made a virtue. It depends on the writer."

"And on the taste of the reader," he suggested. "But I believe the
taste of the intelligent 'general reader' is much better than one
supposes. The mind craves for nourishment; and the extraordinary
success of books in which any attempt, however imperfect, is made to
provide food for thought, as distinguished from those which merely
offer matter to distract the attention, bears witness, it seems to me,
to the involuntary effort which is always in progress to procure it. I
believe myself that good fiction may do more to improve the mind,
enlarge the sympathies, and develop the judgment than any other form
of literature--partly because it looks into the hidden springs of
action, and makes all that is obscure in the way of impulse and motive
clear to us. Biography, for instance, merely skims the surface of
life, as a rule; and in history, where man is a puppet moved by
events, there can be very little human nature."

"I wonder if you read many novels," said Beth. "I have to read them
aloud to my husband until I am satiated. And I am determined, if I
ever do try to write one, to avoid all that is conventional. I never
will have a faultlessly beautiful heroine, for instance. I am sick of
that creature. When I come to her, especially if she has golden hair
yards long, a faultless complexion, and eyes of extraordinary
dimensions, I feel inclined to groan and shut the book. I have met her
so often in the weary ways of fiction! I know every variety of her so
well! She consists of nothing but superlatives, and is as conventional
as the torso of an Egyptian statue, with her everlasting physical
perfection. I think her as repulsive as a barber's block. I confess
that a woman who has golden hair and manages to look like a lady, or
to be like one even in a book, is a wonder, considering all that is
associated with golden hair in our day; but I should avoid the
abnormal as much as the conventional. I would not write plotty-plotty
books either, nor make a pivot of the everlasting love-story, which
seems to me to show such a want of balance in an author, such an
absence of any true sense of proportion, as if there was nothing else
of interest in life but our sexual relations. But, oh!" she broke off,
"how I do appreciate what the difficulty of selection must be! In
writing a life, if one could present all sides of it, and not merely
one phase--the good and the bad of it, the joys and the sorro