his
life's devotion to a noble endeavour, does not live down here to any
great extent. They have tried it, one or two of them, and the world--you
and I: the world is made up of you and I--has generally starved, and
hooted them. There are not many of them left now: do you think you would
care to be the wife of one, supposing one were to be found for you?
Would you care to live with him in two furnished rooms in Clerkenwell,
die with him on a chair bedstead? A century hence they will put up a
statue to him, and you may be honoured as the wife who shared with him
his sufferings. Do you think you are woman enough for that? If not,
thank your stars you have secured, for your own exclusive use, one of us
UNexceptional men, who knows no better than to admire you. YOU are not
exceptional.

And in us ordinary men there is some good. It wants finding, that is
all. We are not so commonplace as you think us. Even your Jack, fond of
his dinner, his conversation four-cornered by the Sporting Press--yes, I
agree he is not interesting, as he sits snoring in the easy-chair; but,
believe it or not, there are the makings of a great hero in Jack, if
Fate would but be kinder to him, and shake him out of his ease.

Dr. Jekyll contained beneath his ample waist-coat not two egos, but
three--not only Hyde but another, a greater than Jekyll--a man as near
to the angels as Hyde was to the demons. These well-fed City men, these
Gaiety Johnnies, these plough-boys, apothecaries, thieves! within each
one lies hidden the hero, did Fate, the sculptor, choose to use his
chisel. That little drab we have noticed now and then, our way taking
us often past the end of the court, there was nothing by which to
distinguish her. She was not over-clean, could use coarse language on
occasion--just the spawn of the streets: take care lest the cloak of our
child should brush her.

One morning the district Coroner, not, generally speaking, a poet
himself, but an adept at discovering poetry buried under unlikely
rubbish-heaps, tells us more about her. She earned six shillings a week,
and upon it supported a bed-ridden mother and three younger children.
She was housewife, nurse, mother, breadwinner, rolled into one. Yes,
there are heroines OUT of fiction.

So loutish Tom has won the Victoria Cross--dashed out under a storm
of bullets and rescued the riddled flag. Who would have thought it of
loutish Tom? The village alehouse one always deemed the goal of his
ende