presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront
their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the
most, that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of its
very nature an "ado," an ado about something, and the larger the
form it takes the greater of course the ado. Therefore,
consciously, that was what one was in for--for positively
organising an ado about Isabel Archer.

One looked it well in the face, I seem to remember, this
extravagance; and with the effect precisely of recognising the
charm of the problem. Challenge any such problem with any
intelligence, and you immediately see how full it is of
substance; the wonder being, all the while, as we look at the
world, how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and
even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering. George Eliot
has admirably noted it--"In these frail vessels is borne onward
through the ages the treasure of human affection." In "Romeo and
Juliet" Juliet has to be important, just as, in "Adam Bede" and
"The Mill on the Floss" and "Middlemarch" and "Daniel
Deronda," Hetty Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver and Rosamond Vincy and
Gwendolen Harleth have to be; with that much of firm ground, that
much of bracing air, at the disposal all the while of their feet
and their lungs. They are typical, none the less, of a class
difficult, in the individual case, to make a centre of interest;
so difficult in fact that many an expert painter, as for instance
Dickens and Walter Scott, as for instance even, in the main, so
subtle a hand as that of R. L. Stevenson, has preferred to leave
the task unattempted. There are in fact writers as to whom we
make out that their refuge from this is to assume it to be not
worth their attempting; by which pusillanimity in truth their