A REBELLIOUS HEROINE

by John Kendrick Bangs




CHAPTER I: STUART HARLEY: REALIST



"--if a word could save me, and that word were not the Truth, nay, if
it did but swerve a hair's-breadth from the Truth, I would not say
it!"--LONGFELLOW.

Stuart Harley, despite his authorship of many novels, still
considered himself a realist. He affected to say that he did not
write his books; that he merely transcribed them from life as he saw
it, and he insisted always that he saw life as it was.

"The mission of the novelist, my dear Professor," he had once been
heard to say at his club, "is not to amuse merely; his work is that
of an historian, and he should be quite as careful to write
truthfully as is the historian. How is the future to know what
manner of lives we nineteenth century people have lived unless our
novelists tell the truth?"

"Possibly the historians will tell them," observed the Professor of
Mathematics. "Historians sometimes do tell us interesting things."