The smile of the marble girl wins us as if it came from a living one, but we do not respond to her welcome.

Just as she appears in her marble form she is complete in herself without any relation to us or to anyone else.

The very difference from reality has given her that self-sustained perfect life.
If we read in a police report about burglaries, we may lock our house more securely; if we read about a flood, we may send our mite; if we read about an elopement, we may try to find out what happened later.

But if we read about all these in a short story, we have esthetic enjoyment only if the author somehow makes it perfectly clear to us by the form of the description that this burglary and flood and elopement do not belong to our real surroundings and exist only in the world of imagination.

The extreme case comes to us in the theater performance.