walk home with me to-night, yuh might
be askin' to call next week. Inside half a year, if yuh was lonesome
enough, yuh'd ask me to marry yuh. And b'gorra," she said softly,
looking down at her unlovely red hands, "I'm dead scared I'd do it. Get
back to work, Ted Terrill, and hold yer head up high, and when yuh say
your prayers to-night, thank your lucky stars I ain't a hussy."

III

WHAT SHE WORE

Somewhere in your story you must pause to describe your heroine's
costume. It is a ticklish task. The average reader likes his heroine
well dressed. He is not satisfied with knowing that she looked like a
tall, fair lily. He wants to be told that her gown was of green crepe,
with lace ruffles that swirled at her feet. Writers used to go so far as
to name the dressmaker; and it was a poor kind of a heroine who didn't
wear a red velvet by Worth. But that has been largely abandoned in these
days of commissions. Still, when the heroine goes out on the terrace to
spoon after dinner (a quaint old English custom for the origin of which
see any novel by the "Duchess," page 179) the average reader wants to
know what sort of a filmy wrap she snatches up on the way out. He
demands a description, with as many illustrations as the publisher will
stand for, of what she wore from the bedroom to the street, with full
stops for the ribbons on her robe de nuit, and the buckles on her
ballroom slippers. Half the poor creatures one sees flattening their
noses against the shop windows are authors getting a line on the advance
fashions. Suppose a careless writer were to dress his heroine in a
full-plaited skirt only to find, when his story is published four months
later, that full-plaited skirts have been relegated to the dim past!

I started to read a story once. It was a good one. There was in it not
a single allusion to brandy-and-soda, or divorce, or the stock market.
The dialogue crackled. The hero talked like a live man. It was a
shipboard story, and the heroine was charming so long as she wore her
heavy ulster. But along toward evening she blossomed forth in a yellow
gown, with a scarlet poinsettia at her throat. I quit her cold. Nobody
ever wore a scarlet poinsettia; or if they did, they couldn't wear it on
a yellow gown. Or if they did wear it with a yellow gown, they didn't
wear it at the throat. Scarlet poinsettias aren't worn, anyhow. To this
day I don't know whether the heroine married the hero or jumpe