Feminists like to talk about heroines.
So do Americans sometimes, when they are in a sentimental mood and have nothing else to do. Miss Vivien Kellems was the descendant of an Englishman, Richard Kellam, who came to North America in 1636, and of the Randolphs of Virginia, whose ancestor came in the early 1670s. Eleven of her ancestors fought to make the colonies independent of the mother country, hoping that they would remain free. They could not foresee what would happen in less than a century later. When I met her briefly, she was past sixty, but she retained the kind of feminine pulchritude that, according to experts, comes from a well-formed bony structure.