to know him; I rang the metal
on more than one stone, and every time it rang false. I knew, if I married
him, I should live and die a wretched woman. Was it not better to live
alone?"

"But, Sarah,--if he loved you?"

"He did not,--not enough to hurt himself; he could not love anything so
much better than his ease as to suffer, Josey: he was safe. He thought, or
said, he loved me; but he was mistaken."

"Safe, indeed! He ought to have been shot!"

"Hush, dear!"

There was a long pause. It was as when you lift a wreck from the tranquil
sea and let it fall again to the depths, useless to wave or shore; the
black and ghastly hulk is covered; it is seen no more; but the water
palpitates with circling rings, trembles above the grave, dashes quick and
apprehensive billows upon the sand, and is long in regaining its quiet
surface.

"I wonder if there ever was a perfect man," said Jo, at length, drawing a
deep sigh.

"You an American girl, Jo, and don't think at once of Washington?"

"My dear, I am bored to death with Washington _a l'Americain_. A man!--
how dare you call him a man?--don't you know he is a myth, an abstraction,
a plaster-of-Paris cast? Did you ever hear any human trait of his noticed?
Weren't you brought up to regard him as a species of special seraph, a
sublime and stainless figure, inseparable from a grand manner and a
scroll? Did you ever dare suppose he ate, or drank, or kissed his wife?
You started then at the idea: I saw you!"

"You are absurd, Jo. It is true that he is exactly, among us, what
demigods were to the Greeks,--only less human than they. But when I once
get my neck out of the school-yoke, I do not start at such suggestions as
yours; I believe he did comport himself as a man of like passions with
others, and was as far from being a hero to his _valet-de-chambre_ as
anybody."

By this time we were at home, and Jo flung her parasol on the bench in the
porch, and sat down beside it with a gesture of weariness and disgust
mingled.

"Why will you, of all people, Sarah, quote that tinkling, superficial
trash of a proverb, so palpably French, when the true reason why a man is
not a hero to his lackey is only because he is seen with a lackey's eyes,
--the sight of a low, convention-ridden, narrow, uneducated mind, unable
to take a broad enough view to see that a man is a hero because he is a
man, because he overleaps the level of his life, and is greater than his
race, being one of them