the natural perfidy of predatory man; fourth, the disaster is irretrievable. There is no salvation for the woman but death, the cloister, exile, or, occasionally, a shamefaced return to "chastity" under the horsewhip or at point of the pistol.
This idea flourished in the "good old" novels of Sir Walter Scott; it is fairly well illustrated in the case of Effie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian. Scott was a romancer. His contemporary, Jane Austen, was a realist. She was far less chivalrously certain than he that lovely women who are neglectful of legal status are by nature virtuous. She looked at them hard; she inclined strongly to believe that such women are by nature vain, sentimental, and ignorant—like Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. But Jane Austen is at one with Scott in treating unlawful passion austerely. In the fiction of both these worthies the erring woman is unmistakably a "victim"; the man, however plausible his manners, is a profligate and unprincipled, if not a designing, villain; the consequences of departure from legal status are depicted in strongly deterrent colors. Our idea of chastity is fortified by them.
Now let us advance a generation or so and question our friends the Victorians: do they accept
