in the slightest action that a man attempts in this Great World's
Fair of Conventionality, whose every sideshow is hedged around with
the red-tape of the Law. Witness even that delusive proverb--there
is honour amongst thieves. So is there an unwritten canon in
literature and the making of books, that a Romance must end with a
phrase to convey another illusion--namely, the happiness that is
ever after._

_And so, in this respect, I throw canons to the winds--it sounds a
herculean feat--wash out the printed red of the rubric, and call,
perhaps the saddest story I shall write, a Romance._

_Yet I profess to have a reason beyond mere contrariness. The world
of Romance must be at all times an elusive star--never capable of
being put in the exact same place on any one's calendar. And to me
it conveys no fixed beginning, no fixed end, so long as it possesses
that quality of dreaming imagination in the mind of the character
with whom the circumstances are first concerned. All that we know
certainly of life is reality, and of all those myriad things which
combine to make up the one great scheme, of which we know nothing,
there is the quality of Romance--free to any one who cares to let
his mind drift upon the sea of conjecture._

_In that this was the case with Sally; in that she made her dream
out of Reality itself--I have called it a Romance. The Romance that
remains a Romance until the end, is not as yet within the reach of
my pen. If it ever should be--then I promise you that book as well._

_On all my other anticipations--the attitude of the critical mind
towards Chapter IV. in Book I., the sensitiveness of the delicate