But to return to heroines, let us make a volte face. There is an old story of the lady who wrote rather irritably to Thackeray, asking, curtly, why all the good women he created were fools and the bright women all bad. “The same complaint,” he answered, “has been made, Madame, of God and Shakespeare, and as neither has given explanation I can not presume to attempt one.” It was curt and severe, and, of course, Thackeray did not write it as it would appear, even though he may have said as much jestingly to some intimate who understood the epigram; but was not the question rather impudently intrusive? Thackeray, you remember, was the “seared cynic” who created Caroline Gann, the gentle, beautiful, glorious “Little Sister,” the staunch, pure-hearted woman whose character not even the perfect scoundrelism of Dr. George Brand Firmin could tarnish or disturb. If there are heroines, surely she has her place high amid the noble group! There are plenty of intelligent persons sacramentally wedded to mere conventions of good and bad. You could never persuade them that Rebecca Sharp--that most perfect daughter of Thackeray's mind--was a heroine. But of course she was. In that world wherein she was cast to live she was indubitably, incomparably, the very best of all the inhabitants to whom you are intimately introduced. Capt. Dobbin? Oh, no, I am not forgetting good Old Dob. Of all the social door mats that ever I wiped my feet upon Old Dob is certainly the cleanest, most patient, serviceable and unrevolutionary. But, just a door mat, with the virtues and attractions of that useful article of furniture--the sublime, immortal prig of all the ages, or you can take the head of any novel-reader under thirty for a football. You may have known many women, from Bernadettes of Massavielle to Borgias of scant neighborhoods, but you know you never knew one who would marry Old Dob, except as that emotional dishrag, Amelia, married him--as the Last Chance on the stretching high-road of uncertain years. No girl ever willingly marries door mats. She just wipes her feet on them and passes on into the drawing room looking for the Prince. It seems to me one of the triumphant proofs of Becky as a heroine that she did not marry Captain Dobbin. She might have done it any day by crooking her little finger at him--but she didn't. Madame Becky, that smart daughter of an alcoholic gentleman artist and of his lady of the French ballet, inherited the perfect non-moral morality of the artist blood that sang mercurially through her veins. How could she, therefore, how could she, being non-moral, be immoral? It is clear nonsense. But she did possess the instinctive artist morality of unerring taste for selection in choice. Examine the facts meticulously--meticulously--and observe how carefully she selected that best in all that worst she moved among.