"I wonder if there ever was a perfect man," said Jo, at length, drawing a
deep sigh.
"You an American girl, Jo, and don't think at once of Washington?"
"My dear, I am bored to death with Washington _a l'Americain_. A man!--
how dare you call him a man?--don't you know he is a myth, an abstraction,
a plaster-of-Paris cast? Did you ever hear any human trait of his noticed?
Weren't you brought up to regard him as a species of special seraph, a
sublime and stainless figure, inseparable from a grand manner and a
scroll? Did you ever dare suppose he ate, or drank, or kissed his wife?
You started then at the idea: I saw you!"
"You are absurd, Jo. It is true that he is exactly, among us, what
demigods were to the Greeks,--only less human than they. But when I once
get my neck out of the school-yoke, I do not start at such suggestions as
yours; I believe he did comport himself as a man of like passions with
others, and was as far from being a hero to his _valet-de-chambre_ as
anybody."
By this time we were at home, and Jo flung her parasol on the bench in the
porch, and sat down beside it with a gesture of weariness and disgust
mingled.
"Why will you, of all people, Sarah, quote that tinkling, superficial
trash of a proverb, so palpably French, when the true reason why a man is
not a hero to his lackey is only because he is seen with a lackey's eyes,
--the sight of a low, convention-ridden, narrow, uneducated mind, unable
to take a broad enough view to see that a man is a hero because he is a
man, because he overleaps the level of his life, and is greater than his
race, being one of them? If he were of the heroic race, what virtue in
being heroic? it is the assertion of his trivial life that makes his
speciality evident,--the shadow that throws out the bas-relief.
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