Thackeray imagines the officers calling upon Mrs. Dodd, wife of that clerical scoundrel of the reign of George II.: "is my wife, Mrs. Dodd, to show them into the dining-room, and say, 'Pray step in, gentlemen! My husband has just come home from church. That bill with my Lord Chesterfield's acceptance, I am bound to own, was never written by his lordship; and the signature is in the doctor's handwriting'? I say, would any man of sense or honor or fine feeling praise his wife for telling the truth under such circumstances? Suppose she made a fine grimace and said, 'Most painful as my position is, most deeply as I feel for my William, yet truth must prevail; and I deeply lament to state that the beloved partner of my life _did_ commit the flagitious act with which he is charged, and is at this present moment located in the two-pair back, up the chimney, whither it is my duty to lead you.' Why, even Dodd himself, who was one of the greatest humbugs who ever lived, would not have had the face to say that he approved of his wife telling the truth in such a case. If ever I steal a teapot, and _my_ women don't stand up for me, pass the article under their shawls, whisk down the street with it, outbluster the policeman, and utter any amount of fibs before Mr. Beak, those beings are not what I take them to be."
A bronze lioness was dedicated to Leæna, a girl of humble birth, beloved by Aristogiton, who, with Harmodius, conspired to kill the tyrant Hippias. She "was sentenced to the torture, and, that the pain might not wring from her any confession of the secrets of the conspiracy, she bit out her tongue." Some scoffer will say, What greater sacrifice _could_ a woman make?
But she earned, and ought to have had, a verse in the poem of Kallistratus,[20] to wreathe around her name the myrtle-bough of the two patriots.
In "Far from the Madding Crowd," a novel written by Thomas Hardy, Bathsheba has hotly denied being in love; but she resents being taken in earnest by her confidant. "O God, what a lie it was! Heaven and my love forgive me! And don't you know that a woman who loves at all thinks nothing of perjury when it is balanced against her love?"
Lady Macbeth has the kind of wifehood which devotes itself. Hurried by her husband's hopes, she throws herself without reserve into the abyss they dig at her feet. All her character is lavished to consolidate his state. She is not a vulgar murderess, because her soul is without a flaw of egotism. She is not a perfect woman; but she is most perfectly and irrevocably married. The imperfect wives are egotistical, from various motives. They have some knack or talent which craves airing, and earns the superficial admiration which is the discord of a household. Harlots are not the only women who live upon the street. Lady Macbeth's mind has no specialty, no gift that itches to be noticed, no facility save that of aggrandizing at any expense the man she loves and is absorbed in.