Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/83

 the direction where truth, like a rabbit, has just disappeared in the bushes. Now, this novelist belongs to the large and productive group of hunters who are leaving the highroad to pursue truth into the underbrush. His theory of you is not a personal reflection upon you; it is only part of his general theory of society and human nature."

"Bah! bah! bah!" Cornelia exclaimed. "I'm sick of human nature—their theories of it, I mean. I love people, but I hate what our current writers say about them. Life is so much more decent, when one knows how to live and whom to live with, than any of our novelists will admit. I have the same feeling in the theatre. I go to a play and see nothing in it that can compare with the quality of real experience—if one has any taste and discrimination. But tell me, now, what does this dreadful creature say about me?"

"Well, I'll take the risk," I said, "since you have the courage or the curiosity to insist on it." I pulled out the second letter. "What he says is this: 'I am afraid your Cornelia is not real. For me, at any rate, she doesn't exist. She isn't elemental. She isn't spontaneous. She strikes me as a theoretical construction to please a Victorian grandmother. Or perhaps I had better call her an