none of our midwestern novelists ever made the acquaintance of a lady? Is the type extinct? Is its literary interest exhausted?" I abandoned that quest. Then I searched a long time for the portrait of a girl or of a woman who should reveal the delightful things about her heart—something of the finer fragrance of personality. I found plenty of women and girls who gossiped and intrigued and bored and tormented their lovers and forced their husbands to jump out of the window on the wedding night; but at the moment I can't recall a solitary midwestern heroine with charm enough to intoxicate a moderately critical schoolboy. That is a terrible indictment of a fictional movement which pretends to be realistic; for in the real world there are plenty of women and girls with charm enough to intoxicate even highly critical schoolboys.
If you follow this argument, you will not conclude that the women who are sitting for our novelist lack charm. You will conclude that they have not been persuaded to reveal their charm—which is a very different matter. The cynical, satirical, brutal, and barbaric mood of our midwestern "realism" excludes at present from midwestern fiction the possibility of meeting there a heroine to whom any particular person could think for an instant of losing his heart. And one fancies the midwestern women of these novels saying of their midwestern men: "They talk a lot of loving; but, Lord, what do they understand? They talk about falling in and out of love. Hitherto, they have only fallen
