Have an idea of your own now and then.
Be a little original."
The child promised she'd try, and went to bed thoughtful.
Next morning, for breakfast, a dish of kippers and a dish of kidneys were placed on the table, side by side.
Now the child loved kippers with an affection that amounted almost to passion, while she loathed kidneys worse than powders.
It was the one subject on which she did know her own mind.
"A kidney or a kipper for you, Jessie?" asked the mother, addressing the elder child first.
Jessie hesitated for a moment, while her sister sat regarding her in an agony of suspense.
"Kipper, please, ma," Jessie answered at last, and the younger child turned her head away to hide the tears.
"You'll have a kipper, of course, Trixy?" said the mother, who had noticed nothing.
"No, thank you, ma," said the small heroine, stifling a sob, and speaking in a dry, tremulous voice, "I'll have a kidney."
"But I thought you couldn't bear kidneys," exclaimed her mother, surprised.
"No, ma, I don't like 'em much."
"And you're so fond of kippers!"
"Yes, ma."
"Well, then, why on earth don't you have one?"
"'Cos Jessie's going to have one, and you told me to be original," and here the poor mite, reflecting upon the price her originality was going to cost her, burst into tears. * * * * *
The other three of us refused to sacrifice ourselves upon the altar of Brown's originality. We decided to be content with the customary beautiful girl.
"Good or bad?" queried Brown.
"Bad," responded MacShaughnassy emphatically.
"What do you say, Jephson?"
"Well," replied Jephson, taking the pipe from between his lips, and speaking in that soothingly melancholy tone of voice that he never varies, whether telling a joke about a wedding or an anecdote relating to a funeral, "not altogether bad.
Bad, with good instincts, the good instincts well under control."
"I wonder why it is," murmured MacShaughnassy reflectively, "that bad people are so much more interesting than good."
"I don't think the reason is very difficult to find," answered Jephson.
"There's more uncertainty about them.
They keep you more on the alert.
It's like the difference between riding a well-broken, steady-going hack and a lively young colt with ideas of his own.
The one is comfortable to travel on, but the other provides you with more exercise.
If you start off with a thoroughly good woman for your heroine you give your story away in the first chapter.
Everybody knows precisely how she will behave under every conceivable combination of circumstances in which you can place her. On every occasion she will do the same thing--that is the right thing.
"With a bad heroine, on the other hand, you can never be quite sure what is going to happen.
Out of the fifty or so courses open to her, she may take the right one, or she may take one of the forty-nine wrong ones, and you watch her with curiosity to see which it will be."
"But surely there are plenty of good heroines who are interesting," I said.
"At intervals--when they do something wrong," answered Jephson.
"A consistently irreproachable heroine is as irritating as Socrates must have been to Xantippe, or as the model boy at school is to all the other lads.
Take the stock heroine of the eighteenth-century romance.
She never met her lover except for the purpose of telling him that she could not be his, and she generally wept steadily throughout the interview.
She never forgot to turn pale at the sight of blood, nor to faint in his arms at the most inconvenient moment possible.
She was determined never to marry without her father's consent, and was equally resolved never to marry anybody but the one particular person she was convinced he would never agree to her marrying.
She was an excellent young woman, and nearly as uninteresting as a celebrity at home."
"Ah, but you're not talking about good women now," I observed. "You're talking about some silly person's idea of a good woman."
"I quite admit it," replied Jephson.
"Nor, indeed, am I prepared to say what is a good woman.
I consider the subject too deep and too complicated for any mere human being to give judgment upon.
But I _am_ talking of the women who conformed to the popular idea of maidenly goodness in the age when these books were written.
You must remember goodness is not a known quantity.
It varies with every age and every locality, and it is, generally speaking, your 'silly persons' who are responsible for its varying standards.
In Japan, a 'good' girl would be a girl who would sell her honour in order to afford little luxuries to her aged parents.
In certain hospitable islands of the torrid zone the 'good' wife goes to lengths that we should deem altogether unnecessary in making her husband's guest feel himself at home.