Now, after all, could anything be less harmful than my tales? The casual meeting of my hero and heroine in the first chapter has always been marked by the gravest circumspection. My melodrama has never been offensively gory,--in fact, I have been ridiculed for my bloodless combats. My villains have been the sort that anyone with any kind of decent bringing-up would hiss. A girl in white, walking beside a lake, with a blue parasol swinging back of her head, need offend no one. That the young man emerging from the neighboring wood should not recognize her at once as the young woman ordained in his grandfather’s will as the person he must marry to secure the estate, seems utterly banal, I confess; but it is the business of romance to maintain illusions. Realism, with the same agreed state of facts, recognizes the girl immediately--and spoils the story. Or I might put it thus: in realism, much or all is obvious in the first act; in romance, nothing is quite clear until the third. This is why romance is more popular than realism, for we are all children and want to be surprised. Why villains should always be so stupid, and why heroines should so perversely misunderstand the noble motives of heroes, are questions I cannot answer. Likewise before dear old Mistaken Identity--the most venerable impostor in the novelist’s cabinet--I stand dumbly grateful. On the stage, where a plot is most severely tested, but where the audience must, we are told, always be in the secret, we see constantly how flimsy a mask the true prince need wear. And the reason for this lies in the primal and--let us hope--eternal childlikeness of the race. The Zeitgeist will not grind us underfoot so long as we are capable of joy in make-believe, and can renew our youth in the frolics of Peter Pan. You, sir, who re-read “The Newcomes” every year, and you, madam, reverently dusting your Jane Austen,--I am sadder than you can be that my talent is so slender; but is it not a fact that you have watched me at my little tricks on the mimic stage, and been just a little astonished when the sparrow, and not the dove, emerged from the handkerchief? But you prefer the old writers; and so, dear friends, do I!