What, also, we might have pointed out was that in a five-cent
story the villain was absolutely sure of receiving suitable and
adequate punishment for his misdeeds. Right then and there, on
the spot, he got his. And the heroine was always so pluperfectly
pure. And the hero always was a hero to his finger tips, never
doing anything unmanly or wrong or cowardly, and always using the
most respectful language in the presence of the opposite sex.
There was never any sex problem in a nickul librury. There were
never any smutty words or questionable phrases. If a villain said
"Curse you!" he was going pretty far. Any one of us might whet
up our natural instincts for cruelty on Fore's Book of Martyrs,
or read of all manner of unmentionable horrors in the Old Testament,
but except surreptitiously we couldn't walk with Nick Carter,
whose motives were ever pure and who never used the naughty word
even in the passion of the death grapple with the top-booted forces
of sinister evil.
We might have told our parents, had we had the words in which to
state the case and they but the patience to listen, that in a
nickul librury there was logic and the thrill of swift action and
the sharp spice of adventure. There, invariably virtue was rewarded
and villainy confounded; there, inevitably was the final triumph
for law and for justice and for the right; there embalmed in one
thin paper volume, was all that Sandford and Merton lacked; all
that the Rollo books never had.
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