They are mixed generally, and are 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 honor. 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 tender 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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