Catherine tries to be ordinary: and is an extraordinary success.

She is pretty, but not beautiful: sensible and well-natured, but capable, like most of us, of making a complete fool of herself and of doing complete injustice to other people; fairly well educated, but not in the least learned or accomplished.

In real life she would be simply a unit in the thousands of quite nice but ordinary girls whom Providence providentially provides in order that mankind shall not be alone.

In literature she is more precious than rubies--exactly because art has so masterfully followed and duplicated nature.
Precisely to what extent the attractive quality of this art is enhanced by the pervading irony of the treatment would be a very difficult problem to work out.

It is scarcely hazardous to say that irony is the very salt of the novel: and that just as you put salt even in a cake, so it is not wise to neglect it wholly even in a romance.