The story
“When the beautiful heroine and the gallant hero are wrecked, or drift to a desert island, and they are marooned, or left behind when the others sail away, they ALWAYS get married—in story books. Of course, it is all right in make-believe-land, but in real life such a course would be inconvenient, and so a certain young woman found. She was pretty enough to be a heroine, and the man who saved her life was brave enough to be her hero, but she was very mournful when she reached her friends, and thought of the rules laid down by her most popular authors. The young woman was a college graduate, wealthy in her own right, and a painter from choice. The hero was a common sailor, brave enough, yet not the kind of a man she would pick out for a life partner.
“Then there was another reason. This ‘reason’ was a wealthy, well-bred young man, who adored her, and whom she deeply loved. They were engaged, both were perfectly happy, but the romantic young woman believed that it could never be. By all the laws of literature, her life belonged to the man who had saved her; so when they were rescued, she wrote two notes, one to the preserver of her life, informing him that she would marry him, and the other to her fiancé, tearfully informing him that all was over between them. Real life differs decidedly from fiction. Men do not always wed the women whose lives they save. If they did so, he would go on the retired list after one act of bravery and only be eligible again when he became a widower or was freed by the divorce courts. So, for reasons that satisfied at least four persons, this adventure did not end in the story book way, and everybody was happy.”
Summary from The Moving Picture World · 11 May 1912
