“I comply: Because if you like her, that is to say, if you like the way the author has treated her, the principles you have been enunciating are Pickwickian, which is quite likely. In brief, if you justify the author you have destroyed the justification for your own philosophy, or what has just been passing for your philosophy. After all, I dare say that you are hampered by being a heroine yourself. How extremely odd it would be if you should turn out to be an embodied heroine out of some story—” [Illustration] “That would mean that I was out of a romance?” “Yes, out of a romance,—they are the most real,—and if you should appear in the flesh and exploit your own theories as to how the thing should be done,—only that I should advise you if you are an embodied heroine to go to your own author. I really don’t recognize you as any heroine of mine. Your own author would understand you better—not altogether, but better than any one else. He would know your little perversities, and how to add, subtract, and divide you. But probably if you were a materialized heroine—which might mean, I suppose, that I was the medium and this a daylight _séance_—you would say what you did not mean,—or, what is so much worse, say what you almost did mean.” “No,” she said, “I am not a materialized literary spirit. You will not wake up in a few moments and find that I am a bad dream. I am quite real. I could prove this to you by admitting that I am getting hungry. Only a very real woman will admit that she is hungry. Does it not occur to you that we all are living some story, and that some of us who are romanticists at heart live realism by force of circumstances; and that some of us who are realists are forced to yield to the inexorable momentum of romance?” “Yes,” I said, “and you would be miserable if you were not expressing this paradox. The only way a woman can justify herself for believing in golden knights and the Rubaiyat and the Oversoul is by marrying a soap-boiler who reads Laura Jean Libbey.” “That is a tribute to her sense of proportion.” “Do you think so?” I asked her. “Perhaps it is a tribute also to her sense of humor. At all events, a woman generally likes this kind of balance. If she calls a spade a spade she likes to make things even by saying something nice about the hoe.” “You would appreciate that trait if you happened to be the hoe.” “Naturally—and growl if I were the spade.” “Tell me,” she said bending forward, “what sort of fiction do you yourself write?” “If I must answer,” I said, “I myself am compelled by artistic and other circumstances to write realism.” She threw herself back in the seat with a laugh. “I will confess,” I went on, “that I have been suspecting you for some minutes. What sort of fiction do _you_ write?” She laughed again, then looking at me whimsically without lifting her head she said, “I wrote ‘The Sacrifice.’”...