O Gay White Way, you are far from gay in the fast-fading light, before the magic hand of Edison wipes the wrinkles from your face and galvanizes you into hectic vitality; far from alluring with your tinsel shop windows, with your puffy-faced, unshaven men leaning against door-posts and chewing pessimistic toothpicks, your sharp-eyed newsboys wise with the wisdom of the Tenderloin, and your itinerant women whose eyes wander from side to side. It is not in this guise that you draw the hearts of millions to yourself, O dingy, Gay White Way, O Via Lobsteria Dolorosa!
Well, when a man begins to moralize it is time to go home. I have walked farther than I intended, and I am soft from lack of exercise, and tired. The romance of the crowd has disappeared. Romance cannot survive that short passage of Longacre Square, where the art of the theatre and of the picture-postcard flourish in an atmosphere impregnated with gasolene. As I glance into the windows of the automobile salesrooms and catch my own reflection in the enamel of Babylonian limousines I find myself thinking all at once of the children at home. They expand and fill up the horizon. Broadway disappears. I smile into the face of a painted promenader, but how is she to know that it is not at her I smile but at the sudden recollection of what the baby said at the breakfast-table that morning? Like all good New Yorkers when they enter the Subway, I proceed to choke up all my senses against contact with the external world, and thus resolving myself into a state of coma, I dip down into the bowels of the earth, whence in due time I am spewed out two short blocks from Belshazzar Court.
Never, I fancy, has it been more true than it is to-day, that fiction reflects life. The best fiction has always given us a kind of precipitate of human nature--_Don Quixote_ and _Tom Jones_ are equally 'true' and true, in a sense, for all time; but our modern books give us every quirk and turn of the popular ideal, and fifty years hence, if read at all, may be too 'quaint' for words. And to any one who has been reading fiction for the last twenty years, it is cryingly obvious that fashions in human nature have changed.
My first novel was _Jane Eyre_; and at the age of eight, I fell desperately in love with Fairfax Rochester. No instance could serve better to point the distance we have come. I was not an extraordinary little girl (except that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate in being permitted to encounter the classics in infancy), and I dare say that if I had not met Mr. Rochester, I should have succumbed to some imaginary gentleman of a quite different stamp. It may be that I should have fallen in love--had time and chance permitted--with 'V. V.' or The Beloved Vagabond. But I doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer assume that it is the prime business of the female heart (at whatever age) to surrender itself completely to some man. Consequently, the men in the novels of to-day are not calculated, as they once were, to hit the fluttering mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be taken, as modern tactics direct the assault.