This was so that she could be a martyr. She loved being a martyr, and was willing to make everyone else intensely uncomfortable in order to accomplish her object. She was very gentle and sweet, and even the Colonel would cease to bellow and snort in her presence.
The really learned heroine has gone for good. She is as rare as the megatherium. Her successors—the women who can discuss a little politics, or who know something about literature—are only collateral descendants. There is some doubt about even that degree of kinship. They are not the real things.
Our old friend had stockings of cerulean blue—though she would have died had she shown half an inch of one of them. Her idea of courtship was to get the hero in a woodland bower and then say something like this:
"Perhaps you have never realized, Mr. Montmorency, how profoundly the philosophy of the Rosicrucians has affected modern thought in its ultimate conception of ontology. The epistemological sciences exhibit the effect of Thales' dictum concerning the fourth state of material cosmogony."
And Mr. Montmorency liked it, too. He had a reply all ready. He wondered if it really was Thales so much as Empedocles or Ctesias. She showed him that his suspicions were groundless. Thales was the man.
He gave up all idea of holding her hand, and listened to a fifteen-minute discourse on the Peripatetics.
After this kind of heroine, is it any wonder that we object to the bridge-playing ladies with a passion for alcohol, who are served to us by the novelist of to-day?
The learned heroine of the old books talked as no one can talk now, except, possibly, a Radcliffe girl with a blue book in front of her, the clock pointing to a quarter of twelve, and a realization that a failure to get B minus in the exam. will make it impossible for her to secure a degree in three years.
The saintly children of the old fiction are perhaps the offspring of the learned heroine and Mr. Montmorency. Certainly such a marriage would result in children of no commonplace type. These, however, tend not so much to scholarship as to good behavior. They would get 98 in all their studies, but 100 plus in deportment.
They are too good to be true. They have enough piety to fit out a convocation of bishops, with a great deal left over. The little girls among them are addicted to the death-bed habit. Only they carry the matter further than the invalid heroine.