He had already observed, before he began his study, that almost every piece of fiction that impressed him, regardless of the manner of its narration, included what he chose to call a chief character and a lesser character and that the interest of the fiction arose out of the dealings between these two. When he began his study, the teacher had not yet decided how to classify the many sorts of chief character and lesser character that he was likely to find. He supposed that he might classify the characters first according to their gender and then according to their relatedness with one another, as, for example, wife and husband, mother and son, friend and friend, and the like. He was only a little way into his study when he decided that all such relationships were divisible into two groups only: relationships determined by blood and those otherwise determined. He then set about separating the pieces of fiction under study according to this division. The results surprised him somewhat. He had expected that a majority of the pieces would have included characters from the second of the two groups, but the opposite was the result.
