You are very welcome to the Alderling incident, my dear Acton, if youthink you can do anything with it, and I will give it ascircumstantially as possible. The thing has its limitations, I shouldthink, for the fictionists, chiefly in a sort of roundedness whichleaves little play to the imagination. It seems to me that it would bemore to your purpose if it were less pat in its catastrophe, but youare a better judge of all that than I am, and I will put the facts inyour hands, and keep my own hands off, so far as any plastic use ofthe material is concerned.The first I knew of the peculiar Alderling situation was shortly afterWilliam James's Will to Believe came out. I had been telling theAlderlings about it, for they had not seen it, and I noticed that fromtime to time they looked significantly at each other. When I had gotthrough, he gave a little laugh, and she said, "Oh, you may laugh!"and then I made bold to ask, "What is it?""Marion can tell you," he said. He motioned towards the coffee-pot andasked, "More?" I shook my head, and he said, "Come out, and let us seewhat the maritime interests have been doing for us. Pipe or cigar?" Ichose cigarettes, and he brought the box off the table, stopping onhis way to the veranda, and taking his pipe and tobacco-pouch from thehall mantel.Mrs. Alderling had got to the veranda before us, and done things tothe chairs and cushions, and was leaning against one of the slender,fluted pine columns like some rich, blond caryatid just off duty, withthe blue of her dress and the red of her hair showing deliciouslyagainst the background of white house-wall. He and she were anastonishing and satisfying contrast; in the midst of your amazementyou felt the divine propriety of a woman like her wanting just such awiry, smoky-complexioned, blackbrowed, black-bearded, bald-headedlittle man as he was.Before he sat down where she was going to put him he stood stoopingly,and frowned at the waters of the cove lifting from the foot of thelawn that sloped to it before the house. "Three lumbermen, twogoodish-sized yachts, a dozen sloop-rigged boats: not so bad. Aboutthe usual number that come loafing in to spend the night. You ought tosee them when it threatens to breeze up. Then they're here in flocks.Go on, Marion."He gave a soft groan of comfort as he settled in his chair and beganpulling at his short black pipe, and she let her eyes dwell on him ina rapture that curiously interested me. People in love are rarelyinteresting--that is, flesh-and-blood people. Of course I know thatlovers are the life of fiction, and that a story of any kind canscarcely hold the reader without them. Yet lovers in real life are, sofar as I have observed them, bores. They are confessed to bedisgusting before or after marriage when they let their fondnessappear, but even when they try to hide it they are tiresome. Charactergoes down before passion in them; nature is reduced to propensity.Then, how is it that the novelist manages to keep these, and to giveus nature and character while seeming to offer nothing but propensityand passion? Perhaps he does not give them. Perhaps what he does is tohypnotize us so that we each of us identify ourselves with the lovers,and add our own natures and characters to the single principle thatanimates them. But if we have them there before us in the tiresomereality they exclude us from their pleasure in each other and stop upthe perspective of our happiness with their hulking personalities,bare of all the iridescence of potentiality which we could have castabout them. Something of this iridescence may cling to unmarriedlovers, in spite of themselves, but wedded bliss is a sheer offense.