ue novelist is expected to pay as much attention to the heroine's
parents as though he were a suitor for her hand. Indeed, there is no
relative of hero or heroine too humble or stupid for such a novelist as
the great Balzac. He will invite the dullest of them to stay with him
for quite prolonged visits, and without a murmur set apart a suite of
chapters for their accommodation. I'm not sure that the humanity of
the reader in these cases is of such comprehensive sympathy as the
novelist's, and it may well be that the novelist undertakes all such
hard labour under a misapprehension of the desires of the reader, who,
as a rule, I fancy, is as anxious to join the ladies as the novelist
himself. Indeed, I believe that there is an opportunity for a new form
of novel, in which the novelist, as well as the reader, will skip all
the dull people, and merely indicate such of them as are necessary to
the action by an outline or a symbol, compressing their familiar
psychology, and necessary plot-interferences with the main characters,
into recognised formulae. For the benefit of readers voracious for
everything about everybody, schedule chapters might be provided by
inferior novelists, good at painting say tiresome bourgeois fathers,
gouty uncles and brothers in the army, as sometimes in great pictures
we read that the sheep in the foreground have been painted by Mr.
So-and-so, R.A.

The Major-General and his Lady were taking the waters at Wiesbaden.
That was all I knew of Nicolete's parents, and all I needed to know;
with the exception of one good action,--at her urgent entreaty they had
left Nicolete behind them, with no other safeguard than a charming
young lady companion, whose fitness for her sacred duties consisted in
a temperament hardly less romantic and whimsical than Nicolete's own.
She was too charming to deserve the name of obstacle; and as there was
no other--

But I admit that the cart has got a little in front of the horse, and I
grow suddenly alarmed lest the reader should be suspecting me of an
elopement, or some such romantic vulgarity. If he will only put any
such thoughts from his mind, I promise to proceed with the story in a
brief and business-like manner forthwith.

We are back once more at the close of the last chapter, in Nicolete's
book-bower in the wildwood. It is an hour or two later, and the
afternoon sun is flooding with a searching glory all the secret places
of the woodland. Hidden nooks an