"But who is this who advances smiling to greet him as he
crosses the familiar threshold of the dear old house?
Can this tall, beautiful girl be Gwendoline, the
child-playmate of his boyhood?"

   Well, can it? I ask it of every experienced reader—can
it or can it not?

   Ned had his day, in the boyhood of each of us. We presently
passed him by. I am speaking, of course, of those of us
who are of maturer years and can look back upon thirty
or forty years of fiction reading. "Ned," flourishes
still, I understand, among the children of today. But
now he flies in aeroplanes, and dives in submarines, and
gives his invaluable military advice to General Joffre
and General Pershing.

   But with the oncoming of adolescent years something softer
was needed than Ned with his howling cannibals and his
fusillade of revolver shots.

   So the "Ned" of the Adventure Books was supplanted by
the Romantic Heroine of the Victorian Age and the
Long-winded Immaculate who accompanied her as the Hero.

   I do not know when these two first opened their twin
career. Whether Fenimore Cooper or Walter Scott began
them, I cannot say. But they had an undisputed run on
two continents for half a century.

   This Heroine was a sylph. Her chiefest charm lay in her
physical feebleness. She was generally presented to us
in some such words as these:

   "Let us now introduce to our readers the fair Madeline
of Rokewood. Slender and graceful and of a form so fragile
that her frame scarce fitted to fulfil its bodily
functions…she appeared rather as one of those ethereal
beings of the air who might visit for a brief moment this

 Prev. P 11/55 next