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The synopsis added that: “Ursula Bart, a charming and unsophisticated young American girl possessed of an elusive expression makes her first acquaintance with London society.”

Here you have a week’s unnecessary work on the part of the author boiled down to its essentials. She was young. One hardly expects an elderly heroine. The “young” might have been dispensed with, especially seeing it is told us that she was a girl. But maybe this is carping. There are young girls and old girls. Perhaps it is as well to have it in black and white; she was young. She was an American young girl. There is but one American young girl in English fiction. We know by heart the unconventional things that she will do, the startlingly original things that she will say, the fresh illuminating thoughts that will come to her as, clad in a loose robe of some soft clinging stuff, she sits before the fire, in the solitude of her own room.

To complete her she had an “elusive expression.” The days when we used to catalogue the heroine’s “points” are past. Formerly it was possible. A man wrote perhaps some half-a-dozen novels during the whole course of his career. He could have a dark girl for the first, a light girl for the second, sketch a merry little wench for the third, and draw you something stately for the fourth. For the remaining two he could go abroad. Nowadays, when a man turns out a novel and six short stories once a year, description has to be dispensed with. It is not the writer’s fault. There is not sufficient variety in the sex. We used to introduce her thus:

“Imagine to yourself, dear reader, an exquisite and gracious creature of five feet three. Her golden hair of that peculiar shade”–here would follow directions enabling the reader to work it out for himself. He was to pour some particular wine into some particular sort of glass, and wave it about before some particular sort of a light. Or he was to get up at five o’clock on a March morning and go into a wood. In this way he could satisfy himself as to the particular shade of gold the heroine’s hair might happen to be. If he were a careless or lazy reader he could save himself time and trouble by taking the author’s word for it. Many of them did.

“Her eyes!” They were invariably deep and liquid. They had to be pretty deep to hold all the odds and ends that were hidden in them; sunlight and shadow, mischief, unsuspected possibilities, assorted emotions, strange wild yearnings. Anything we didn’t know where else to put we said was hidden in her eyes.

“Her nose!” You could have made it for yourself out of a pen’orth of putty after reading our description of it.

“Her forehead!” It was always “low and broad.” I don’t know why it was always low. Maybe because the intellectual heroine was not then popular. For the matter of that I doubt if she be really popular now. The brainless doll, one fears, will continue for many years to come to be man’s ideal woman–and woman’s ideal of herself for precisely the same period, one may be sure.

“Her chin!” A less degree of variety was permissible in her chin. It had to be at an angle suggestive of piquancy, and it had to contain at least the suspicion of a dimple.

To properly understand her complexion you were expected to provide yourself with a collection of assorted fruits and flowers. There are seasons in the year when it must have been difficult for the conscientious reader to have made sure of her complexion. Possibly it was for this purpose that wax flowers and fruit, carefully kept from the dust under glass cases, were common objects in former times upon the tables of the cultured.