The tender, sympathetic, moist-eyed woman who condoles so sweetly with your little troubles, and whose affectionate compassion soothes you like the trickling of sweet waters or the cooling breath of a pleasant air, but who leaves her sick husband at home to get through the weary hours as he best may, who bullies her servants and scolds her children--she too, is a heroine of a class that does not look well when closely studied. The pretty young mother, making play with her pretty young children in the Park--a smiling picture of love and loveliness--when followed home, turning into a fretful, self-indulgent fine lady, flung wearily into an easy chair, sending the children up to the nursery and probably seeing them no more until Park hour to-morrow, when their beautiful little _têtes d'ange_ will enhance her own loveliness in the eyes of men, and make her more beautiful because making the picture more complete; Mrs. Jellaby given up to universal philanthropy, refusing a crust to the beggar at her own gate, but full of tearful pity for the misery she has undertaken to mitigate at Borioboolagha; Croesus scattering showers of gold abroad, and applauded to the echo when his name, with the donation following, is read out at a public dinner, but looking after the cheese-parings at home; the eloquent upholder of human equality in public, snubbing in private all who are one degree below him in the social scale, and treating his servants like dogs; the no less eloquent descanter on the motto _Noblesse oblige_, when the house-door is shut between him and the world, running honesty so fine that it is almost undistinguishable from roguery--all these heroes abroad show but shabbily at home, and make their heroism within the four walls literally a vanishing quantity.