Across the hills and far away Beyond their utmost purple rim, And deep into the dying day, The happy Princess followed him.
Now, what is the effect of this custom of ending the story with the old clap-trap ‘happy ever after?’ Poor Polly Brown, who has had the three soiled loose-leaved volumes from the village library, looks out at our poor familiar world in fading wintry light, and decides that the one prize worth winning is her wedding-day. The world’s winters, the wild black boughs and barren fields, will then be seen no more; it will be a romantic existence, with no dull relations to be civil to, no tiresome household work, no dusting of that shut-up drawing-room with its faint smell of carpet and fire-grate and musty roses. She has dreamed her dream; all her efforts are turned towards attaining it. In a certain sense, she is selfish already. Poor Polly, impatient to escape from the homely parlour and the sanctum of dried roses! Bella Millefleurs, who never lived, will yet cause her real pain in the days of disillusion. She will shed real tears, not as heroines do, but with the prosaic human sorrow of red eyes.
Somebody else, two seasons ago, held the same book with dainty white hand, when, from a great London lending library it came in its first freshness, with stainless cover, and pages smelling deliciously of ‘new book.’ This pretty girl had danced till three that morning, and had a new ring on her finger, which she kissed when she was sure nobody would see her. Of course she was only resting in curtained firelight in a gem of a boudoir; it would be cruel to expect so graceful and fragile a creature to do anything after such a night; and idle to expect her to do more than skim and skip the chapters, when her own real tale was so much sweeter. She had dreamed her dream from fifty other stories of the same ending. She had attained her life’s object in securing a lover with a coronet; and the happy marriage is the coming rest without sorrow or change. If poor Polly Brown could have seen her, she would have been ready to cry for envy; and yet two seasons after, when we saw the homely girl devouring that same story from the same pages, perhaps my lady with the coronet was beginning to feel the heartbreak of disillusion, the unfitness for a life that was misunderstood.