WOMAN'S WORLD
(Continued from page ■!.) A Million-Times Written Plot. Miss Stfilk Bonson, the novelist, who has bean a patient lor sonic weeks in a hospital :n California, has been thinking about tilings in general, ind novelists in particular. So she writes in the "Common Cause":— 1 have been at a loss Id understand— (a) why we novelists go on writing iioveli; (bi why readers go on reading us. It seems to me that there is only one plot in demand, and that plot has been written about a million times. Great minds, as sonic comforter lias assured (is, think alike, and of course it is pleasant, but surely ;i little monotonous, to picture a million great minds busily thinking ahko. Probably' if all the novels read by me since I was first laid as'dc were piled up they would fill up tho hospital elevator shaft, ygt I must admit that I have only come across one theme, very slightly and superficially varied. "There are always two lovers whose inevitable man\age is postponed during three Hundred odd pages 'by such things as tornadoes, or villains, or avalanches, or misunderstandings, or floods, or mistaken justice, or what not
"I feel that I am acquiring a more exalted and optimistic idea of lovo since 'I have submitted to hospital culture,'' adds Miss Benson. "Every evening from seven to e'ght there, is an invasion of our ward hy a horde of bashful 'beaux,' who come after a hard day's work to listen to their fair invalids, describing their latest symptoms. 1 find myseif gazing with increasing sentimentality upon this pink and perspiring horde; T watch thrjm treading on their own toes, and frowning sullenly at each other. "I enjoy the kind yet curiously ungracious way that eich beau lias of throwing heavily down upon the bosom of his 'invalid a tight, warm wad of ilowere, Both in their presence and out of it a constant ecstatc comparison of beaux goes, on among the young women in my ward; mest of us talk about our 'heart hopes' whenever we are not asleep. I watch and ,listen, but am ashamed that I have scorned anything that could help to clothe, in glory these, rather suppressed romances Perhaps the refined fiction, has after all « real refining' power of deriving; pure sold from wasto metal. "In trailing clouds of glory do tho beaux come; with dogged punctuality at seven they come, and stay till the nurses havo to push them out. They fill the ward with the light of reflected romance. I "think a sort of ghost of refined fiction stands betweon all the lovers, to dim their eyes a little. And at such times, while I wntchj I think I know why my hospital literature is called True, and I wonder whether what seemed the truer truth was perhaps superficial- after nil. . . "I shall bo a confirmed sentimentalist when I come ont of hospital."
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Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 76, 23 December 1919, Page 5
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487WOMAN'S WORLD Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 76, 23 December 1919, Page 5
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