Now, what is anybody to do with a heroine like
that? I have known old maids in abundance, with pathos and
sunshine in their lives; but the old maid of novels I never have
met, who abandoned her soul to gossip,--nor yet the other type, a
life-long martyr of unselfishness. They are mixed generally, and
not unlike their married sisters, so far as I can see. Then as
to men, certainly I know heroes. One man, I knew, as high a
chevalier in heart as any Bayard of them all; one of those souls
simple and gentle as a woman, tender in knightly honour. He was
an old man, with a rusty brown coat and rustier wig, who spent
his life in a dingy village office. You poets would have laughed
at him. Well, well, his history never will be written. The
kind, sad, blue eyes are shut now. There is a little
farm-graveyard overgrown with privet and wild grape-vines, and a
flattened grave where he was laid to rest; and only a few who
knew him when they were children care to go there, and think of
what he was to them. But it was not in the far days of Chivalry
alone, I think, that true and proud souls have stood in the world
unwelcome, and, hurt to the quick, have turned away and dumbly
died. Let it be. Their lives are not lost, thank God!
I meant only to ask you, How can I help it, if the people in my
story seem coarse to you,--if the hero, unlike all other heroes,
stopped to count the cost before he fell in love,--if it made his
fingers thrill with pleasure to touch a full pocket-book as well
as his mistress's hand,--not being withal, this Stephen Holmes, a
man to be despised? A hero, rather, of a peculiar type,--a man,
more than other men: the very mould of man, doubt it who will,
that women love longest and most madly.
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