But she is also obliged to acknowledge that she has done some injustice to her own romance and to the sincerity of Lord Lufton:[163] “Well, it was not a dream. Here, standing here, on this very spot--on that flower of the carpet--he begged me a dozen times to be his wife. I wonder whether you and Mark would let me cut it out and keep it.” No solution to her matrimonial problem being offered, she suggests one:[164] “‘And what shall I do next?’ said Lucy, still speaking in a tone that was half tragic and half jeering. “‘Do?’ said Mrs. Robarts. “‘Yes, something must be done. If I were a man I could go to Switzerland, of course; or, as the case is a bad one, perhaps as far as Hungary. What is it that girls do? they don’t die now-a-days, I believe. * * * I have got a piece of sackcloth, and I mean to wear that, when I have made it up.’” We are relieved to hear later that no such drastic action was necessary, as she became Lady Lufton and was able to be happy without overworking her sense of humor. These instances may serve to indicate the general method and effect of so-called realism applied to satiric intent, so long as allowance is made for the unreal and distorted nature of all incomplete and isolated cases, butchered to make an analytic holiday. CHAPTER III THE IRONIC The science of Esthetics is a tribute to our zeal in attempting to define the indefinable word beauty. Nearly as elusive of categoric bondage is _irony_; but for its capture no formal scientific crusade has as yet been organized. It is, however, whether in spite of its vagueness or because of it, a term of great and increasing popularity. No phrase is at present more of a general favorite than “The Irony of Fate,” no exclamation more frequent than “How ironic!” In this expressive and impressive utterance there is as much individual variation of meaning as in “How beautiful!” And it coexists with as much possibility of a standardized conception. What the latter may be, it is the business of the student of the subject to try to determine. The etymology and early usage of the word are familiar enough. Generically, to the ancient Greeks, irony meant dissimulation in speech; specifically, that form of dissimulation used by Socrates for the confusion of his dialectic opponent, consisting on the part of the wise man of an assumption of ignorance which longed for enlightenment. On this bated hook were caught the unwary who pretended to wisdom the while they had it not, lured by flattering inquiry to a fatal communicativeness.