ivable combination of circumstances in which you can
place her. On every occasion she will do the same thing--that is the
right thing.

"With a bad heroine, on the other hand, you can never be quite sure what
is going to happen. Out of the fifty or so courses open to her, she may
take the right one, or she may take one of the forty-nine wrong ones, and
you watch her with curiosity to see which it will be."

"But surely there are plenty of good heroines who are interesting," I
said.

"At intervals--when they do something wrong," answered Jephson. "A
consistently irreproachable heroine is as irritating as Socrates must
have been to Xantippe, or as the model boy at school is to all the other
lads. Take the stock heroine of the eighteenth-century romance. She
never met her lover except for the purpose of telling him that she could
not be his, and she generally wept steadily throughout the interview. She
never forgot to turn pale at the sight of blood, nor to faint in his arms
at the most inconvenient moment possible. She was determined never to
marry without her father's consent, and was equally resolved never to
marry anybody but the one particular person she was convinced he would
never agree to her marrying. She was an excellent young woman, and
nearly as uninteresting as a celebrity at home."

"Ah, but you're not talking about good women now," I observed. "You're
talking about some silly person's idea of a good woman."

"I quite admit it," replied Jephson. "Nor, indeed, am I prepared to say
what is a good woman. I consider the subject too deep and too
complicated for any mere human being to give judgment upon. But I _am_
talking of the women who conformed to the popular idea of maidenly
goodness in the age when these books were written. You must remember
goodness is not a known quantity. It varies with every age and every
locality, and it is, generally speaking, your 'silly persons' who are
responsible for its varying standards. In Japan, a 'good' girl would be
a girl who would sell her honour in order to afford little luxuries to
her aged parents. In certain hospitable islands of the torrid zone the
'good' wife goes to lengths that we should deem altogether unnecessary in
making her husband's guest feel himself at home. In ancient Hebraic
days, Jael was accounted a good woman for murdering a sleeping man, and
Sarai stood in no danger of losing the respect of her little world when
she led Hagar unt