“Good or bad?” queried Brown.

“Bad,” responded MacShaughnassy emphatically.  “What do you say, Jephson?”

“Well,” replied Jephson, taking the pipe from between his lips, and speaking in that soothingly melancholy tone of voice that he never varies, whether telling a joke about a wedding or an anecdote relating to a funeral, “not altogether bad.  Bad, with good instincts, the good instincts well under control.”

“I wonder why it is,” murmured MacShaughnassy reflectively, “that bad people are so much more interesting than good.”

“I don’t think the reason is very difficult to find,” answered Jephson.  “There’s more uncertainty about them.  They keep you more on the alert.  It’s like the difference between riding a well-broken, steady-going hack and a lively young colt with ideas of his own.  The one is comfortable to travel on, but the other provides you with more exercise.  If you start off with a thoroughly good woman for your heroine you give your story away in the first chapter.  Everybody knows precisely how she will behave under every conceivable combination of circumstances in which you can place her.  On every occasion she will do the same thing—­that is the right thing.

“With a bad heroine, on the other hand, you can never be quite sure what is going to happen.  Out of the fifty or so courses open to her, she may take the right one, or she may take one of the forty-nine wrong ones, and you watch her with curiosity to see which it will be.”

“But surely there are plenty of good heroines who are interesting,” I said.

“At intervals—­when they do something wrong,” answered Jephson.  “A consistently irreproachable heroine is as irritating as Socrates must have been to Xantippe, or as the model boy at school is to all the other lads.  Take the stock heroine of the eighteenth-century romance.  She never met her lover except for the purpose of telling him that she could not be his, and she generally wept steadily throughout the interview.  She never forgot to turn pale at the sight of blood, nor to faint in his arms at the most inconvenient moment possible.  She was determined never to marry without her father’s consent, and was equally resolved never to marry anybody but the one particular person she was convinced he would never agree to her marrying.  She was an excellent young woman, and nearly as uninteresting as a celebrity at home.”

“Ah, but you’re not talking about good women now,” I observed.  “You’re talking about some silly person’s idea of a good woman.”

“I quite admit it,” replied Jephson.  “Nor, indeed, am I prepared to say what is a good woman.  I consider the subject too deep and too complicated for any mere human being to give judgment upon.  But I am talking of the women who conformed to the popular idea of maidenly goodness in the age when these books were written.  You must remember goodness is not a known quantity.