iency as "a match" in the
light of dollars and cents. As for heroines, of course I have seen
beautiful women, and good as fair. The most beautiful is delicate and
pure enough for a type of the Madonna, and has a heart almost as warm
and holy. (Very pure blood is in her veins, too, if you care about
blood.) But at home they call her Tode for a nickname; all we can do,
she will sing, and sing through her nose; and on washing-days she often
cooks the dinner, and scolds wholesomely, if the tea-napkins are not in
order. 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. Of course, if I could, I would have blotted out every meanness
before I showed him to you; I would have told you Margret was an
impetuous, whole-souled woman, glad to throw her life down for her
fathe