Far different is the typical woman with a mission, whose type, dashed off with a few strokes by the pen of Dickens, flits across our memory from _Bleak House_, and provokes a sigh and a smile. Again, Mrs Jellyby, with her dress laced anyhow like the lattice of a summer-house, is writing in a room full of disorder, with her philanthropic eye fixed upon the savages of Borrioboola, South Africa, while her own little boy is outside, kicking and howling, with his head stuck between the area railings. Again, Mr Jellyby employs his evenings in leaning his head feebly against the wall; and when poor Caddy is married, we hear him giving her all he has to give—the beseeching advice: ‘My dear, never have a mission!’
Even Mrs Jellyby may help us in our search, by sending us flying in the opposite direction. We have had light on our path—hiddenness is the seal, and unselfishness is the essence, and we are searching for the heroines of home. Their distinction does not depend, as in fiction, upon adventures, lovers, or beauty. If it did, they could be heroines only till the end of youth and volume three; but in the real world they shall be heroines not only till the time of gray hairs and careworn brow, but for ever and a day.
There is nothing in creation more beautiful than a true heroine, and nothing so hard to find. Not that they are scarce. They crowd the world as daisies dot the summer fields. But they are hidden, and hidden precisely where a thing wanted is most unlikely to be found—too close to us, just straight before our eyes. Not in the world of romance, or in the crush of public life, or in the clear cold air of science; but in the narrow lane where we started, in the monotonous routine of common daily life, that seems to be hedged in from all interest—there are the heroines to be found. Their heroism is made up of trivial details, the shabby atoms of uneventful life. If it be objected that the heroic means something greatly above the ordinary level, we would answer, that their whole life is above the level; that the essence of heroism—sacrifice—has become to them an unconsciously acting second nature, and that all that is life-long is surely great. But sometimes trivial incidents can become in themselves heroic. Whoever heard in a novel of heroism with a crushed thumb? All the finest things are true. It is told of the late Viscountess Beaconsfield, that on the night of an important speech by her husband, then Mr Disraeli, when they were seated in the carriage together to drive to the House of Commons, the servant closing the door, crushed her thumb. She uttered no cry, left the bruise untouched, and acted and spoke as if she was at ease. Hours after, when she descended from the Ladies’ Gallery, he discovered the agony she had been enduring, in order not to spoil his speech; and in after-years, when the Viscountess was dead, he still told the touching little story in her praise.