with a flow of
language, a wealth of imagery, that must have taken him years to acquire.
What does the novel-reading girl think, I wonder, when the real young man
proposes to her! He has not called her anything in particular. Possibly
he has got as far as suggesting she is a duck or a daisy, or hinting
shyly that she is his bee or his honeysuckle: in his excitement he is not
quite sure which. In the novel she has been reading the hero has likened
the heroine to half the vegetable kingdom. Elementary astronomy has been
exhausted in his attempt to describe to her the impression her appearance
leaves on him. Bond Street has been sacked in his endeavour to get it
clearly home to her what different parts of her are like--her eyes, her
teeth, her heart, her hair, her ears. Delicacy alone prevents his
extending the catalogue. A Fiji Island lover might possibly go further.
We have not yet had the Fiji Island novel. By the time he is through
with it she must have a somewhat confused notion of herself--a vague
conviction that she is a sort of condensed South Kensington Museum.

Difficulty of living up to the Poster.

Poor Angelina must feel dissatisfied with the Edwin of real life. I am
not sure that art and fiction have not made life more difficult for us
than even it was intended to be. The view from the mountain top is less
extensive than represented by the picture postcard. The play, I fear me,
does not always come up to the poster. Polly Perkins is pretty enough as
girls go; but oh for the young lady of the grocer's almanack! Poor dear
John is very nice and loves us--so he tells us, in his stupid, halting
way; but how can we respond when we remember how the man loved in the
play! The "artist has fashioned his dream of delight," and the workaday
world by comparison seems tame to us.

CHAPTER VIII

The Lady and the Problem.

She is a good woman, the Heroine of the Problem Play, but accidents will
happen, and other people were to blame.

Perhaps that is really the Problem: who was responsible for the heroine's
past? Was it her father? She does not say so--not in so many words.
That is not her way. It is not for her, the silently-suffering victim of
complicated antecedent incidents, to purchase justice for herself by
pointing the finger of accusation against him who, whatever his faults
may be, was once, at all events, her father. That one fact in his favour
she can never forget. Indeed s