Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/36

 it for a moment. Then she intervened again: she destroyed the dilemma. She made it all come right. She restored both hero and heroine to chastity by pitching the lunatic wife headlong into the flames of the house of Rochester.

A happy thought—so it must have seemed to the author. Yet, as one reflects upon it, this solution appears a little dangerous. To pitch a superfluous wife into the flames—well, it would not quite serve as a Kantian basis for the solution of all such problems. Under the English law, the dilemma reasserted its actuality. Jane Eyre stands there early in the Victorian Age as a challenge, rather evasively presented, to the idea of chastity. In W. B. Maxwell's Spinster of This Parish, 1923, a modern heroine is placed in almost precisely Jane's situation, except that her lover does not think it necessary to lie to her about his lunatic wife. Without a moment's hesitation, she accepts the grand passion. Since she accepts it with all the fortitude and fidelity of an old-fashioned wife, she seems to-day a quite safe, old-fashioned character; and it is hard to conceive of any one's thinking of her as "unchaste."

Other Victorians, usually with much circumspection, returned to the dilemma; and they