So Kate and Edward had their day and then, as Tennyson
says, they "passed," or as less cultivated people put
it, "they were passed up in the air."

   As the years went by they failed to please. Kate was a
great improvement upon Madeline. But she wouldn't do.
The truth was, if one may state it openly, Kate wasn't
TOUGH enough. In fact she wasn't tough at all. She turned
out to be in reality just as proper and just as virtuous
as Madeline.

   So, too, with the Air-and-Grass Hero. For all of his
tempered muscles and his lariat and his Winchester rifle,
he was presently exposed as a fraud. He was just as
Long-winded and just as Immaculate as the Victorian Hero
that he displaced.

   What the public really wants and has always wanted in
its books is wickedness. Fiction was recognised in its
infancy as being a work of the devil.

   So the popular novel, despairing of real wickedness among
the cannibals, and in the ruined tower at midnight, and
on the open-air of the prairies, shifted its scenes again.
It came indoors. It came back to the city. And it gave
us the new crop of heroes and heroines and the scenes
and settings with which the fiction of to-day has replaced
the Heroes and Heroines of Yesterday. The Lure of the
City is its theme. It pursues its course to the music of
the ukalele, in the strident racket of the midnight
cabaret. Here move the Harvard graduate in his dinner
jacket, drunk at one in the morning. Here is the hard
face of Big Business scowling at its desk; and here the
glittering Heroine of the hour in her dress of shimmering
sequins, making such tepid creatures as Madeline and Kate
look like the small change out of a twenty-five cent
shinplaster.

   3.—The Discovery of America;
    Being Done into Moving Pictures and Out Again

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