"Yet, Miss Eva," said I, "I don't think we are so very much better off than you. The life of the great body of _men_ is a succession of mere ignoble drudgeries, with nothing great or inspiring. Unless we learn to ennoble the common-place by a heroic spirit, most of us must pass through life with no expression of this aspiration; and I think that more women succeed in doing this than men--in fact, I think it is the distinctive prerogative of woman to idealize life by shedding an ennobling spirit upon its very trifles." "That is true," she said, frankly; "but I confess it never occurred to me; yet don't you think it harder to be heroic in every-day affairs?" "Certainly; but those that can inspire common-place drudgery with noble and heroic meanings are the true heroes. There was a carpenter once in Nazareth who worked thirty years quietly at his bench; but who doubts that every stroke of that work was inspired and heroic, as much as the three public years that followed? And there are women, like him, toiling in poverty--hard-working wives, long-suffering mothers, whose every breath is heroic. There _can_ be no common-place where such noble creatures live and suffer." "Yes, Mr. Henderson," said Ida, "heroism can be in any life that is a _work_-life--any life which includes energy and self-denial. But fashionable life is based on mere love of ease. All it seeks is pleasurable sensation and absence of care and trouble, and it starves this heroic capability; and that is the reason, as Eva says, why there is so much repressed unhappiness in women. It is the hunger of starving faculties. What are all these girls and women looking for? Amusement, excitement. What do they dread more than anything? Effort, industry, self-denial. Not one of them can read a serious book through--not because they are not able, but because it takes an effort. They read nothing but serial stories, and if there is much thought in them, they skip it, to get at the story. All the education they get in schools lies idle; they do nothing with it, as a general thing. They neither read, write, nor speak their French, Italian, or German--and what is the use of having got them? Men study languages as a key to literature, and use literature for some purpose; women study only to forget. It does not take four languages and all the ologies to enable them to dance the German and compose new styles of trimming. They might do all they do equally as well without these expensive educations as with----"