remorselessly made of her. I wouldn't be a lawyer for a wagon load of
diamonds, but if I had had to be a lawyer I should have preferred to
be a solicitor at the London bar in 1817 to write the brief for the
respondent in the celebrated divorce case of Crawley vs. Crawley.
Against the back-ground of the world she lived in Becky could have been
painted as meekly white and beautiful as that lovely old picture of St.
Cecilia at the Choir Organ.

Perhaps Becky was not strictly a heroine; but she was a honey.

* * * * *

Men can not "create" heroines in the sense of shadowing forth what
they conceive to be the glory, beauty, courage and splendor of womanly
character. It is the indescribable sum of womanhood corresponding to the
unutterable name of God. The true man's love of woman is a spirit sense
attending upon the actual senses of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting
and smelling. The woman he loves enters into every one of these senses
and thus is impounded five-fold upon that union of all of them, which,
together with the miracle of mind, composes what we call the human soul
as a divine essence. She is attached to every religion, yet enters with
authority into none. She is first at its birth, the last to stay weeping
at its death. In every great novel a heroine, unnamed, unspoken,
undescribed, hovers throughout like an essence. The heroism of woman
is her privacy. There is to me no more wonderful, philosophical,
psychological and delicate triumph of literary art in existence than the
few chapters in "Quo Vadis" in which that great introspective genius,
Sienkiewicz, sets forth the growth of the spell of love with which Lygia
has encompassed Vinicius, and the singular development and progress of
the emotion through which Vinicius is finally immersed in human love of