THE WOMAN WHO DID

by

Grant Allen

1895

TO MY DEAR WIFE

TO WHOM I HAVE DEDICATED MY TWENTY HAPPIEST YEARS

I DEDICATE ALSO

THIS BRIEF MEMORIAL OF A LESS FORTUNATE LOVE

WRITTEN AT PERUGIA

SPRING 1893

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE

WHOLLY AND SOLELY TO SATISFY

MY OWN TASTE

AND MY OWN CONSCIENCE

PREFACE

"But surely no woman would ever dare to do so, " said my friend. 

"I knew a woman who did, " said I; "and this is her story. "

I. 

Mrs. Dewsbury's lawn was held by those who knew it the loveliest inSurrey. The smooth and springy sward that stretched in front ofthe house was all composed of a tiny yellow clover. It gavebeneath the foot like the pile on velvet. One's gaze looked forthfrom it upon the endless middle distances of the oak-clad Weald, with the uncertain blue line of the South Downs in the background. Ridge behind ridge, the long, low hills of paludina limestone stoodout in successive tiers, each thrown up against its neighbor by themisty haze that broods eternally over the wooded valley; till, roaming across them all, the eye rested at last on the rearingscarp of Chanctonbury Ring, faintly pencilled on the furthest skyline. Shadowy phantoms of dim heights framed the verge to east andwest. Alan Merrick drank it in with profound satisfaction. Afterthose sharp and clear-cut Italian outlines, hard as lapis lazuli, the mysterious vagueness, the pregnant suggestiveness, of ourEnglish scenery strikes the imagination; and Alan was fresh homefrom an early summer tour among the Peruginesque solidities of theUmbrian Apennines. "How beautiful it all is, after all, " he said, turning to his entertainer. "In Italy 'tis the background thepainter dwells upon; in England, we look rather at the middledistance. "

Mrs. Dewsbury darted round her the restless eye of a hostess, tosee upon whom she could socially bestow him. "Oh, come this way, "she said, sweeping across the lawn towards a girl in a blue dressat the opposite corner. "You must know our new-comer. I want tointroduce you to Miss Barton, from Cambridge. She's SUCH a nicegirl too, --the Dean of Dunwich's daughter. "

Alan Merrick drew back with a vague gesture of distaste. "Oh, thank you, " he replied; "but, do you know, I don't think I likedeans, Mrs. Dewsbury. " Mrs. Dewsbury's smile was recondite anddiplomatic. "Then you'll exactly suit one another, " she answeredwith gay wisdom. "For, to tell you the truth, I don't think SHEdoes either. "

The young man allowed himself to be led with a passive protest inthe direction where Mrs. Dewsbury so impulsively hurried him. Heheard that cultivated voice murmuring in the usual inaudible toneof introduction, "Miss Barton, Mr. Alan Merrick. " Then he raisedhis hat. As he did so, he looked down at Herminia Barton's facewith a sudden start of surprise. Why, this was a girl of mostunusual beauty!

She was tall and dark, with abundant black hair, richly waved abovethe ample forehead; and she wore a curious Oriental-looking navy-bluerobe of some soft woollen stuff, that fell in natural foldsand set off to the utmost the lissome grace of her rounded figure. It was a sort of sleeveless sack, embroidered in front witharabesques in gold thread, and fastened obliquely two inches belowthe waist with a belt of gilt braid, and a clasp of Moorish jewel-work. Beneath it, a bodice of darker silk showed at the arms andneck, with loose sleeves in keeping. The whole costume, thoughquite simple in style, a compromise either for afternoon orevening, was charming in its novelty, charming too in the way itpermitted the utmost liberty and variety of movement to the lithelimbs of its wearer. But it was her face particularly that struckAlan Merrick at first sight. That face was above all things theface of a free woman. Something so frank and fearless shone inHerminia's glance, as her eye met his, that Alan, who respectedhuman freedom above all other qualities in man or woman, was takenon the spot by its perfect air of untrammelled liberty. Yet it wassubtle and beautiful too, undeniably beautiful. Herminia Barton'sfeatures, I think, were even more striking in their way in laterlife, when sorrow had stamped her, and the mark of her willingmartyrdom for humanity's sake was deeply printed upon them. Buttheir beauty then was the beauty of holiness, which not all canappreciate. In her younger days, as Alan Merrick first saw her, she was beautiful still with the first flush of health and strengthand womanhood in a free and vigorous English girl's body. Acertain lofty serenity, not untouched with pathos, seemed to strikethe keynote. But that was not all. Some hint of every element inthe highest loveliness met in that face and form, --physical, intellectual, emotional, moral. 

"You'll like him, Herminia, " Mrs. Dewsbury said, nodding. "He'sone of your own kind, as dreadful as you are; very free andadvanced; a perfect firebrand. In fact, my dear child, I don'tknow which of you makes my hair stand on end most. " And with thatintroductory hint, she left the pair forthwith to their owndevices. 

Mrs. Dewsbury was right. It took those two but little time to feelquite at home with one another. Built of similar mould, eachseemed instinctively to grasp what each was aiming at. Two orthree turns pacing up and down the lawn, two or three steps alongthe box-covered path at the side, and they read one anotherperfectly. For he was true man, and she was real woman. 

"Then you were at Girton?" Alan asked, as he paused with one handon the rustic seat that looks up towards Leith Hill, and theheather-clad moorland. 

"Yes, at Girton, " Herminia answered, sinking easily upon the bench, and letting one arm rest on the back in a graceful attitude ofunstudied attention. "But I didn't take my degree, " she went onhurriedly, as one who is anxious to disclaim some too great honorthrust upon her. "I didn't care for the life; I thought itcramping. You see, if we women are ever to be free in the world, we must have in the end a freeman's education. But the educationat Girton made only a pretence at freedom. At heart, our girlswere as enslaved to conventions as any girls elsewhere. The wholeobject of the training was to see just how far you could manage topush a woman's education without the faintest danger of heremancipation. "

"You are right, " Alan answered briskly, for the point was a pet onewith him. "I was an Oxford man myself, and I know that servitude. When I go up to Oxford now and see the girls who are being groundin the mill at Somerville, I'm heartily sorry for them. It's worsefor them than for us; they miss the only part of university lifethat has educational value. When we men were undergraduates, welived our whole lives, lived them all round, developing equallyevery fibre of our natures. We read Plato, and Aristotle, and JohnStuart Mill, to be sure, --and I'm not quite certain we got muchgood from them; but then our talk and thought were not all ofbooks, and of what we spelt out in them. We rowed on the river, weplayed in the cricket-field, we lounged in the billiard-rooms, weran up to town for the day, we had wine in one another's roomsafter hall in the evening, and behaved like young fools, and threworanges wildly at one another's heads, and generally enjoyedourselves. It was all very silly and irrational, no doubt, but itwas life, it was reality; while the pretended earnestness of thosepallid Somerville girls is all an affectation of one-sidedculture. "

"That's just it, " Herminia answered, leaning back on the rusticseat like David's Madame Recamier. "You put your finger on thereal blot when you said those words, developing equally every fibreof your natures. That's what nobody yet wants us women to do. They're trying hard enough to develop us intellectually; butmorally and socially they want to mew us up just as close as ever. And they won't succeed. The zenana must go. Sooner or later, I'msure, if you begin by educating women, you must end by emancipatingthem. "

"So I think too, " Alan answered, growing every moment moreinterested. "And for my part, it's the emancipation, not the mereeducation, that most appeals to me. "

"Yes, I've always felt that, " Herminia went on, letting herself outmore freely, for she felt she was face to face with a sympatheticlistener. "And for that reason, it's the question of social andmoral emancipation that interests me far more than the merepolitical one, --woman's rights as they call it. Of course I'm amember of all the woman's franchise leagues and everything of thatsort, --they can't afford to do without a single friend's name ontheir lists at present; but the vote is a matter that troubles melittle in itself, what I want is to see women made fit to use it. After all, political life fills but a small and unimportant part inour total existence. It's the perpetual pressure of social andethical restrictions that most weighs down women. "

Alan paused and looked hard at her. "And they tell me, " he said ina slow voice, "you're the Dean of Dunwich's daughter!"

Herminia laughed lightly, --a ringing girlish laugh. Alan noticedit with pleasure. He felt at once that the iron of Girton had notentered into her soul, as into so many of our modern young women's. There was vitality enough left in her for a genuine laugh ofinnocent amusement. "Oh yes, " she said, merrily; "that's what Ialways answer to all possible objectors to my ways and ideas. Ireply with dignity, '_I_ was brought up in the family of aclergyman of the Church of England. '"

"And what does the Dean say to your views?" Alan interposeddoubtfully. 

Herminia laughed again. If her eyes were profound, two dimplessaved her. "I thought you were with us, " she answered with atwinkle; "now, I begin to doubt it. You don't expect a man oftwenty-two to be governed in all things, especially in theformation of his abstract ideas, by his father's opinions. Whythen a woman?"

"Why, indeed?" Alan answered. "There I quite agree with you. Iwas thinking not so much of what is right and reasonable as of whatis practical and usual. For most women, of course, are--well, moreor less dependent upon their fathers. "

"But I am not, " Herminia answered, with a faint suspicion of justpride in the undercurrent of her tone. "That's in part why I wentaway so soon from Girton. I felt that if women are ever to befree, they must first of all be independent. It is the dependenceof women that has allowed men to make laws for them, socially andethically. So I wouldn't stop at Girton, partly because I felt thelife was one-sided, --our girls thought and talked of nothing elseon earth except Herodotus, trigonometry, and the higher culture, --butpartly also because I wouldn't be dependent on any man, noteven my own father. It left me freer to act and think as I would. So I threw Girton overboard, and came up to live in London. "

"I see, " Alan replied. "You wouldn't let your schooling interferewith your education. And now you support yourself?" he went onquite frankly. 

Herminia nodded assent. 

"Yes, I support myself, " she answered; "in part by teaching at ahigh school for girls, and in part by doing a little hack-work fornewspapers. "

"Then you're just down here for your holidays, I suppose?" Alan putin, leaning forward. 

"Yes, just down here for my holidays. I've lodgings on theHolmwood, in such a dear old thatched cottage; roses peep in at theporch, and birds sing on the bushes. After a term in London, it'sa delicious change for one. "

"But are you alone?" Alan interposed again, still half hesitating. 

Herminia smiled once more; his surprise amused her. "Yes, quitealone, " she answered. "But if you seem so astonished at that, Ishall believe you and Mrs. Dewsbury have been trying to take me in, and that you're not really with us. Why shouldn't a woman comedown alone to pretty lodgings in the country?"

"Why not, indeed?" Alan echoed in turn. "It's not at all that Idisapprove, Miss Barton; on the contrary, I admire it; it's onlythat one's surprised to find a woman, or for the matter of thatanybody, acting up to his or her convictions. That's what I'vealways felt; 'tis the Nemesis of reason; if people begin bythinking rationally, the danger is that they may end by actingrationally also. "

Herminia laughed. "I'm afraid, " she answered, "I've alreadyreached that pass. You'll never find me hesitate to do anything onearth, once I'm convinced it's right, merely because other peoplethink differently on the subject. "

Alan looked at her and mused. She was tall and stately, but herfigure was well developed, and her form softly moulded. He admiredher immensely. How incongruous an outcome from a clerical family!"It's curious, " he said, gazing hard at her, "that you should be adean's daughter. "

"On the contrary, " Herminia answered, with perfect frankness, "Iregard myself as a living proof of the doctrine of heredity. "

"How so?" Alan inquired. 

"Well, my father was a Senior Wrangler, " Herminia replied, blushingfaintly; "and I suppose that implies a certain moderate developmentof the logical faculties. In HIS generation, people didn't applythe logical faculties to the grounds of belief; they took those forgranted; but within his own limits, my father is still an acutereasoner. And then he had always the ethical and social interests. Those two things--a love of logic, and a love of right--are theforces that tend to make us what we call religious. Worldly peopledon't care for fundamental questions of the universe at all; theyaccept passively whatever is told them; they think they think, andbelieve they believe it. But people with an interest infundamental truth inquire for themselves into the constitution ofthe cosmos; if they are convinced one way, they become what we calltheologians; if they are convinced the other way, they become whatwe call free-thinkers. Interest in the problem is common to both;it's the nature of the solution alone that differs in the twocases. "

"That's quite true, " Alan assented. "And have you ever noticedthis curious corollary, that you and I can talk far moresympathetically with an earnest Catholic, for example, or anearnest Evangelical, than we can talk with a mere ordinary worldlyperson. "

"Oh dear, yes, " Herminia answered with conviction. "Thought willalways sympathize with thought. It's the unthinking mass one canget no further with. "

Alan changed the subject abruptly. This girl so interested him. She was the girl he had imagined, the girl he had dreamt of, thegirl he had thought possible, but never yet met with. "And you'rein lodgings on the Holmwood here?" he said, musing. "For how muchlonger?"

"For, six weeks, I'm glad to say, " Herminia answered, rising. 

"At what cottage?"

"Mrs. Burke's, --not far from the station. "

"May I come to see you there?"

Herminia's clear brown eyes gazed down at him, all puzzlement. "Why, surely, " she answered; "I shall be delighted to see you!"She paused for a second. "We agree about so many things, " she wenton; "and it's so rare to find a man who can sympathize with thehigher longings in women. "

"When are you likeliest to be at home?" Alan asked. 

"In the morning, after breakfast, --that is, at eight o'clock, "Herminia answered, smiling; "or later, after lunch, say two orthereabouts. "

"Six weeks, " Alan repeated, more to himself than to her. Those sixweek were precious. Not a moment of them must be lost. "Then Ithink, " he went on quietly, "I shall call tomorrow. "

A wave of conscious pleasure broke over Herminia's cheek, blushrose on white lily; but she answered nothing. She was glad thiskindred soul should seem in such a hurry to renew her acquaintance. 

II. 

Next afternoon, about two o'clock, Alan called with a tremulousheart at the cottage. Herminia had heard not a little of himmeanwhile from her friend Mrs. Dewsbury. "He's a charming youngman, my dear, " the woman of the world observed with confidence. "I felt quite sure you'd attract one another. He's so clever andadvanced, and everything that's dreadful, --just like yourself, Herminia. But then he's also very well connected. That's alwayssomething, especially when one's an oddity. You wouldn't go downone bit yourself, dear, if you weren't a dean's daughter. Theshadow of a cathedral steeple covers a multitude of sins. Mr. Merrick's the son of the famous London gout doctor, --you MUST knowhis name, --all the royal dukes flock to him. He's a barristerhimself, and in excellent practice. You might do worse, do youknow, than to go in for Alan Merrick. "

Herminia's lip curled an almost imperceptible curl as she answeredgravely, "I don't think you quite understand my plans in life, Mrs. Dewsbury. It isn't my present intention to GO IN for anybody. "

But Mrs. Dewsbury shook her head. She knew the world she lived in. "Ah, I've heard a great many girls talk like that beforehand, " sheanswered at once with her society glibness; "but when the right manturned up, they soon forgot their protestations. It makes a lot ofdifference, dear, when a man really asks you!"

Herminia bent her head. "You misunderstand me, " she replied. "Idon't mean to say I will never fall in love. I expect to do that. I look forward to it frankly, --it is a woman's place in life. Ionly mean to say, I don't think anything will ever induce me tomarry, --that is to say, legally. "

Mrs. Dewsbury gave a start of surprise and horror. She reallydidn't know what girls were coming to nowadays, --which, consideringher first principles, was certainly natural. But if only she hadseen the conscious flush with which Herminia received her visitorthat afternoon, she would have been confirmed in her belief thatHerminia, after all, in spite of her learning, was much like othergirls. In which conclusion Mrs. Dewsbury would not in the end havebeen fully justified. 

When Alan arrived, Herminia sat at the window by the quaintlyclipped box-tree, a volume of verse held half closed in her hand, though she was a great deal too honest and transparent to pretendshe was reading it. She expected Alan to call, in accordance withhis promise, for she had seen at Mrs. Dewsbury's how great animpression she produced upon him; and, having taught herself thatit was every true woman's duty to avoid the affectations andself-deceptions which the rule of man has begotten in women, shedidn't try to conceal from herself the fact that she on her sidewas by no means without interest in the question how soon he wouldpay her his promised visit. As he appeared at the rustic gate inthe privet hedge, Herminia looked out, and changed color withpleasure when she saw him push it open. 

"Oh, how nice of you to look me up so soon!" she cried, jumpingfrom her seat (with just a glance at the glass) and strolling outbareheaded into the cottage garden. "Isn't this a charming place?Only look at our hollyhocks! Consider what an oasis after sixmonths of London!"

She seemed even prettier than last night, in her simple whitemorning dress, a mere ordinary English gown, without affectation ofany sort, yet touched with some faint reminiscence of a flowingGreek chiton. Its half-classical drapery exactly suited the severeregularity of her pensive features and her graceful figure. Alanthought as he looked at her he had never before seen anybody whoappeared at all points so nearly to approach his ideal ofwomanhood. She was at once so high in type, so serene, sotranquil, and yet so purely womanly. 

"Yes, it IS a lovely place, " he answered, looking around at theclematis that drooped from the gable-ends. "I'm staying myselfwith the Watertons at the Park, but I'd rather have this prettylittle rose-bowered garden than all their balustrades and Italianterraces. The cottagers have chosen the better part. Whatgillyflowers and what columbines! And here you look out sodirectly on the common. I love the gorse and the bracken, I lovethe stagnant pond, I love the very geese that tug hard at thesilverweed, they make it all seem so deliciously English. "

"Shall we walk to the ridge?" Herminia asked with a sudden burst ofsuggestion. "It's too rare a day to waste a minute of it indoors. I was waiting till you came. We can talk all the freer for thefresh air on the hill-top. "

Nothing could have suited Alan Merrick better, and he said so atonce. Herminia disappeared for a moment to get her hat. Alanobserved almost without observing it that she was gone but for asecond. She asked none of that long interval that most womenrequire for the simplest matter of toilet. She was back againalmost instantly, bright and fresh and smiling, in the most modestof hats, set so artlessly on her head that it became her betterthan all art could have made it. Then they started for a longstroll across the breezy common, yellow in places with uprightspikes of small summer furze, and pink with wild pea-blossom. Beesbuzzed, broom crackled, the chirp of the field cricket rang shrillfrom the sand-banks. Herminia's light foot tripped over the spongyturf. By the top of the furthest ridge, looking down on NorthHolmwood church, they sat side by side for a while on the closeshort grass, brocaded with daisies, and gazed across at the croppedsward of Denbies and the long line of the North Downs stretchingaway towards Reigate. Tender grays and greens melted into oneanother on the larches hard by; Betchworth chalk-pit gleamed dreamywhite in the middle distance. They had been talking earnestly allthe way, like two old friends together; for they were both of themyoung, and they felt at once that nameless bond which often drawsone closer to a new acquaintance at first sight than years ofconverse. "How seriously you look at life, " Alan cried at last, inanswer to one of Herminias graver thoughts. "I wonder what makesyou take it so much more earnestly than all other women?"

"It came to me all at once when I was about sixteen, " Herminiaanswered with quiet composure, like one who remarks upon someobjective fact of external nature. "It came to me in listening to asermon of my father's, --which I always look upon as one moreinstance of the force of heredity. He was preaching on the text, 'The Truth shall make you Free, ' and all that he said about itseemed to me strangely alive, to be heard from a pulpit. He saidwe ought to seek the Truth before all things, and never to resttill we felt sure we had found it. We should not suffer our soulsto be beguiled into believing a falsehood merely because wewouldn't take the trouble to find out the Truth for ourselves bysearching. We must dig for it; we must grope after it. And as hespoke, I made up my mind, in a flash of resolution, to find out theTruth for myself about everything, and never to be deterred fromseeking it, and embracing it, and ensuing it when found, by anyconvention or preconception. Then he went on to say how the Truthwould make us Free, and I felt he was right. It would open oureyes, and emancipate us from social and moral slaveries. So I madeup my mind, at the same time, that whenever I found the Truth Iwould not scruple to follow it to its logical conclusions, butwould practise it in my life, and let it make me Free with perfectfreedom. Then, in search of Truth, I got my father to send me toGirton; and when I had lighted on it there half by accident, and ithad made me Free indeed, I went away from Girton again, because Isaw if I stopped there I could never achieve and guard my freedom. From that day forth I have aimed at nothing but to know the Truth, and to act upon it freely; for, as Tennyson says, --

 'To live by law Acting the law we live by without fear, And because right is right to follow right, Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence. '"

She broke off suddenly, and looking up, let her eye rest for asecond on the dark thread of clambering pines that crest the downjust above Brockham. "This is dreadfully egotistical, " she cried, with a sharp little start. "I ought to apologize for talking somuch to you about my own feelings. "

Alan gazed at her and smiled. "Why apologize, " he asked, "formanaging to be interesting? You, are not egotistical at all. Whatyou are telling me is history, --the history of a soul, which isalways the one thing on earth worth hearing. I take it as acompliment that you should hold me worthy to hear it. It is aproof of confidence. Besides, " he went on, after a second's pause, "I am a man; you are a woman. Under those circumstances, whatwould otherwise be egotism becomes common and mutual. When twopeople sympathize with one another, all they can say aboutthemselves loses its personal tinge and merges into pure human andabstract interest. "

Herminia brought back her eyes from infinity to his face. "That'strue, " she said frankly. "The magic link of sex that severs andunites us makes all the difference. And, indeed, I confess Iwouldn't so have spoken of my inmost feelings to another woman. "

III. 

From that day forth, Alan and Herminia met frequently. Alan wasgiven to sketching, and he sketched a great deal in his idle timeson the common. He translated the cottages from real estate intopoetry. On such occasions, Herminia's walks often led her in thesame direction. For Herminia was frank; she liked the young man, and, the truth having made her free, she knew no reason why sheshould avoid or pretend to avoid his company. She had no fear ofthat sordid impersonal goddess who rules Philistia; it mattered notto her what "people said, " or whether or not they said anythingabout her. "Aiunt: quid aiunt? aiant, " was her motto. Could shehave known to a certainty that her meetings on the common with AlanMerrick had excited unfavorable comment among the old ladies ofHolmwood, the point would have seemed to her unworthy of anemancipated soul's consideration. She could estimate at its trueworth the value of all human criticism upon human action. 

So, day after day, she met Alan Merrick, half by accident, half bydesign, on the slopes of the Holmwood. They talked much together, for Alan liked her and understood her. His heart went out to her. Compact of like clay, he knew the meaning of her hopes andaspirations. Often as he sketched he would look up and wait, expecting to catch the faint sound of her light step, or see herlithe figure poised breezy against the sky on the neighboringridges. Whenever she drew near, his pulse thrilled at her coming, --asomewhat unusual experience with Alan Merrick. For Alan, thougha pure soul in his way, and mixed of the finer paste, was not quitelike those best of men, who are, so to speak, born married. A manwith an innate genius for loving and being loved cannot long remainsingle. He MUST marry young; or at least, if he does not marry, hemust find a companion, a woman to his heart, a help that is meetfor him. What is commonly called prudence in such concerns is onlyanother name for vice and cruelty. The purest and best of mennecessarily mate themselves before they are twenty. As a rule, itis the selfish, the mean, the calculating, who wait, as they say, "till they can afford to marry. " That vile phrase scarcely veilshidden depths of depravity. A man who is really a man, and who hasa genius for loving, must love from the very first, and must feelhimself surrounded by those who love him. 'Tis the first necessityof life to him; bread, meat, raiment, a house, an income, rank farsecond to that prime want in the good man's economy. 

But Alan Merrick, though an excellent fellow in his way, and ofnoble fibre, was not quite one of the first, the picked souls ofhumanity. He did not count among the finger-posts who point theway that mankind will travel. Though Herminia always thought himso. That was her true woman's gift of the highest idealizingpower. Indeed, it adds, to my mind, to the tragedy of HerminiaBarton's life that the man for whom she risked and lost everythingwas never quite worthy of her; and that Herminia to the end notonce suspected it. Alan was over thirty, and was still "lookingabout him. " That alone, you will admit, is a sufficiently gravecondemnation. That a man should have arrived at the ripe age ofthirty and not yet have lighted upon the elect lady--the womanwithout whose companionship life would be to him unendurable is initself a strong proof of much underlying selfishness, or, whatcomes to the same thing, of a calculating disposition. The rightsort of man doesn't argue with himself at all on these matters. Hedoesn't say with selfish coldness, "I can't afford a wife;" or, "IfI marry now, I shall ruin my prospects. " He feels and acts. Hemates, like the birds, because he can't help himself. A womancrosses his path who is to him indispensable, a part of himself, the needful complement of his own personality; and without heed orhesitation he takes her to himself, lawfully or unlawfully, becausehe has need of her. That is how nature has made us; that is howevery man worthy of the name of man has always felt, and thought, and acted. The worst of all possible and conceivable checks uponpopulation is the vile one which Malthus glossed over as "theprudential, " and which consists in substituting prostitution formarriage through the spring-tide of one's manhood. 

Alan Merrick, however, was over thirty and still unmarried. Morethan that, he was heart-free, --a very evil record. And, like mostother unmarried men of thirty, he was a trifle fastidious. He was"looking about him. " That means to say, he was waiting to findsome woman who suited him. No man does so at twenty. He sees andloves. But Alan Merrick, having let slip the golden moment whennature prompts every growing youth to fling himself with puredevotion at the feet of the first good angel who happens to crosshis path and attract his worship, had now outlived the early flushof pure passion, and was thinking only of "comfortably settlinghimself. " In one word, when a man is young, he asks himself with athrill what he can do to make happy this sweet soul he loves; whenhe has let that critical moment flow by him unseized, he asks only, in cold blood, what woman will most agreeably make life run smoothfor him. The first stage is pure love; the second, pureselfishness. 

Still, Alan Merrick was now "getting on in his profession, " and, aspeople said, it was high time he should be settled. They said itas they might have said it was high time he should take a businesspartner. From that lowest depth of emotional disgrace HerminiaBarton was to preserve him. It was her task in life, though sheknew it not, to save Alan Merrick's soul. And nobly she saved it. 

Alan, "looking about him, " with some fine qualities of natureunderlying in the background that mean social philosophy of theclass from which he sprang, fell frankly in love almost at firstsight with Herminia. He admired and respected her. More thanthat, he understood her. She had power in her purity to raise hisnature for a time to something approaching her own high level. True woman has the real Midas gift: all that she touches turns topurest gold. Seeing Herminia much and talking with her, Alan couldnot fail to be impressed with the idea that here was a soul whichcould do a great deal more for him than "make him comfortable, "--whichcould raise him to moral heights he had hardly yet dreamtof, --which could wake in him the best of which he was capable. Andwatching her thus, he soon fell in love with her, as few men ofthirty are able to fall in love for the first time, --as the youngman falls in love, with the unselfish energy of an unspoilt nature. He asked no longer whether Herminia was the sort of girl who couldmake him comfortable; he asked only, with that delicious tremor ofself-distrust which belongs to naive youth, whether he dare offerhimself to one so pure and good and beautiful. And his hesitationwas justified; for our sordid England has not brought forth manysuch serene and single-minded souls as Herminia Barton. 

At last one afternoon they had climbed together the steep red faceof the sandy slope that rises abruptly from the Holmwood towardsLeith Hill, by the Robin Gate entrance. Near the top, they hadseated themselves on a carpet of sheep-sorrel, looking out acrossthe imperturbable expanse of the Weald, and the broad pastures ofSussex. A solemn blue haze brooded soft over the land. The sunwas sinking low; oblique afternoon lights flooded the distant SouthDowns. Their combes came out aslant in saucer-shaped shadows. Alan turned and gazed at Herminia; she was hot with climbing, andher calm face was flushed. A town-bred girl would have looked redand blowsy; but the color and the exertion just suited Herminia. On that healthy brown cheek it seemed natural to discern thevisible marks of effort. Alan gazed at her with a sudden rush ofuntrammelled feeling. The elusive outline of her grave sweet face, the wistful eyes, the ripe red mouth enticed him. "Oh, Herminia, "he cried, calling her for the first time by her Christian namealone, "how glad I am I happened to go that afternoon to Mrs. Dewsbury's. For otherwise perhaps I might never have known you. "

Herminia's heart gave a delicious bound. She was a woman, andtherefore she was glad he should speak so. She was a woman, andtherefore she shrank from acknowledging it. But she looked himback in the face tranquilly, none the less on that account, andanswered with sweet candor, "Thank you so much, Mr. Merrick. "

"_I_ said 'Herminia, '" the young man corrected, smiling, yet aghastat his own audacity. 

"And I thanked you for it, " Herminia answered, casting down thosedark lashes, and feeling the heart throb violently under her neatbodice. 

Alan drew a deep breath. "And it was THAT you thanked me for, " heejaculated, tingling. 

"Yes, it was that I thanked you for, " Herminia answered, with astill deeper rose spreading down to her bare throat. "I like youvery much, and it pleases me to hear you call me Herminia. Whyshould I shrink from admitting it? 'Tis the Truth, you know; andthe Truth shall make us Free. I'm not afraid of my freedom. "

Alan paused for a second, irresolute. "Herminia, " he said at last, leaning forward till his face was very close to hers, and he couldfeel the warm breath that came and went so quickly; "that's very, very kind of you. I needn't tell you I've been thinking a greatdeal about you these last three weeks or so. You have filled mymind; filled it to the brim, and I think you know it. "

Philosopher as she was, Herminia plucked a blade of grass, and drewit quivering through her tremulous fingers. It caught andhesitated. "I guessed as much, I think, " she answered, low butfrankly. 

The young man's heart gave a bound. "And YOU, Herminia?" he asked, in an eager ecstasy. 

Herminia was true to the Truth. "I've thought a great deal aboutyou too, Mr. Merrick, " she answered, looking down, but with a greatgladness thrilling her. 

"I said 'Herminia, '" the young man repeated, with a marked stresson the Christian name. 

Herminia hesitated a second. Then two crimson spots flared forthon her speaking face, as she answered with an effort, "About youtoo, Alan. "

The young man drew back and gazed at her. 

She was very, very beautiful. "Dare I ask you, Herminia?" he cried. "Have I a right to ask you? Am I worthy of you, I mean? Ought I toretire as not your peer, and leave you to some man who could risemore easily to the height of your dignity?"

"I've thought about that too, " Herminia answered, still firm to herprinciples. "I've thought it all over. I've said to myself, ShallI do right in monopolizing him, when he is so great, and sweet, andtrue, and generous? Not monopolizing, of course, for that would bewrong and selfish; but making you my own more than any otherwoman's. And I answered my own heart, Yes, yes, I shall do rightto accept him, if he asks me; for I love him, that is enough. Thethrill within me tells me so. Nature put that thrill in our soulsto cry out to us with a clear voice when we had met the soul shethen and there intended for us. "

Alan's face flushed like her own. "Then you love me, " he cried, all on fire. "And you deign to tell me so; Oh, Herminia, how sweetyou are. What have I done to deserve it?"

He folded her in his arms. Her bosom throbbed on his. Their lipsmet for a second. Herminia took his kiss with sweet submission, and made no faint pretence of fighting against it. Her heart wasfull. She quickened to the finger-tips. 

There was silence for a minute or two, --the silence when soulspeaks direct to soul through the vehicle of touch, themother-tongue of the affections. Then Alan leaned back once more, and hanging over her in a rapture murmured in soft low tones, "SoHerminia, you will be mine! You say beforehand you will take me. "

"Not WILL be yours, " Herminia corrected in that silvery voice ofhers. "AM yours already, Alan. I somehow feel as if I had alwaysbeen yours. I am yours this moment. You may do what you wouldwith me. "

She said it so simply, so purely, so naturally, with all thesupreme faith of the good woman, enamoured, who can yield herselfup without blame to the man who loves her, that it hardly evenoccurred to Alan's mind to wonder at her self-surrender. Yet hedrew back all the same in a sudden little crisis of doubt anduncertainty. He scarcely realized what she meant. "Then, dearest, " he cried tentatively, "how soon may we be married?"

At sound of those unexpected words from such lips as his, a flushof shame and horror overspread Herminia's cheek. "Never!" shecried firmly, drawing away. "Oh, Alan, what can you mean by it?Don't tell me, after all I've tried to make you feel andunderstand, you thought I could possibly consent to MARRY you?"

The man gazed at her in surprise. Though he was prepared for much, he was scarcely prepared for such devotion to principle. "Oh, Herminia, " he cried, "you can't mean it. You can't have thought ofwhat it entails. Surely, surely, you won't carry your ideas offreedom to such an extreme, such a dangerous conclusion!"

Herminia looked up at him, half hurt. "Can't have thought of whatit entails!" she repeated. Her dimples deepened. "Why, Alan, haven't I had my whole lifetime to think of it? What else have Ithought about in any serious way, save this one great question of awoman's duty to herself, and her sex, and her unborn children?It's been my sole study. How could you fancy I spoke hastily, orwithout due consideration on such a subject? Would you have melike the blind girls who go unknowing to the altar, as sheep go tothe shambles? Could you suspect me of such carelessness?--suchculpable thoughtlessness?--you, to whom I have spoken of all thisso freely?"

Alan stared at her, disconcerted, hardly knowing how to answer. "But what alternative do you propose, then?" he asked in hisamazement. 

"Propose?" Herminia repeated, taken aback in her turn. It allseemed to her so plain, and transparent, and natural. "Why, simplythat we should be friends, like any others, very dear, dearfriends, with the only kind of friendship that nature makespossible between men and women. "

She said it so softly, with some womanly gentleness, yet with suchlofty candor, that Alan couldn't help admiring her more than everbefore for her translucent simplicity, and directness of purpose. Yet her suggestion frightened him. It was so much more novel tohim than to her. Herminia had reasoned it all out with herself, asshe truly said, for years, and knew exactly how she felt andthought about it. To Alan, on the contrary, it came with the shockof a sudden surprise, and he could hardly tell on the spur of themoment how to deal with it. He paused and reflected. "But do youmean to say, Herminia, " he asked, still holding that soft brownhand unresisted in his, "you've made up your mind never to marryany one? made up your mind to brave the whole mad world, that can'tpossibly understand the motives of your conduct, and live with somefriend, as you put it, unmarried?"

"Yes, I've made up my mind, " Herminia answered, with a faint tremorin her maidenly voice, but with hardly a trace now of a traitorousblush, where no blush was needed. "I've made up my mind, Alan; andfrom all we had said and talked over together, I thought you atleast would sympathize in my resolve. "

She spoke with a gentle tinge of regret, nay almost of disillusion. The bare suggestion of that regret stung Alan to the quick. Hefelt it was shame to him that he could not rise at once to theheight of her splendid self-renunciation. "You mistake me, dearest, " he answered, petting her hand in his own (and she allowedhim to pet it). "It wasn't for myself, or for the world Ihesitated. My thought was for you. You are very young yet. Yousay you have counted the cost. I wonder if you have. I wonder ifyou realize it. "

"Only too well, " Herminia replied, in a very earnest mood. "I havewrought it all out in my mind beforehand, --covenanted with my soulthat for women's sake I would be a free woman. Alan, whoever wouldbe free must himself strike the blow. I know what you willsay, --what every man would say to the woman he loved under similarcircumstances, --'Why should YOU be the victim? Why should YOU bethe martyr? Bask in the sun yourself; leave this doom to someother. ' But, Alan, I can't. I feel _I_ must face it. Unless onewoman begins, there will be no beginning. " She lifted his hand inher own, and fondled it in her turn with caressing tenderness. "Think how easy it would be for me, dear friend, " she cried, witha catch in her voice, "to do as other women do; to accept theHONORABLE MARRIAGE you offer me, as other women would call it; tobe false to my sex, a traitor to my convictions; to sell my kindfor a mess of pottage, a name and a home, or even for thirty piecesof silver, to be some rich man's wife, as other women have sold it. But, Alan, I can't. My conscience won't let me. I know whatmarriage is, from what vile slavery it has sprung; on what unseenhorrors for my sister women it is reared and buttressed; by whatunholy sacrifices it is sustained, and made possible. I know ithas a history, I know its past, I know its present, and I can'tembrace it; I can't be untrue to my most sacred beliefs. I can'tpander to the malignant thing, just because a man who loves mewould be pleased by my giving way and would kiss me, and fondle mefor it. And I love you to fondle me. But I must keep my properplace, the freedom which I have gained for myself by such arduousefforts. I have said to you already, 'So far as my will goes, I amyours; take me, and do as you choose with me. ' That much I canyield, as every good woman should yield it, to the man she loves, to the man who loves her. But more than that, no. It would betreason to my sex; not my life, not my future, not my individuality, not my freedom. "

"I wouldn't ask you for those, " Alan answered, carried away by thetorrent flood of her passionate speech. "I would wish you to guardthem. But, Herminia, just as a matter of form, --to prevent theworld from saying the cruel things the world is sure to say, --andas an act of justice to you, and your children! A mere ceremony ofmarriage; what more does it mean now-a-days than that we two agreeto live together on the ordinary terms of civilized society?"

Still Herminia shook her head. "No, no, " she cried vehemently. "Ideny and decline those terms; they are part and parcel of a systemof slavery. I have learnt that the righteous soul should avoid allappearance of evil. I will not palter and parley with the unholything. Even though you go to a registry-office and get rid as faras you can of every relic of the sacerdotal and sacramental idea, yet the marriage itself is still an assertion of man's supremacyover woman. It ties her to him for life, it ignores herindividuality, it compels her to promise what no human heart can besure of performing; for you can contract to do or not to do, easilyenough, but contract to feel or not to feel, --what transparentabsurdity! It is full of all evils, and I decline to consider it. If I love a man at all, I must love him on terms of perfectfreedom. I can't bind myself down to live with him to my shame oneday longer than I love him; or to love him at all if I find himunworthy of my purest love, or unable to retain it; or if Idiscover some other more fit to be loved by me. You admitted theother day that all this was abstractly true; why should you wishthis morning to draw back from following it out to its end inpractice?"

Alan was only an Englishman, and shared, of course, the inabilityof his countrymen to carry any principle to its logical conclusion. He was all for admitting that though things must really be so, yetit were prudent in life to pretend they were otherwise. This isthe well-known English virtue of moderation and compromise; it hasmade England what she is, the shabbiest, sordidest, worst-organizedof nations. So he paused for a second and temporized. "It's foryour sake, Herminia, " he said again; "I can't bear to think of yourmaking yourself a martyr. And I don't see how, if you act as youpropose, you could escape martyrdom. "

Herminia looked up at him with pleading eyes. Tears just trembledon the edge of those glistening lashes. "It never occurred to meto think, " she said gently but bravely, "my life could ever end inanything else but martyrdom. It MUST needs be so with all truelives, and all good ones. For whoever sees the truth, whoeverstrives earnestly with all his soul to be good, must be raised manyplanes above the common mass of men around him; he must be a moralpioneer, and the moral pioneer is always a martyr. People won'tallow others to be wiser and better than themselves, unpunished. They can forgive anything except moral superiority. We have eachto choose between acquiescence in the wrong, with a life of ease, and struggle for the right, crowned at last by inevitable failure. To succeed is to fail, and failure is the only success worth aimingat. Every great and good life can but end in a Calvary. "

"And I want to save you from that, " Alan cried, leaning over herwith real tenderness, for she was already very dear to him. "Iwant to save you from yourself; I want to make you think twicebefore you rush headlong into such a danger. "

"NOT to save me from myself, but to save me from my own higher andbetter nature, " Herminia answered with passionate seriousness. "Alan, I don't want any man to save me from that; I want you ratherto help me, to strengthen me, to sympathize with me. I want you tolove me, not for my face and form alone, not for what I share withevery other woman, but for all that is holiest and deepest withinme. If you can't love me for that, I don't ask you to love me; Iwant to be loved for what I am in myself, for the yearnings Ipossess that are most of all peculiar to me. I know you areattracted to me by those yearnings above everything; why wish meuntrue to them? It was because I saw you could sympathize with mein these impulses that I said to myself, Here, at last, is the manwho can go through life as an aid and a spur to me. Don't tell meI was mistaken; don't belie my belief. Be what I thought you were, what I know you are. Work with me, and help me. Lift me! raiseme! exalt me! Take me on the sole terms on which I can give myselfup to you. "

She stretched her arms out, pleading; she turned those subtle eyesto him, appealingly. She was a beautiful woman. Alan Merrick washuman. The man in him gave way; he seized her in his clasp, andpressed her close to his bosom. It heaved tumultuously. "I coulddo anything for you, Herminia, " he cried, "and indeed, I dosympathize with you. But give me, at least, till to-morrow tothink this thing over. It is a momentous question; don't let us beprecipitate. "

Herminia drew a long breath. His embrace thrilled through her. "As you will, " she answered with a woman's meekness. "Butremember, Alan, what I say I mean; on these terms it shall be, andupon none others. Brave women before me have tried for awhile toact on their own responsibility, for the good of their sex; butnever of their own free will from the very beginning. They haveavoided marriage, not because they thought it a shame and asurrender, a treason to their sex, a base yielding to the unjustpretensions of men, but because there existed at the time someobstacle in their way in the shape of the vested interest of someother woman. When Mary Godwin chose to mate herself with Shelley, she took her good name in her hands; but still there was Harriet. As soon as Harriet was dead, Mary showed she had no deep principleof action involved, by marrying Shelley. When George Eliot choseto pass her life with Lewes on terms of equal freedom, she defiedthe man-made law; but still, there was his wife to prevent thepossibility of a legalized union. As soon as Lewes was dead, George Eliot showed she had no principle involved, by marryinganother man. Now, _I_ have the rare chance of acting otherwise; Ican show the world from the very first that I act from principle, and from principle only. I can say to it in effect, 'See, here isthe man of my choice, the man I love, truly, and purely, the manany one of you would willingly have seen offering himself in lawfulmarriage to your own daughters. If I would, I might go the beatenway you prescribe, and marry him legally. But of my own free willI disdain that degradation; I choose rather to be free. No fear ofyour scorn, no dread of your bigotry, no shrinking at your cruelty, shall prevent me from following the thorny path I know to be theright one. I seek no temporal end. I will not prove false to thefuture of my kind in order to protect myself from your hatefulindignities. I know on what vile foundations your temple ofwedlock is based and built, what pitiable victims languish and diein its sickening vaults; and I will not consent to enter it. Here, of my own free will, I take my stand for the right, and refuse yoursanctions! No woman that I know of has ever yet done that. Otherwomen have fallen, as men choose to put it in their odious dialect;no other has voluntarily risen as I propose to do. '" She paused amoment for breath. "Now you know how I feel, " she continued, looking straight into his eyes. "Say no more at present; it iswisest so. But go home and think it out, and talk it over with metomorrow. "

IV. 

That night Alan slept little. Even at dinner his hostess, Mrs. Waterton, noticed his preoccupation; and, on the pretext of aheadache, he retired early to his own bedroom. His mind was fullof Herminia and these strange ideas of hers; how could he listenwith a becoming show of interest to Ethel Waterton's aspirations onthe grand piano after a gipsy life, --oh, a gipsy life for her!--whenin point of fact she was a most insipid blonde from the coverof a chocolate box? So he went to bed betimes, and there lay longawake, deep wondering to himself how to act about Herminia. 

He was really in love with her. That much he acknowledged frankly. More profoundly in love than he had ever conceived it possible hecould find himself with any one. Hitherto, he had "considered"this girl or that, mostly on his mother's or sister's recommendation;and after observing her critically for a day or two, as he mighthave observed a horse or any other intended purchase, he had come tothe conclusion "she wouldn't do, " and had ceased to entertain her. But with Herminia, he was in love. The potent god had come uponhim. That imperious inner monitor which cries aloud to a man, "Youmust have this girl, because you can't do without her; you muststrive to make her happy, because her happiness is more to you nowten thousand fold than your own, " that imperious inner monitor hadspoken out at last in no uncertain tone to Alan Merrick. He knewfor the first time what it is to be in love; in love with a true andbeautiful woman, not with his own future convenience and comfort. The keen fresh sense it quickened within him raised him for themoment some levels above himself. For Herminia's sake, he felt, hecould do or dare anything. 

Nay, more; as Herminia herself had said to him, it was her better, her inner self he was in love with, not the mere statuesque face, the full and faultless figure. He saw how pure, how pellucid, hownoble the woman was; treading her own ideal world of high seraphicharmonies. He was in love with her stainless soul; he could nothave loved her so well, could not have admired her so profoundly, had she been other than she was, had she shared the commonprejudices and preconceptions of women. It was just because shewas Herminia that he felt so irresistibly attracted towards her. She drew him like a magnet. What he loved and admired was not somuch the fair, frank face itself, as the lofty Cornelia-like spiritbehind it. 

And yet, --he hesitated. 

Could he accept the sacrifice this white soul wished to make forhim? Could he aid and abet her in raising up for herself so muchundeserved obloquy? Could he help her to become Anathema maranathaamong her sister women? Even if she felt brave enough to try theexperiment herself for humanity's sake, was it not his duty as aman to protect her from her own sublime and generous impulses? Isit not for that in part that nature makes us virile? We mustshield the weaker vessel. He was flattered not a little that thisleader among women should have picked him out for herself among theranks of men as her predestined companion in her chosen task ofemancipating her sex. And he was thoroughly sympathetic (as everygood man must needs be) with her aims and her method. Yet, stillhe hesitated. Never before could he have conceived such a problemof the soul, such a moral dilemma possible. It rent heart andbrain at once asunder. Instinctively he felt to himself he wouldbe doing wrong should he try in any way to check these splendid andunselfish impulses which led Herminia to offer herself willingly upas a living sacrifice on behalf of her enslaved sisters everywhere. Yet the innate feeling of the man, that 'tis his place to protectand guard the woman, even from her own higher and purer self, intervened to distract him. He couldn't bear to feel he might beinstrumental in bringing upon his pure Herminia the tortures thatmust be in store for her; he couldn't bear to think his name mightbe coupled with hers in shameful ways, too base for any man tocontemplate. 

And then, intermixed with these higher motives, came others that hehardly liked to confess to himself where Herminia was concerned, but which nevertheless would obtrude themselves, will he, nill he, upon him. What would other people say about such an innocent unionas Herminia contemplated? Not indeed, "What effect would it haveupon his position and prospects?" Alan Merrick's place as abarrister was fairly well assured, and the Bar is luckily one ofthe few professions in lie-loving England where a man need notgrovel at the mercy of the moral judgment of the meanest andgrossest among his fellow-creatures, as is the case with theChurch, with medicine, with the politician, and with theschoolmaster. But Alan could not help thinking all the same howpeople would misinterpret and misunderstand his relations with thewoman he loved, if he modelled them strictly upon Herminia'swishes. It was hateful, it was horrible to have to con the thingover, where that faultless soul was concerned, in the vile andvulgar terms other people would apply to it; but for Herminia'ssake, con it over so he must; and though he shrank from the effortwith a deadly shrinking, he nevertheless faced it. Men at theclubs would say he had seduced Herminia. Men at the clubs wouldlay the whole blame of the episode upon him; and he couldn't bearto be so blamed for the sake of a woman, to save whom from thefaintest shadow of disgrace or shame he would willingly have died athousand times over. For since Herminia had confessed her love tohim yesterday, he had begun to feel how much she was to him. Hisadmiration and appreciation of her had risen inexpressibly. Andwas he now to be condemned for having dragged down to the dust thatangel whose white wings he felt himself unworthy to touch with thehem of his garment?

And yet, once more, when he respected her so much for the sacrificeshe was willing to make for humanity, would it be right for him tostand in her way, to deter her from realizing her own highestnature? She was Herminia just because she lived in that world ofhigh hopes, just because she had the courage and the nobility todare this great thing. Would it be right of him to bring her downfrom that pedestal whereon she stood so austere, and urge upon herthat she should debase herself to be as any other woman, --even asEthel Waterton? For the Watertons had brought him there to proposeto Ethel. 

For hours he tossed and turned and revolved these problems. Rainbeat on the leaded panes of the Waterton dormers. Day dawned, butno light came with it to his troubled spirit. The more he thoughtof this dilemma, the more profoundly he shrank from the idea ofallowing himself to be made into the instrument for what the worldwould call, after its kind, Herminia's shame and degradation. Foreven if the world could be made to admit that Herminia had donewhat she did from chaste and noble motives, --which considering whatwe all know of the world, was improbable, --yet at any rate it couldnever allow that he himself had acted from any but the vilest andmost unworthy reasons. Base souls would see in the sacrifice hemade to Herminia's ideals, only the common story of a trustfulwoman cruelly betrayed by the man who pretended to love her, andwould proceed to treat him with the coldness and contempt withwhich such a man deserves to be treated. 

As the morning wore on, this view of the matter obtruded itselfmore and more forcibly every moment on Alan. Over and over againhe said to himself, let come what come might, he must never aid andabet that innocent soul in rushing blindfold over a cliff to herown destruction. It is so easy at twenty-two to ruin yourself forlife; so difficult at thirty to climb slowly back again. No, no, holy as Herminia's impulses were, he must save her from herself; hemust save her from her own purity; he must refuse to be led astrayby her romantic aspirations. He must keep her to the beaten pathtrod by all petty souls, and preserve her from the painful crown ofmartyrdom she herself designed as her eternal diadem. 

Full of these manful resolutions, he rose up early in the morning. He would be his Herminia's guardian angel. He would use her lovefor him, --for he knew she loved him, --as a lever to egg her asidefrom these slippery moral precipices. 

He mistook the solid rock of ethical resolution he was trying todisturb with so frail an engine. The fulcrum itself would yieldfar sooner to the pressure than the weight of Herminia'suncompromising rectitude. Passionate as she was, --and with thatopulent form she could hardly be otherwise, --principle was stilldeeper and more imperious with her than passion. 

V. 

He met her by appointment on the first ridge of Bore Hill. A sunnysummer morning smiled fresh after the rain. Bumble-bees bustledbusily about the closed lips of the red-rattle, and ripe gorse podsburst with little elastic explosions in the basking sunlight. 

When Alan reached the trysting-place, under a broad-armed oak, in aglade of the woodland, Herminia was there before him; a good womanalways is, 'tis the prerogative of her affection. She was simplydressed in her dainty print gown, a single tea-rosebud peeped outfrom her bodice; she looked more lily-like, so Alan thought in hisheart, than he had ever yet seen her. She held out her hand to himwith parted lips and a conscious blush. Alan took it, but bentforward at the same time, and with a hasty glance around, justtouched her rich mouth. Herminia allowed him without a struggle;she was too stately of mien ever to grant a favor without grantingit of pure grace, and with queenly munificence. 

Alan led her to a grassy bank where thyme and basil grew matted, and the hum of myriad wings stirred the sultry air; Herminia lethim lead her. She was woman enough by nature to like being led;only, it must be the right man who led her, and he must lead heralong the path that her conscience approved of. Alan seatedhimself by her side, and took her hand in his; Herminia let himhold it. This lovemaking was pure honey. Dappled spots of lightand shade flecked the ground beneath the trees like a jaguar'sskin. Wood-pigeons crooned, unseen, from the leafy covert. Shesat there long without uttering a word. Once Alan essayed tospeak, but Herminia cut him short. "Oh, no, not yet, " she criedhalf petulantly; "this silence is so delicious. I love best justto sit and hold your hand like this. Why spoil it with language?"

So they sat for some minutes, Herminia with her eyes half-closed, drinking in to the full the delight of first love. She could feelher heart beating. At last Alan interposed, and began to speak toher. The girl drew a long breath; then she sighed for a second, asshe opened her eyes again. Every curve of her bosom heaved andswayed mysteriously. It seemed such a pity to let articulate wordsdisturb that reverie. Still, if Alan wished it. For a woman is awoman, let Girton do its worst; and Herminia not less but rathermore than the rest of them. 

Then Alan began. With her hand clasped in his, and fondling itwhile he spoke, he urged all he could urge to turn her from herpurpose. He pointed out to her how unwise, how irretrievable herposition would be, if she once assumed it. On such a road as thatthere is no turning back. The die once cast, she must foreverabide by it. He used all arts to persuade and dissuade; alleloquence to save her from herself and her salvation. If he lovedher less, he said with truth, he might have spoken less earnestly. It was for her own sake he spoke, because he so loved her. Hewaxed hot in his eager desire to prevent her from taking this fatalstep. He drew his breath hard, and paused. Emotion and anxietyovercame him visibly. 

But as for Herminia, though she listened with affection and with afaint thrill of pleasure to much that he said, seeing how deeply heloved her, she leaned back from time to time, half weary with hiseagerness, and his consequent iteration. "Dear Alan, " she said atlast, soothing his hand with her own, as a sister might havesoothed it, "you talk about all this as though it were to me somenew resolve, some new idea of my making. You forget it is theoutcome of my life's philosophy. I have grown up to it slowly. I have thought of all this, and of hardly anything else, ever sinceI was old enough to think for myself about anything. Root andbranch, it is to me a foregone conclusion. I love you. You loveme. So far as I am concerned, there ends the question. One waythere is, and one way alone, in which I can give myself up to you. Make me yours if you will; but if not, then leave me. Only, remember, by leaving me, you won't any the more turn me aside frommy purpose. You won't save me from myself, as you call it; youwill only hand me over to some one less fit for me by far than youare. " A quiet moisture glistened in her eyes, and she gazed at himpensively. "How wonderful it is, " she went on, musing. "Threeweeks ago, I didn't know there was such a man in the world at allas you; and now--why, Alan, I feel as if the world would be nothingto me without you. Your name seems to sing in my ears all day longwith the song of the birds, and to thrill through and through me asI lie awake on my pillow with the cry of the nightjar. Yet, if youwon't take me on my own terms, I know well what will happen. Ishall go away, and grieve over you, of course, and feel bereavedfor months, as if I could never possibly again love any man. Atpresent it seems to me I never could love him. But though my hearttells me that, my reason tells me I should some day find some othersoul I might perhaps fall back upon. But it would only be fallingback. For the sake of my principles alone, and of the example Iwish to set the world, could I ever fall back upon any other. Yetfall back I would. And what good would you have done me then byrefusing me? You would merely have cast me off from the man I lovebest, the man who I know by immediate instinct, which is the voiceof nature and of God within us, was intended from all time for me. The moment I saw you my heart beat quicker; my heart's evidencetold me you were the one love meant for me. Why force me todecline upon some other less meet for me?"

Alan gazed at her, irresolute. "But if you love me so much, " hesaid, "surely, surely, it is a small thing to trust your future tome. "

The tenderness of woman let her hand glide over his cheek. She wasnot ashamed of her love. "O Alan, " she cried, "if it were only formyself, I could trust you with my life; I could trust you withanything. But I haven't only myself to think of. I have to thinkof right and wrong; I have to think of the world; I have to thinkof the cause which almost wholly hangs upon me. Not for nothingare these impulses implanted in my breast. They are the voice ofthe soul of all women within me. If I were to neglect them for thesake of gratifying your wishes, --if I were to turn traitor to mysex for the sake of the man I love, as so many women have turnedbefore me, I should hate and despise myself. I couldn't love you, Alan, quite so much, loved I not honor more, and the battle imposedupon me. "

Alan wavered as she spoke. He felt what she said was true; even ifhe refused to take her on the only terms she could accept, he wouldnot thereby save her. She would turn in time and bestow herselfupon some man who would perhaps be less worthy of her, --nay even onsome man who might forsake her in the sequel with unspeakabletreachery. Of conduct like that, Alan knew himself incapable. Heknew that if he took Herminia once to his heart, he would treat herwith such tenderness, such constancy, such devotion as never yetwas shown to living woman. (Love always thinks so. ) But still, heshrank from the idea of being himself the man to take advantage ofher; for so in his unregenerate mind he phrased to himself theirunion. And still he temporized. "Even so, Herminia, " he cried, bending forward and gazing hard at her, "I couldn't endure to haveit said it was I who misled you. "

Herminia lifted her eyes to his with just a tinge of lofty scorn, tempered only by the womanliness of those melting lashes. "And youcan think of THAT?" she murmured, gazing across at him half intears. "O Alan, for my part I can think of nothing now but thetruths of life and the magnitude of the issues. Our hearts againstthe world, --love and duty against convention. "

Then Alan began again and talked all he knew. He urged, he prayed, he bent forward, he spoke soft and low, he played on her tenderestchords as a loving woman. Herminia was moved, for her heart wentforth to him, and she knew why he tried so hard to save her fromher own higher and truer nature. But she never yielded an inch. She stood firm to her colors. She shook her head to the last, andmurmured over and over again, "There is only one right way, and nopersuasion on earth will ever avail to turn me aside from it. "

The Truth had made her Free, and she was very confident of it. 

At last, all other means failing, Alan fell back on the finalresort of delay. He saw much merit in procrastination. There wasno hurry, he said. They needn't make up their minds, one way orthe other, immediately. They could take their time to think. Perhaps, with a week or two to decide in, Herminia might persuadehim; or he might persuade her. Why rush on fate so suddenly?

But at that, to his immense surprise, Herminia demurred. "No, no, "she said, shaking her head, "that's not at all what I want. Wemust decide to-day one way or the other. Now is the accepted time;now is the day of salvation. I couldn't let you wait, and slip bydegrees into some vague arrangement we hardly contemplateddefinitely. To do that would be to sin against my ideas ofdecorum. Whatever we do we must do, as the apostle says, decentlyand in order, with a full sense of the obligations it imposes uponus. We must say to one another in so many words, 'I am yours; youare mine;' or we must part forever. I have told you my whole soul;I have bared my heart before you. You may take it or leave it; butfor my dignity's sake, I put it to you now, choose one way or theother. "

Alan looked at her hard. Her face was crimson by this withmaidenly shame; but she made no effort to hide or avert it. Forthe good of humanity, this question must be settled once for all;and no womanish reserve should make her shrink from settling it. Happier maidens in ages to come, when society had reconstructeditself on the broad basis of freedom, would never have to gothrough what she was going through that moment. They would bespared the quivering shame, the tingling regret, the struggle withwhich she braced up her maiden modesty to that supreme effort. Butshe would go through with it all the same. For eternal woman'ssake she had long contemplated that day; now it had come at last, she would not weakly draw back from it. 

Alan's eyes were all admiration. He stood near enough to her levelto understand her to the core. "Herminia, " he cried, bending overher, "you drive me to bay. You press me very hard. I feel myselfyielding. I am a man; and when you speak to me like that, I knowit. You enlist on your side all that is virile within me. Yet howcan I accept the terms you offer? For the very love I bear you, how do you this injustice? If I loved you less, I might perhapssay yes; because I love you so well, I feel compelled to say no toyou. "

Herminia looked at him hard in return. Her cheeks were glowing nowwith something like the shame of the woman who feels her love islightly rejected. "Is that final?" she asked, drawing herself upas she sat, and facing him proudly. 

"No, no, it's not final, " Alan answered, feeling the woman'sinfluence course through body and blood to his quivering fingertips. Magical touches stirred him. "How can it be final, Herminia, whenyou look at me like that? How can it be final, when you're sogracious, so graceful, so beautiful? Oh, my child, I am a man; don'tplay too hard on those fiercest chords in my nature. "

Herminia gazed at him fixedly; the dimples disappeared. Her voicewas more serious now, and had nothing in it of pleading. "It isn'tlike that that I want to draw you, Alan, " she answered gravely. "It isn't those chords I want to play upon. I want to convinceyour brain, your intellect, your reason. You agree with me inprinciple. Why then, should you wish to draw back in practice?"

"Yes, I agree with you in principle, " Alan answered. "It isn'tthere that I hesitate. Even before I met you, I had arrived atpretty much the same ideas myself, as a matter of abstractreasoning. I saw that the one way of freedom for the woman is tocast off, root and branch, the evil growth of man's supremacy. Isaw that the honorableness of marriage, the disgrace of free union, were just so many ignoble masculine devices to keep up man'slordship; vile results of his determination to taboo to himselfbeforehand and monopolize for life some particular woman. I knowall that; I acknowledge all that. I see as plainly as you do thatsooner or later there must come a revolution. But, Herminia, thewomen who devote themselves to carrying out that revolution, willtake their souls in their hands, and will march in line to thefreeing of their sex through shame and calumny and hardshipsinnumerable. I shrink from letting you, the woman that I love, bring that fate upon yourself; I shrink still more from being theman to aid and abet you in doing it. "

Herminia fixed her piercing eyes upon his face once more. Tearsstood in them now. The tenderness of woman was awakened withinher. "Dear Alan, " she said gently, "don't I tell you I havethought long since of all that? I am PREPARED to face it. It isonly a question of with whom I shall do so. Shall it be with theman I have instinctively loved from the first moment I saw him, better than all others on earth, or shall it be with some lesser?If my heart is willing, why should yours demur to it?"

"Because I love you too well, " Alan answered doggedly. 

Herminia rose and faced him. Her hands dropped by her side. Shewas splendid when she stood so with her panting bosom. "Then youdecide to say good-bye?" she cried, with a lingering cadence. 

Alan seized her by both wrists, and drew her down to his side. "No, no, darling, " he answered low, laying his lips against hers. "I can never say good-bye. You have confessed you love me. When awoman says that, what can a man refuse her? From such a woman asyou, I am so proud, so proud, so proud of such a confession; howcould I ever cease to feel you were mine, --mine, mine, wholly minefor a lifetime?"

"Then you consent?" Herminia cried, all aglow, half nestling to hisbosom. 

"I consent, " Alan answered, with profound misgivings. "What elsedo you leave open to me?"

Herminia made no direct answer; she only laid her head with perfecttrust upon the man's broad shoulder. "O Alan, " she murmured low, letting her heart have its way, "you are mine, then; you are mine. You have made me so happy, so supremely happy. "

VI. 

Thus, half against his will, Alan Merrick was drawn into thisirregular compact. 

Next came that more difficult matter, the discussion of ways andmeans, the more practical details. Alan hardly knew at first onwhat precise terms it was Herminia's wish that they two should passtheir lives together. His ideas were all naturally framed on theold model of marriage; in that matter, Herminia said, he was stillin the gall of bitterness, and the bond of iniquity. He took itfor granted that of course they must dwell under one roof with oneanother. But that simple ancestral notion, derived from man'slordship in his own house, was wholly adverse to Herminia's viewsof the reasonable and natural. She had debated these problems atfull in her own mind for years, and had arrived at definite andconsistent solutions for every knotty point in them. Why shouldthis friendship differ at all, she asked, in respect of time andplace, from any other friendship? The notion of necessarilykeeping house together, the cramping idea of the family tie, belonged entirely to the regime of the manmade patriarchate, wherethe woman and the children were the slaves and chattels of the lordand master. In a free society, was it not obvious that each womanwould live her own life apart, would preserve her independence, andwould receive the visits of the man for whom she cared, --the fatherof her children? Then only could she be free. Any other methodmeant the economic and social superiority of the man, and wasirreconcilable with the perfect individuality of the woman. 

So Herminia reasoned. She rejected at once, therefore, the idea ofany change in her existing mode of life. To her, the friendshipshe proposed with Alan Merrick was no social revolution; it was butthe due fulfilment of her natural functions. To make of it anoccasion for ostentatious change in her way of living seemed to heras unnatural as is the practice of the barbarians in our midst whouse a wedding--that most sacred and private event in a young girl'slife--as an opportunity for display of the coarsest and crudestcharacter. To rivet the attention of friends on bride andbridegroom is to offend against the most delicate susceptibilitiesof modesty. From all such hateful practices, Herminia's pure mindrevolted by instinct. She felt that here at least was the onemoment in a woman's history when she would shrink with timidreserve from every eye save one man's, --when publicity of any sortwas most odious and horrible. 

Only the blinding effect of custom, indeed, could ever have shutgood women's eyes to the shameful indecorousness of weddingceremonial. We drag a young girl before the prying gaze of all theworld at the very crisis in her life, when natural modesty wouldmost lead her to conceal herself from her dearest acquaintance. And our women themselves have grown so blunted by use to thehatefulness of the ordeal that many of them face it now withinhuman effrontery. Familiarity with marriage has almost killedout in the maidens of our race the last lingering relics of nativemodesty. 

Herminia, however, could dispense with all that show. She had alittle cottage of her own, she told Alan, --a tiny little cottage, in a street near her school-work; she rented it for a small sum, in quite a poor quarter, all inhabited by work-people. There shelived by herself; for she kept no servants. There she shouldcontinue to live; why need this purely personal compact betweenthem two make any difference in her daily habits? She would goon with her school-work for the present, as usual. Oh, no, shecertainly didn't intend to notify the head-mistress of the schoolor any one else, of her altered position. It was no alteration ofposition at all, so far as she was concerned; merely the additionto life of a new and very dear and natural friendship. Herminiatook her own point of view so instinctively indeed, --lived sowrapped in an ideal world of her own and the future's, --that Alanwas often quite alarmed in his soul when he thought of the rudeawakening that no doubt awaited her. Yet whenever he hinted it toher with all possible delicacy, she seemed so perfectly preparedfor the worst the world could do, so fixed and resolved in herintention of martyrdom, that he had no argument left, and couldonly sigh over her. 

It was not, she explained to him further, that she wished toconceal anything. The least tinge of concealment was wholly aliento that frank fresh nature. If her head-mistress asked her apoint-blank question, she would not attempt to parry it, but wouldreply at once with a point blank answer. Still, her very views onthe subject made it impossible for her to volunteer informationunasked to any one. Here was a personal matter of the utmostprivacy; a matter which concerned nobody on earth, save herself andAlan; a matter on which it was the grossest impertinence for anyone else to make any inquiry or hold any opinion. They two choseto be friends; and there, so far as the rest of the world wasconcerned, the whole thing ended. What else took place betweenthem was wholly a subject for their own consideration. But if evercircumstances should arise which made it necessary for her to avowto the world that she must soon be a mother, then it was for theworld to take the first step, if it would act upon its own hatefuland cruel initiative. She would never deny, but she would never goout of her way to confess. She stood upon her individuality as ahuman being. 

As to other practical matters, about which Alan ventured delicatelyto throw out a passing question or two, Herminia was perfectlyfrank, with the perfect frankness of one who thinks and doesnothing to be ashamed of. She had always been self-supporting, shesaid, and she would be self-supporting still. To her mind, thatwas an essential step towards the emancipation of women. Theirfriendship implied for her no change of existence, merely anaddition to the fulness of her living. He was the complement ofher being. Every woman should naturally wish to live her wholelife, to fulfil her whole functions; and that she could do only bybecoming a mother, accepting the orbit for which nature designedher. In the end, no doubt, complete independence would be securedfor each woman by the civilized state, or in other words by thewhole body of men, who do the hard work of the world, and who wouldcollectively guarantee every necessary and luxury to every woman ofthe community equally. In that way alone could perfect liberty ofchoice and action be secured for women; and she held it just thatwomen should so be provided for, because the mothers of thecommunity fulfil in the state as important and necessary a functionas the men themselves do. It would be well, too, that the mothersshould be free to perform that function without preoccupation ofany sort. So a free world would order things. But in our presentbarbaric state of industrial slavery, capitalism, monopoly, --inother words under the organized rule of selfishness, --such a coursewas impossible. Perhaps, as an intermediate condition, it mighthappen in time that the women of certain classes would for the mostpart be made independent at maturity each by her own father; whichwould produce for them in the end pretty much the same generaleffect of freedom. She saw as a first step the endowment of thedaughter. But meanwhile there was nothing for it save that as manywomen as could should aim for themselves at economic liberty, inother words at self-support. That was an evil in itself, becauseobviously the prospective mothers of a community should be relievedas far as possible front the stress and strain of earning alivelihood; should be set free to build up their nervous systems tothe highest attainable level against the calls of maternity. Butabove all things we must be practical; and in the practical worldhere and now around us, no other way existed for women to be freesave the wasteful way of each earning her own livelihood. Therefore she would continue her schoolwork with her pupils as longas the school would allow her; and when that became impossible, would fall back upon literature. 

One other question Alan ventured gently to raise, --the question ofchildren. Fools always put that question, and think it a crushingone. Alan was no fool, yet it puzzled him strangely. He did notsee for himself how easy is the solution; how absolutely Herminia'splan leaves the position unaltered. But Herminia herself was asmodestly frank on the subject as on every other. It was a moraland social point of the deepest importance; and it would be wrongof them to rush into it without due consideration. She had dulyconsidered it. She would give her children, should any come, theunique and glorious birthright of being the only human beings everborn into this world as the deliberate result of a free union, contracted on philosophical and ethical principles. Alan hintedcertain doubts as to their up-bringing and education. There, too, Herminia was perfectly frank. They would be half hers, half his;the pleasant burden of their support, the joy of their education, would naturally fall upon both parents equally. But why discussthese matters like the squalid rich, who make their marriages aquestion of settlements and dowries and business arrangements?They two were friends and lovers; in love, such base doubts couldnever arise. Not for worlds would she import into their mutualrelations any sordid stain of money, any vile tinge of bargaining. They could trust one another; that alone sufficed for them. 

So Alan gave way bit by bit all along the line, overborne byHerminia's more perfect and logical conception of her ownprinciples. She knew exactly what she felt and wanted; while heknew only in a vague and formless way that his reason agreed withher. 

A week later, he knocked timidly one evening at the door of amodest little workman-looking cottage, down a small side street inthe back-wastes of Chelsea. 'Twas a most unpretending street;Bower Lane by name, full of brown brick houses, all as like aspeas, and with nothing of any sort to redeem their plain frontsfrom the common blight of the London jerry-builder. Only a softserge curtain and a pot of mignonette on the ledge of the window, distinguished the cottage at which Alan Merrick knocked from theothers beside it. Externally that is to say; for within it was asdainty as Morris wall-papers and merino hangings and a delicatefeminine taste in form and color could make it. Keats and Shelleylined the shelves; Rossetti's wan maidens gazed unearthly from theover-mantel. The door was opened for him by Herminia in person;for she kept no servant, --that was one of her principles. She wasdressed from head to foot in a simple white gown, as pure and sweetas the soul it covered. A white rose nestled in her glossy hair;three sprays of white lily decked a vase on the mantel-piece. Somedim survival of ancestral ideas made Herminia Barton so arrayherself in the white garb of affiance for her bridal evening. Hercheek was aglow with virginal shrinking as she opened the door, andwelcomed Alan in. But she held out her hand just as frankly asever to the man of her free choice as he advanced to greet her. Alan caught her in his arms and kissed her forehead tenderly. Andthus was Herminia Barton's espousal consummated. 

VII. 

The next six months were the happiest time of her life, forHerminia. All day long she worked hard with her classes; and oftenin the evenings Alan Merrick dropped in for sweet converse andcompanionship. Too free from any taint of sin or shame herselfever to suspect that others could misinterpret her actions, Herminia was hardly aware how the gossip of Bower Lane made free intime with the name of the young lady who had taken a cottage in therow, and whose relations with the tall gentleman that called somuch in the evenings were beginning to attract the attention of theneighborhood. The poor slaves of washer-women and working men'swives all around, with whom contented slavery to a drunken, husbandwas the only "respectable" condition, --couldn't understand for thelife of them how the pretty young lady could make her name socheap; "and her that pretends to be so charitable and that, andgoes about in the parish like a district visitor!" Though to besure it had already struck the minds of Bower Lane that Herminianever went "to church nor chapel;" and when people cut themselvesadrift from church and chapel, why, what sort of morality can youreasonably expect of them? Nevertheless, Herminia's manners wereso sweet and engaging, to rich and poor alike, that Bower Laneseriously regretted what it took to be her lapse from grace. Poorpurblind Bower Lane! A life-time would have failed it to discernfor itself how infinitely higher than its slavish "respectability"was Herminia's freedom. In which respect, indeed, Bower Lane wasno doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, or, for the matter ofthat, with Lambeth Palace. 

But Herminia, for her part, never discovered she was talked about. To the pure all things are pure; and Herminia was dowered with thatperfect purity. And though Bower Lane lay but some few hundredyards off from the Carlyle Place Girl's School, the social gulfbetween them yet yawned so wide that good old Miss Smith-Watersfrom Cambridge, the head-mistress of the school, never caught asingle echo of the washerwomen's gossip. Herminia's life throughthose six months was one unclouded honeymoon. On Sundays, she andAlan would go out of town together, and stroll across the breezysummit of Leith Hill, or among the brown heather and garrulouspine-woods that perfume the radiating spurs of Hind Head with theiraromatic resins. Her love for Alan was profound and absorbing;while as for Alan, the more he gazed into the calm depths of thatcrystal soul, the more deeply did he admire it. Gradually she wasraising him to her own level. It is impossible to mix with a loftynature and not acquire in time some tincture of its nobler and moregenerous sentiments. Herminia was weaning Alan by degrees from theworld; she was teaching him to see that moral purity and moralearnestness are worth more, after all, than to dwell with purplehangings in all the tents of iniquity. She was making himunderstand and sympathize with the motives which led her stoutly onto her final martyrdom, which made her submit without a murmur ofdiscontent to her great renunciation. 

As yet, however, there was no hint or forecast of actual martyrdom. On the contrary, her life flowed in all the halo of a honeymoon. Itwas a honeymoon, too, undisturbed by the petty jars and discomfortsof domestic life; she saw Alan too seldom for either ever to losethe keen sense of fresh delight in the other's presence. When shemet him, she thrilled to the delicate fingertips. Herminia hadplanned it so of set purpose. In her reasoned philosophy of life, she had early decided that 'tis the wear and tear of too close dailyintercourse which turns unawares the lover into the husband; and shehad determined that in her own converse with the man she loved thatcause of disillusion should never intrude itself. They conservedtheir romance through all their plighted and united life. Herminiahad afterwards no recollections of Alan to look back upon saveideally happy ones. 

So six months wore away. On the memory of those six months Herminiawas to subsist for half a lifetime. At the end of that time, Alanbegan to fear that if she did not soon withdraw from the CarlylePlace School, Miss Smith-Waters might begin to ask inconvenientquestions. Herminia, ever true to her principles, was for stoppingon till the bitter end, and compelling Miss Smith-Waters to dismissher from her situation. But Alan, more worldly wise, foresaw thatsuch a course must inevitably result in needless annoyance andhumiliation for Herminia; and Herminia was now beginning to be sofar influenced by Alan's personality that she yielded the point withreluctance to his masculine judgment. It must be always so. The manmust needs retain for many years to come the personal hegemony hehas usurped over the woman; and the woman who once accepts him aslover or as husband must give way in the end, even in matters ofprinciple, to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a woman, and he less a man, were any other result possible. Deep down in thevery roots of the idea of sex we come on that prime antithesis, --themale, active and aggressive; the female, sedentary, passive, andreceptive. 

And even on the broader question, experience shows one it is alwaysso in the world we live in. No man or woman can go through life inconsistent obedience to any high principle, --not even the willingand deliberate martyrs. We must bow to circumstances. Herminiahad made up her mind beforehand for the crown of martyrdom, the onepossible guerdon this planet can bestow upon really noble anddisinterested action. And she never shrank from any necessarypang, incidental to the prophet's and martyr's existence. Yet evenso, in a society almost wholly composed of mean and petty souls, incapable of comprehending or appreciating any exalted moralstandpoint, it is practically impossible to live from day to day inaccordance with a higher or purer standard. The martyr who shouldtry so to walk without deviation of any sort, turning neither tothe right nor to the left in the smallest particular, mustaccomplish his martyrdom prematurely on the pettiest side-issues, and would never live at all to assert at the stake the great truthwhich is the lodestar and goal of his existence. 

So Herminia gave way. Sadly against her will she gave way. Onemorning in early March, she absented herself from her place in theclass-room without even taking leave of her beloved schoolgirls, whom she had tried so hard unobtrusively to train up towards arational understanding of the universe around them, and sat down towrite a final letter of farewell to poor straight-laced kind-heartedMiss Smith-Waters. She sat down to it with a sigh; for MissSmith-Waters, though her outlook upon the cosmos was through onenarrow chink, was a good soul up to her lights, and had been reallyfond and proud of Herminia. She had rather shown her off, indeed, asa social trump card to the hesitating parent, --"This is our secondmistress, Miss Barton; you know her father, perhaps; such anexcellent man, the Dean of Dunwich. " And now, Herminia sat down witha heavy heart, thinking to herself what a stab of pain the avowalshe had to make would send throbbing through that gentle old breast, and how absolutely incapable dear Miss Smith-Waters could be of everappreciating the conscientious reasons which had led her, Iphigenia-like, to her self-imposed sacrifice. 

But, for all that, she wrote her letter through, delicately, sweetly, with feminine tact and feminine reticence. She told MissSmith-Waters frankly enough all it was necessary Miss Smith-Watersshould know; but she said it with such daintiness that even thatconventionalized and hide-bound old maid couldn't help feeling andrecognizing the purity and nobility of her misguided action. Poorchild, Miss Smith-Waters thought; she was mistaken, of course, sadlyand grievously mistaken; but, then, 'twas her heart that misled her, no doubt; and Miss Smith-Waters, having dim recollections of afar-away time when she herself too possessed some rudimentaryfragment of such a central vascular organ, fairly cried over thepoor girl's letter with sympathetic shame, and remorse, andvexation. Miss Smith-Waters could hardly be expected to understandthat if Herminia had thought her conduct in the faintest degreewrong, or indeed anything but the highest and best for humanity, shecould never conceivably have allowed even that loving heart of hersto hurry her into it. For Herminia's devotion to principle was notless but far greater than Miss Smith-Waters's own; only, as ithappened, the principles themselves were diametrically opposite. 

Herminia wrote her note with not a few tears for poor MissSmith-Waters's disappointment. That is the worst of living a lifemorally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundestconviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostileand painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded ofyour friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies andthe conventional injustices. It is the good, indeed, who are mostagainst you. Still, Herminia steeled her heart to tell the simpletruth, --how, for the right's sake and humanity's she had made up hermind to eschew the accursed thing, and to strike one bold blow forthe freedom and unfettered individuality of women. She knew in whatobloquy her action would involve her, she said; but she knew too, that to do right for right's sake was a duty imposed by nature uponevery one of us; and that the clearer we could see ahead, and thefarther in front we could look, the more profoundly did that dutyshine forth for us. For her own part, she had never shrunk fromdoing what she knew to be right for mankind in the end, though shefelt sure it must lead her to personal misery. Yet unless one womanwere prepared to lead the way, no freedom was possible. She hadfound a man with whom she could spend her life in sympathy andunited usefulness; and with him she had elected to spend it in theway pointed out to us by nature. Acting on his advice, thoughsomewhat against her own judgment, she meant to leave England forthe present, only returning again when she could return with thedear life they had both been instrumental in bringing into theworld, and to which henceforth her main attention must be directed. She signed it, "Your ever-grateful and devoted HERMINIA. "

Poor Miss Smith-Waters laid down that astonishing, that incredibleletter in a perfect whirl of amazement and stupefaction. She didn'tknow what to make of it. It seemed to run counter to all herpreconceived ideas of moral action. That a young girl should ventureto think for herself at all about right and wrong was passingstrange; that she should arrive at original notions upon thoseabstruse subjects, which were not the notions of constitutedauthority and of the universal slave-drivers and obscurantistsgenerally, --notions full of luminousness upon the real relations andduties of our race, --was to poor, cramped Miss Smith-Waterswell-nigh inconceivable. That a young girl should prefer freedom toslavery; should deem it more moral to retain her divinely-conferredindividuality in spite of the world than to yield it up to a man forlife in return for the price of her board and lodging; should refuseto sell her own body for a comfortable home and the shelter of aname, --these things seemed to Miss Smith-Waters, with hersmaller-catechism standards of right and wrong, scarcely short ofsheer madness. Yet Herminia had so endeared herself to the oldlady's soul that on receipt of her letter Miss Smith-Waters wentupstairs to her own room with a neuralgic headache, and never againin her life referred to her late second mistress in any other termsthan as "my poor dear sweet misguided Herminia. "

But when it became known next morning in Bower Lane that thequeenly-looking school-mistress who used to go round among "ourgirls" with tickets for concerts and lectures and that, haddisappeared suddenly with the nice-looking young man who used tocome a-courting her on Sundays and evenings, the amazement andsurprise of respectable Bower Lane was simply unbounded. "Whowould have thought, " the red-faced matrons of the cottagesremarked, over their quart of bitter, "the pore thing had it inher! But there, it's these demure ones as is always the slyest!"For Bower Lane could only judge that austere soul by its own vulgarstandard (as did also Belgravia). Most low minds, indeed, imagineabsolute hypocrisy must be involved in any striving after goodnessand abstract right-doing on the part of any who happen todisbelieve in their own blood-thirsty deities, or their own vilewoman-degrading and prostituting morality. In the topsy-turvyphilosophy of Bower Lane and of Belgravia, what is usual is right;while any conscious striving to be better and nobler than the massaround one is regarded at once as either insane or criminal. 

VIII. 

They were bound for Italy; so Alan had decided. Turning over in hismind the pros and cons of the situation, he had wisely determinedthat Herminia's confinement had better take place somewhere elsethan in England. The difficulties and inconveniences which blockthe way in English lodgings would have been well-nigh insufferable;in Italy, people would only know that an English signora and herhusband had taken apartments for a month or two in some solemn oldpalazzo. To Herminia, indeed, this expatriation at such a momentwas in many ways to the last degree distasteful; for her own part, she hated the merest appearance of concealment, and would ratherhave flaunted the open expression of her supreme moral faith beforethe eyes of all London. But Alan pointed out to her the manypractical difficulties, amounting almost to impossibilities, whichbeset such a course; and Herminia, though it was hateful to her thusto yield to the immoral prejudices of a false social system, gaveway at last to Alan's repeated expression of the necessity forprudent and practical action. She would go with him to Italy, shesaid, as a proof of her affection and her confidence in hisjudgment, though she still thought the right thing was to stand byher guns fearlessly, and fight it out to the bitter end undismayedin England. 

On the morning of their departure, Alan called to see his father, and explain the situation. He felt some explanation was by thistime necessary. As yet no one in London knew anything officiallyas to his relations with Herminia; and for Herminia's sake, Alanhad hitherto kept them perfectly private. But now, furtherreticence was both useless and undesirable; he determined to make aclean breast of the whole story to his father. It was early for abarrister to be leaving town for the Easter vacation; and thoughAlan had chambers of his own in Lincoln's Inn, where he lived byhimself, he was so often in and out of the house in Harley Streetthat his absence from London would at once have attracted theparental attention. 

Dr. Merrick was a model of the close-shaven clear-cut Londonconsultant. His shirt-front was as impeccable as his moralcharacter was spotless--in the way that Belgravia and Harley Streetstill understood spotlessness. He was tall and straight, andunbent by age; the professional poker which he had swallowed inearly life seemed to stand him in good stead after sixty years, though his hair had whitened fast, and his brow was furrowed withmost deliberative wrinkles. So unapproachable he looked, that noteven his own sons dared speak frankly before him. His very smilewas restrained; he hardly permitted himself for a moment that weakhuman relaxation. 

Alan called at Harley Street immediately after breakfast, just aquarter of an hour before the time allotted to his father's firstpatient. Dr. Merrick received him in the consulting-room with aninterrogative raising of those straight, thin eyebrows. The merelook on his face disconcerted Alan. With an effort the son beganand explained his errand. His father settled himself down into hisample and dignified professional chair--old oak round-backed, --andwith head half turned, and hands folded in front of him, seemed todiagnose with rapt attention this singular form of psychologicalmalady. When Alan paused for a second between his haltingsentences and floundered about in search of a more delicate way ofgliding over the thin ice, his father eyed him closely with thosekeen, gray orbs, and after a moment's hesitation put in a "Well, continue, " without the faintest sign of any human emotion. Alan, thus driven to it, admitted awkwardly bit by bit that he wasleaving London before the end of term because he had managed to gethimself into delicate relations with a lady. 

Dr. Merrick twirled his thumbs, and in a colorless voice enquired, without relaxing a muscle of his set face, "What sort of lady, please? A lady of the ballet?"

"Oh, no!" Alan cried, giving a little start of horror. "Quitedifferent from that. A real lady. "

"They always ARE real ladies, --for the most part brought down byuntoward circumstances, " his father responded coldly. "As a rule, indeed, I observe, they're clergyman's daughters. "

"This one is, " Alan answered, growing hot. "In point of fact, toprevent your saying anything you might afterwards regret, I thinkI'd better mention the lady's name. It's Miss Herminia Barton, theDean of Dunwich's daughter. "

His father drew a long breath. The corners of the clear-cut mouthdropped down for a second, and the straight, thin eyebrows weremomentarily elevated. But he gave no other overt sign of dismay orastonishment. 

"That makes a great difference, of course, " he answered, after along pause. "She IS a lady, I admit. And she's been to Girton. "

"She has, " the son replied, scarcely knowing how to continue. 

Dr. Merrick twirled his thumbs once more, with outward calm, for aminute or two. This was most inconvenient in a professionalfamily. 

"And I understand you to say, " he went on in a pitiless voice, "Miss Barton's state of health is such that you think it advisableto remove her at once--for her confinement, to Italy?"

"Exactly so, " Alan answered, gulping down his discomfort. 

The father gazed at him long and steadily. 

"Well, I always knew you were a fool, " he said at last withpaternal candor; "but I never yet knew you were quite such a foolas this business shows you. You'll have to marry the girl now inthe end. Why the devil couldn't you marry her outright at first, instead of seducing her?"

"I did not seduce her, " Alan answered stoutly. "No man on earthcould ever succeed in seducing that stainless woman. "

Dr. Merrick stared hard at him without changing his attitude on hisold oak chair. Was the boy going mad, or what the dickens did hemean by it?

"You HAVE seduced her, " he said slowly. "And she is NOT stainlessif she has allowed you to do so. "

"It is the innocence which survives experience that I value, notthe innocence which dies with it, " Alan answered gravely. 

"I don't understand these delicate distinctions, " Dr. Merrickinterposed with a polite sneer. "I gather from what you said justnow that the lady is shortly expecting her confinement; and as sheisn't married, you tell me, I naturally infer that SOMEBODY musthave seduced her--either you, or some other man. "

It was Alan's turn now to draw himself up very stiffly. 

"I beg your pardon, " he answered; "you have no right to speak insuch a tone about a lady in Miss Barton's position. Miss Bartonhas conscientious scruples about the marriage-tie, which in theoryI share with her; she was unwilling to enter into any relationswith me except in terms of perfect freedom. "

"I see, " the old man went on with provoking calmness. "Shepreferred, in fact, to be, not your wife, but your mistress. "

Alan rose indignantly. "Father, " he said, with just wrath, "if youinsist upon discussing this matter with me in such a spirit, I mustrefuse to stay here. I came to tell you the difficulty in which Ifind myself, and to explain to you my position. If you won't letme tell you in my own way, I must leave the house without havinglaid the facts before you. "

The father spread his two palms in front of him with demonstrativeopenness. "As you will, " he answered. "My time is much engaged. I expect a patient at a quarter past ten. You must be brief, please. "

Alan made one more effort. In a very earnest voice, he began toexpound to his father Herminia's point of view. Dr. Merricklistened for a second or two in calm impatience. Then he consultedhis watch. "Excuse me, " he said. "I have just three minutes. Letus get at once to the practical part--the therapeutics of the case, omitting its aetiology: You're going to take the young lady toItaly. When she gets there, will she marry you? And do you expectme to help in providing for you both after this insane adventure?"

Alan's face was red as fire. "She will NOT marry me when she getsto Italy, " he answered decisively. "And I don't want you to doanything to provide for either of us. "

The father looked at him with the face he was wont to assume inscanning the appearance of a confirmed monomaniac. "She will notmarry you, " he answered slowly; "and you intend to go on livingwith her in open concubinage! A lady of birth and position! Isthat your meaning?"

"Father, " Alan cried despairingly, "Herminia would not consent tolive with me on any other terms. To her it would be disgraceful, shameful, a sin, a reproach, a dereliction of principle. SheCOULDN'T go back upon her whole past life. She lives for nothingelse but the emancipation of women. "

"And you will aid and abet her in her folly?" the father asked, looking up sharply at him. "You will persist in this evil course?You will face the world and openly defy morality?"

"I will not counsel the woman I most love and admire to purchaseher own ease by proving false to her convictions, " Alan answeredstoutly. 

Dr. Merrick gazed at the watch on his table once more. Then herose and rang the bell. "Patient here?" he asked curtly. "Showhim in then at once. And, Napper, if Mr. Alan Merrick ever callsagain, will you tell him I'm out?--and your mistress as well, andall the young ladies. " He turned coldly to Alan. "I must guardyour mother and sisters at least, " he said in a chilly voice, "fromthe contamination of this woman's opinions. "

Alan bowed without a word, and left the room. He never again sawthe face of his father. 

IX. 

Alan Merrick strode from his father's door that day stung with aburning sense of wrong and injustice. More than ever before inhis life he realized to himself the abject hollowness of thatconventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system ofmorals. If he had continued to "live single" as we hypocriticallyphrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering socialcanker of prostitution, on which as basis, like some mediaevalcastle on its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstructure of ouroutwardly decent modern society is reared, his father no doubtwould have shrugged his shoulders and blinked his cold eyes, andcommended the wise young man for abstaining from marriage till hismeans could permit him to keep a wife of his own class in the wayshe was accustomed to. The wretched victims of that vile systemmight die unseen and unpitied in some hideous back slum, withouttouching one chord of remorse or regret in Dr. Merrick's nature. He was steeled against their suffering. Or again, if Alan had soldhis virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like EthelWaterton--had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in aloveless marriage, his father would not only have gladlyacquiesced, but would have congratulated his son on his luck andhis prudence. Yet, because Alan had chosen rather to form ablameless union of pure affection with a woman who was in every wayhis moral and mental superior, but in despite of the conventionalban of society, Dr. Merrick had cast him off as an open reprobate. And why? Simply because that union was unsanctioned by theexponents of a law they despised, and unblessed by the priests of acreed they rejected. Alan saw at once it is not the intrinsicmoral value of an act such people think about, but the light inwhich it is regarded by a selfish society. 

Unchastity, it has been well said, is union without love; and Alanwould have none of it. 

He went back to Herminia more than ever convinced of that spotlesswoman's moral superiority to every one else he had ever met with. She sat, a lonely soul, enthroned amid the halo of her own perfectpurity. To Alan, she seemed like one of those early ItalianMadonnas, lost in a glory of light that surrounds and half hidesthem. He reverenced her far too much to tell her all that hadhappened. How could he wound those sweet ears with his father'scoarse epithets?

They took the club train that afternoon to Paris. There they sleptthe night in a fusty hotel near the Gare du Nord, and went on inthe morning by the daylight express to Switzerland. At Lucerne andMilan they broke the journey once more. Herminia had never yetgone further afield from England than Paris; and this first glimpseof a wider world was intensely interesting to her. Who can helpbeing pleased, indeed, with that wonderful St. Gothard--the crystalgreen Reuss shattering itself in white spray into emerald pools bythe side of the railway; Wasen church perched high upon itssolitary hilltop; the Biaschina ravine, the cleft rocks of Faido, the serpentine twists and turns of the ramping line as it mounts ordescends its spiral zigzags? Dewy Alpine pasture, tossed masses ofland-slip, white narcissus on the banks, snowy peaks in thebackground--all alike were fresh visions of delight to Herminia;and she drank it all in with the pure childish joy of a poeticnature. It was the Switzerland of her dreams, reinforced andcomplemented by unsuspected detail. 

One trouble alone disturbed her peace of mind upon that delightfuljourney. Alan entered their names at all the hotels where theystopped as "Mr. And Mrs. Alan Merrick of London. " That deception, as Herminia held it, cost her many qualms of conscience; but Alan, with masculine common-sense, was firm upon the point that no otherdescription was practically possible; and Herminia yielded with asign to his greater worldly wisdom. She had yet to learn thelesson which sooner or later comes home to all the small minoritywho care a pin about righteousness, that in a world like our own, it is impossible for the righteous always to act consistently up totheir most sacred convictions. 

At Milan, they stopped long enough to snatch a glimpse of thecathedral, and to take a hasty walk through the pictured glories ofthe Brera. A vague suspicion began to cross Herminia's mind, as shegazed at the girlish Madonna of the Sposalizio, that perhaps shewasn't quite as well adapted to love Italy as Switzerland. Natureshe understood; was art yet a closed book to her? If so, she wouldbe sorry; for Alan, in whom the artistic sense was largelydeveloped, loved his Italy dearly; and it would be a real cause ofregret to her if she fell short in any way of Alan's expectations. Moreover, at table d'hote that evening, a slight episode occurredwhich roused to the full once more poor Herminia's tenderconscience. Talk had somehow turned on Shelley's Italian wanderings;and a benevolent-looking clergyman opposite, with that vacantlywell-meaning smile, peculiar to a certain type of country rector, was apologizing in what he took to be a broad and generous spirit ofdivine, toleration for the great moral teacher's supposed lapsesfrom the normal rule of tight living. Much, the benevolent-lookinggentleman opined, with beaming spectacles, must be forgiven to menof genius. Their temptations no doubt are far keener than with mostof us. An eager imagination--a vivid sense of beauty--quickreadiness to be moved by the sight of physical or moralloveliness--these were palliations, the old clergyman held, of muchthat seemed wrong and contradictory to our eyes in the lives of somany great men and women. 

At sound of such immoral and unworthy teaching, Herminia's ardentsoul rose up in revolt within her. "Oh, no, " she cried eagerly, leaning across the table as she spoke. "I can't allow that plea. It's degrading to Shelley, and to all true appreciation of theduties of genius. Not less but more than most of us is the geniusbound to act up with all his might to the highest moral law, to bethe prophet and interpreter of the highest moral excellence. Towhom much is given, of him much shall be required. Just becausethe man or woman of genius stands raised on a pedestal so far abovethe mass have we the right to expect that he or she should point usthe way, should go before us as pioneer, should be more careful ofthe truth, more disdainful of the wrong, down to the smallestparticular, than the ordinary person. There are poor souls borninto this world so petty and narrow and wanting in originality thatone can only expect them to tread the beaten track, be it ever socruel and wicked and mistaken. But from a Shelley or a GeorgeEliot, we expect greater things, and we have a right to expectthem. That's why I can never quite forgive George Eliot--who knewthe truth, and found freedom for herself, and practised it in herlife--for upholding in her books the conventional lies, theconventional prejudices; and that's why I can never admire Shelleyenough, who, in an age of slavery, refused to abjure or to deny hisfreedom, but acted unto death to the full height of his principles. "

The benevolent-looking clergyman gazed aghast at Herminia. Then heturned slowly to Alan. "Your wife, " he said in a mild andterrified voice, "is a VERY advanced lady. "

Herminia longed to blurt out the whole simple truth. "I am NOT hiswife. I am not, and could never be wife or slave to any man. Thisis a very dear friend, and he and I are travelling as friendstogether. " But a warning glance from Alan made her hold her peacewith difficulty and acquiesce as best she might in the virtualdeception. Still, the incident went to her heart, and made hermore anxious than ever to declare her convictions and her practicalobedience to them openly before the world. She remembered, oh, sowell one of her father's sermons that had vividly impressed her inthe dear old days at Dunwich Cathedral. It was preached upon thetext, "Come ye out and be ye separate. "

From Milan they went on direct to Florence. Alan had decided totake rooms for the summer at Perugia, and there to see Herminiasafely through her maternal troubles. He loved Perugia, he said;it was cool and high-perched; and then, too, it was such a capitalplace for sketching. Besides, he was anxious to complete hisstudies of the early Umbrian painters. But they must have just oneweek at Florence together before they went up among the hills. Florence was the place for a beginner to find out what Italian artwas aiming at. You got it there in its full logical development--everyphase, step by step, in organic unity; while elsewhere you sawbut stages and jumps and results, interrupted here and there bydisturbing lacunae. So at Florence they stopped for a week enroute, and Herminia first learnt what Florentine art proposed toitself. 

Ah, that week in Florence! What a dream of delight! 'Twas puregold to Herminia. How could it well be otherwise? It seemed toher afterwards like the last flicker of joy in a doomed life, before its light went out and left her forever in utter darkness. To be sure, a week is a terribly cramped and hurried time in whichto view Florence, the beloved city, whose ineffable glories need atleast one whole winter adequately to grasp them. But failing awinter, a week with the gods made Herminia happy. She carried awaybut a confused phantasmagoria, it is true, of the soaring tower ofthe Palazzo Vecchio, pointing straight with its slender shaft toheaven; of the swelling dome and huge ribs of the cathedral, seenvast from the terrace in front of San Miniato; of the endlessMadonnas and the deathless saints niched in golden tabernacles atthe Uffizi and the Pitti; of the tender grace of Fra Angelico atSan Marco; of the infinite wealth and astounding variety ofDonatello's marble in the spacious courts of the cool Bargello. But her window at the hotel looked straight as it could look downthe humming Calzaioli to the pierced and encrusted front ofGiotto's campanile, with the cupola of San Lorenzo in the middledistance, and the facade of Fiesole standing out deep-blue againstthe dull red glare of evening in the background. If that were notenough to sate and enchant Herminia, she would indeed have beendifficult. And with Alan by her side, every joy was doubled. 

She had never before known what it was to have her lovercontinuously with her. And his aid in those long corridors, wherebambinos smiled down at her with childish lips, helped herwondrously to understand in so short a time what they sought toconvey to her. Alan was steeped in Italy; he knew and entered intothe spirit of Tuscan art; and now for the first time Herminia foundherself face to face with a thoroughly new subject in which Alancould be her teacher from the very beginning, as most men areteachers to the women who depend upon them. This sense of supportand restfulness and clinging was fresh and delightful to her. Itis a woman's ancestral part to look up to the man; she is happiestin doing it, and must long remain so; and Herminia was not sorry tofind herself in this so much a woman. She thought it delicious toroam through the long halls of some great gallery with Alan, andlet him point out to her the pictures he loved best, explain theirpeculiar merits, and show the subtle relation in which they stoodto the pictures that went before them and the pictures that cameafter them, as well as to the other work of the same master or hiscontemporaries. It was even no small joy to her to find that heknew so much more about art and its message than she did; that shecould look up to his judgment, confide in his opinion, see thetruth of his criticism, profit much by his instruction. So welldid she use those seven short days, indeed, that she came toFlorence with Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, mere names;and she went away from it feeling that she had made them realfriends and possessions for a life-time. 

So the hours whirled fast in those enchanted halls, and Herminia'ssoul was enriched by new tastes and new interests. O towers offretted stone! O jasper and porphyry! Her very state of healthmade her more susceptible than usual to fresh impressions, and drewAlan at the same time every day into closer union with her. Forwas not the young life now quickening within her half his and halfhers, and did it not seem to make the father by reflex nearer anddearer to her? Surely the child that was nurtured, unborn, onthose marble colonnades and those placid Saint Catherines must drawin with each pulse of its antenatal nutriment some tincture ofbeauty, of freedom, of culture! So Herminia thought to herself asshe lay awake at night and looked out of the window from thecurtains of her bed at the boundless dome and the tall campanilegleaming white in the moonlight. So we have each of usthought--especially the mothers in Israel among us--about the unbornbabe that hastens along to its birth with such a radiant halo of thepossible future ever gilding and glorifying its unseen forehead. 

X. 

All happy times must end, and the happier the sooner. At one shortweek's close they hurried on to Perugia. 

And how full Alan had been of Perugia beforehand! He loved everystone of the town, every shadow of the hillsides, he told Herminiaat Florence; and Herminia started on her way accordingly wellprepared to fall quite as madly in love with the Umbrian capital asAlan himself had done. 

The railway journey, indeed, seemed extremely pretty. What a marchof sweet pictures! They mounted with creaking wheels the slowascent up the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep, to thewhite towers of Arezzo; then Cortona throned in state on its lonelyhill-top, and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls; next the lowbank, the lucid green water, the olive-clad slopes of reedyThrasymene; last of all, the sere hills and city-capped heights oftheir goal, Perugia. 

For its name's sake alone, Herminia was prepared to admire theantique Umbrian capital. And Alan loved it so much, and was sodetermined she ought to love it too, that she was ready to bepleased with everything in it. Until she arrived there--and then, oh, poor heart, what a grievous disappointment! It was late Aprilweather when they reached the station at the foot of that high hillwhere Augusta Perusia sits lording it on her throne over the weddedvalleys of the Tiber and the Clitumnus. Tramontana was blowing. No rain had fallen for weeks; the slopes of the lower Apennines, ever dry and dusty, shone still drier and dustier than Alan had yetbeheld them. Herminia glanced up at the long white road, thick indeep gray powder, that led by endless zigzags along the drearyslope to the long white town on the shadeless hill-top. At firstsight alone, Perugia was a startling disillusion to Herminia. Shedidn't yet know how bitterly she was doomed hereafter to hate everydreary dirty street in it. But she knew at the first blush thatthe Perugia she had imagined and pictured to herself didn't reallyexist and had never existed. 

She had figured in her own mind a beautiful breezy town, high seton a peaked hill, in fresh and mossy country. She had envisagedthe mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods, and strewn withhuge boulders under whose umbrageous shelter bloomed waving massesof the pretty pale blue Apennine anemones she saw sold in bigbunches at the street corners in Florence. She had imagined, inshort, that Umbria was a wilder Italian Wales, as fresh, as green, as sweet-scented, as fountain-fed. And she knew pretty well whenceshe had derived that strange and utterly false conception. She hadfancied Perugia as one of those mountain villages described byMacaulay, the sort of hilltop stronghold

 "That, hid by beech and pine, Like an eagle's nest hangs on the crest Of purple Apennine. "

Instead of that, what manner of land did she see actually beforeher? Dry and shadeless hill-sides, tilled with obtrusive tilth totheir topmost summit; ploughed fields and hoary olive-grovessilvering to the wind, in interminable terraces; long suburbs, unlovely in their gaunt, bare squalor, stretching like huge arms ofsome colossal cuttlefish over the spurs and shoulders of thatdesecrated mountain. No woods, no moss, no coolness, no greenery;all nature toned down to one monotonous grayness. And this drearydesert was indeed the place where her baby must be born, the babypredestined to regenerate humanity!

Oh, why did they ever leave that enchanted Florence!

Meanwhile Alan had got together the luggage, and engaged aramshackle Perugian cab; for the public vehicles of Perugia areperhaps, as a class, the most precarious and incoherent known toscience. However, the luggage was bundled on to the top by OurLady's grace, without dissolution of continuity; the lean-limbedhorses were induced by explosive volleys of sound Tuscan oaths tomake a feeble and spasmodic effort; and bit by bit the sad littlecavalcade began slowly to ascend the interminable hill that risesby long loops to the platform of the Prefettura. 

That drive was the gloomiest Herminia had ever yet taken. Was itthe natural fastidiousness of her condition, she wondered, or wasit really the dirt and foul smells of the place that made hersicken at first sight of the wind-swept purlieus? Perhaps a littleof both; for in dusty weather Perugia is the most endless town toget out of in Italy; and its capacity for the production ofunpleasant odors is unequalled no doubt from the Alps to Calabria. As they reached the bare white platform at the entry to the uppertown, where Pope Paul's grim fortress once frowned to overawe theaudacious souls of the liberty-loving Umbrians, she turned muteeyes to Alan for sympathy. And then for the first time theterrible truth broke over her that Alan wasn't in the leastdisappointed or disgusted; he knew it all before; he was accustomedto it and liked it! As for Alan, he misinterpreted her glance, indeed, and answered with that sort of proprietary pride we all ofus assume towards a place we love, and are showing off to anewcomer: "Yes, I thought you'd like this view, dearest; isn't itwonderful, wonderful? That's Assisi over yonder, that strangewhite town that clings by its eyelashes to the sloping hill-side:and those are the snowclad heights of the Gran Sasso beyond; andthat's Montefalco to the extreme right, where the sunset gleam justcatches the hill-top. "

His words struck dumb horror into Herminia's soul. Poor child, howshe shrank at it! It was clear, then, instead of being shocked anddisgusted, Alan positively admired this human Sahara. With aneffort she gulped down her tears and her sighs, and pretended tolook with interest in the directions he pointed. SHE could seenothing in it all but dry hill-sides, crowned with still driertowns; unimagined stretches of sultry suburb; devouring wastes ofrubbish and foul immemorial kitchen-middens. And the very factthat for Alan's sake she couldn't bear to say so--seeing howpleased and proud he was of Perugia, as if it had been built fromhis own design--made the bitterness of her disappointment moredifficult to endure. She would have given anything at that momentfor an ounce of human sympathy. 

She had to learn in time to do without it. 

They spent that night at the comfortable hotel, perhaps the best inItaly. Next morning, they were to go hunting for apartments in thetown, where Alan knew of a suite that would exactly suit them. After dinner, in the twilight, filled with his artistic joy atbeing back in Perugia, his beloved Perugia, he took Herminia outfor a stroll, with a light wrap round her head, on the terrace ofthe Prefettura. The air blew fresh and cool now with a certainmountain sharpness; for, as Alan assured her with pride, they stoodseventeen hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean. Themoon had risen; the sunset glow had not yet died off the slopes ofthe Assisi hill-sides. It streamed through the perforated belfryof San Domenico; it steeped in rose-color the slender and turretedshaft of San Pietro, "Perugia's Pennon, " the Arrowhead of Umbria. It gilded the gaunt houses that jut out upon the spine of the Borgohill into the valley of the Tiber. Beyond, rose shadowy Apennines, on whose aerial flanks towns and villages shone out clear in themellow moonlight. Far away on their peaks faint specks oftwinkling fire marked indistinguishable sites of high hill-topcastles. 

Alan turned to her proudly. "Well, what do you think of that?" heasked with truly personal interest. 

Herminia could only gasp out in a half reluctant way, "It's abeautiful view, Alan. Beautiful; beautiful; beautiful!"

But she felt conscious to herself it owed its beauty in the mainto the fact that the twilight obscured so much of it. To-morrowmorning, the bare hills would stand out once more in all theirpristine bareness; the white roads would shine forth as white anddusty as ever; the obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselvesat every turn upon eye and nostril. She hated the place, to saythe truth; it was a terror to her to think she had to stop so longin it. 

Most famous towns, in fact, need to be twice seen: the first timebriefly to face the inevitable disappointment to our expectations;the second time, at leisure, to reconstruct and appraise thesurviving reality. Imagination so easily beggars performance. Rome, Cairo, the Nile, are obvious examples; the grand exceptionsare Venice and Florence, --in a lesser degree, Bruges, Munich, Pisa. As for Umbria, 'tis a poor thing; our own Devon snaps her fingersat it. 

Moreover, to say the truth, Herminia was too fresh to Italy toappreciate the smaller or second-rate towns at their real value. Even northerners love Florence and Venice at first sight; thosetake their hearts by storm; but Perugia, Siena, Orvieto, are anacquired taste, like olives and caviare, and it takes time toacquire it. Alan had not made due allowance for this psychologicaltruth of the northern natures. A Celt in essence, thoroughlyItalianate himself, and with a deep love for the picturesque, whichoften makes men insensible to dirt and discomfort, he expected toItalianize Herminia too rapidly. Herminia, on the other hand, belonged more strictly to the intellectual and somewhat inartisticEnglish type. The picturesque alone did not suffice for her. Cleanliness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul than thequaintest street corners, the oddest old archways; she pined inPerugia for a green English hillside. 

The time, too, was unfortunate, after no rain for weeks; forrainlessness, besides doubling the native stock of dust, brings outto the full the ancestral Etruscan odors of Perugia. So, when nextmorning Herminia found herself installed in a dingy flat, in amorose palazzo, in the main street of the city, she was glad thatAlan insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases ofgroceries and provisions, because it gave her a chance of flingingherself on her bed in a perfect agony of distress and disappointment, and having a good cry, all alone, at the aspect of the home whereshe was to pass so many eventful weeks of her existence. 

Dusty, gusty Perugia! O baby, to be born for the freeing of woman, was it here, was it here you must draw your first breath, in an airpolluted by the vices of centuries!

XI. 

Somewhat later in the day, they went out for a stroll through thetown together. To Herminia's great relief, Alan never even noticedshe had been crying. Man-like, he was absorbed in his own delight. She would have felt herself a traitor if Alan had discovered it. 

"Which way shall we go?" she asked listlessly, with a glance toright and left, as they passed beneath the sombre Tuscan gate oftheir palazzo. 

And Alan answered, smiling, "Why, what does it matter? Which wayyou like. Every way is a picture. "

And so it was, Herminia herself was fain to admit, in a purepainter's sense that didn't at all attract her. Lines groupedthemselves against the sky in infinite diversity. Whichever waythey turned quaint old walls met their eyes, and tumble-downchurches, and mouldering towers, and mediaeval palazzi with carveddoorways or rich loggias. But whichever way they turned dustyroads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb, unwholesome airs, sickening sights and sounds and perfumes. Narrowstreets swept, darkling, under pointed archways, that frameddistant vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solidblue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness of that sapphire firmamentrepelled Herminia. They passed beneath the triumphal arch ofAugustus with its Etruscan mason-work, its Roman decorations, andround the antique walls, aglow with tufted gillyflowers, to thebare Piazza d'Armi. A cattle fair was going on there; and Alanpointed with pleasure to the curious fact that the oxen were allcream-colored, --the famous white steers of Clitumnus. Herminiaknew her Virgil as well as Alan himself, and murmured half aloudthe sonorous hexameter, "Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos. "But somehow, the knowledge that these were indeed the milk-whitebullocks of Clitumnus failed amid so much dust to arouse herenthusiasm. She would have been better pleased just then with ayellow English primrose. 

They clambered down the terraced ravines sometimes, a day or twolater, to arid banks by a dry torrent's bed where Italian primrosesreally grew, interspersed with tall grape-hyacinths, and scentedviolets, and glossy cleft leaves of winter aconite. But even theprimroses were not the same thing to Herminia as those she used togather on the dewy slopes of the Redlands; they were so dry anddust-grimed, and the path by the torrent's side was so distastefuland unsavory. Bare white boughs of twisted fig-trees depressedher. Besides, these hills were steep, and Herminia felt theclimbing. Nothing in city or suburbs attracted her soul. EtruscanVolumnii, each lolling in white travertine on the sculptured lid ofhis own sarcophagus urn, and all duly ranged in the twilight oftheir tomb at their spectral banquet, stirred her heart but feebly. St. Francis, Santa Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy. But asfor Alan, he revelled all day long in his native element. Hesketched every morning, among the huddled, strangled lanes;sketched churches and monasteries, and portals of palazzi; sketchedmountains clear-cut in that pellucid air; till Herminia wonderedhow he could sit so long in the broiling sun or keen wind on thosebare hillsides, or on broken brick parapets in those noisomebyways. But your born sketcher is oblivious of all on earth savehis chosen art; and Alan was essentially a painter in fibre, diverted by pure circumstance into a Chancery practice. 

The very pictures in the gallery failed to interest Herminia, sheknew not why. Alan couldn't rouse her to enthusiasm over hisbeloved Buonfigli. Those naive flaxen-haired angels, with sweetlyparted lips, and baskets of red roses in their delicate hands, ownsisters though they were to the girlish Lippis she had so admiredat Florence, moved her heart but faintly. Try as she might to likethem, she responded to nothing Perugian in any way. 

At the end of a week or two, however, Alan began to complain ofconstant headache. He was looking very well, but grew uneasy andrestless. Herminia advised him to give up sketching for a while, those small streets were so close; and he promised to yield to herwishes in the matter. Yet he grew worse next day, so thatHerminia, much alarmed, called in an Italian doctor. Perugiaboasted no English one. The Italian felt his pulse, and listenedto his symptoms. "The signore came here from Florence?" he asked. 

"From Florence, " Herminia assented, with a sudden sinking. 

The doctor protruded his lower lip. "This is typhoid fever, " hesaid after a pause. "A very bad type. It has been assuming such aform this winter at Florence. "

He spoke the plain truth. Twenty-one days before in his bedroom atthe hotel in Florence, Alan had drunk a single glass of water fromthe polluted springs that supply in part the Tuscan metropolis. For twenty-one days those victorious microbes had brooded insilence in his poisoned arteries. At the end of that time, theyswarmed and declared themselves. He was ill with an aggravatedform of the most deadly disease that still stalks unchecked throughunsanitated Europe. 

Herminia's alarm was painful. Alan grew rapidly worse. In twodays he was so ill that she thought it her duty to telegraph atonce to Dr. Merrick, in London: "Alan's life in danger. Seriousattack of Florentine typhoid. Italian doctor despairs of his life. May not last till to-morrow. --HERMINIA BARTON. "

Later on in the day came a telegram in reply; it was addressed toAlan: "Am on my way out by through train to attend you. But as amatter of duty, marry the girl at once, and legitimatize your childwhile the chance remains to you. "

It was kindly meant in its way. It was a message of love, offorgiveness, of generosity, such as Herminia would hardly haveexpected from so stern a man as Alan had always represented hisfather to be to her. But at moments of unexpected danger angryfeelings between father and son are often forgotten, and bloodunexpectedly proves itself thicker than water. Yet even soHerminia couldn't bear to show the telegram to Alan. She fearedlest in this extremity, his mind weakened by disease, he might wishto take his father's advice, and prove untrue to their commonprinciples. In that case, woman that she was, she hardly knew howshe could resist what might be only too probably his dying wishes. Still, she nerved herself for this trial of faith, and went throughwith it bravely. Alan, though sinking, was still conscious atmoments; in one such interval, with an effort to be calm, sheshowed him his father's telegram. Tears rose into his eyes. "Ididn't expect him to come, " he said. "This is all very good ofhim. " Then, after a moment, he added, "Would you wish me in thisextremity, Hermy, to do as he advises?"

Herminia bent over him with fierce tears on her eyelids. "O Alandarling, " she cried, "you mustn't die! You mustn't leave me! Whatcould I do without you? oh, my darling, my darling! But don'tthink of me now. Don't think of the dear baby. I couldn't bear todisturb you even by showing you the telegram. For your sake, Alan, I'll be calm, --I'll be calm. But oh, not for worlds, --not forworlds, --even so, would I turn my back on the principles we wouldboth risk our lives for!"

Alan smiled a faint smile. "Hermy, " he said slowly, "I love youall the more for it. You're as brave as a lion. Oh, how much Ihave learned from you!"

All that night and next day Herminia watched by his bedside. Nowand again he was conscious. But for the most part he lay still, in a comatose condition, with eyes half closed, the whites showingthrough the lids, neither moving nor speaking. All the time hegrew worse steadily. As she sat by his bedside, Herminia began torealize the utter loneliness of her position. That Alan might diewas the one element in the situation she had never even dreamt of. No wife could love her husband with more perfect devotion thanHerminia loved Alan. She hung upon every breath with unspeakablesuspense and unutterable affection. But the Italian doctor heldout little hope of a rally. Herminia sat there, fixed to the spot, a white marble statue. 

Late next evening Dr. Merrick reached Perugia. He drove straightfrom the station to the dingy flat in the morose palazzo. At thedoor of his son's room, Herminia met him, clad from head to foot inwhite, as she had sat by the bedside. Tears blinded her eyes; herface was wan; her mien terribly haggard. 

"And my son?" the Doctor asked, with a hushed breath of terror. 

"He died half an hour ago, " Herminia gasped out with an effort. 

"But he married you before he died?" the father cried, in a tone ofprofound emotion. "He did justice to his child?--he repaired hisevil?"

"He did not, " Herminia answered, in a scarcely audible voice. "Hewas stanch to the end to his lifelong principles. "

"Why not?" the father asked, staggering. "Did he see my telegram?"

"Yes, " Herminia answered, numb with grief, yet too proud toprevaricate. "But I advised him to stand firm; and he abode by mydecision. "

The father waved her aside with his hands imperiously. "Then Ihave done with you, " he exclaimed. "I am sorry to seem harsh toyou at such a moment. But it is your own doing. You leave me nochoice. You have no right any longer in my son's apartments. "

XII. 

No position in life is more terrible to face than that of thewidowed mother left alone in the world with her unborn baby. Whenthe child is her first one, --when, besides the natural horror andagony of the situation, she has also to confront the unknowndangers of that new and dreaded experience, --her plight is stillmore pitiable. But when the widowed mother is one who has neverbeen a wife, --when in addition to all these pangs of bereavementand fear, she has further to face the contempt and hostility of asneering world, as Herminia had to face it, --then, indeed, her lotbecomes well-nigh insupportable; it is almost more than humannature can bear up against. So Herminia found it. She might havedied of grief and loneliness then and there, had it not been forthe sudden and unexpected rousing of her spirit of opposition byDr. Merrick's words. That cruel speech gave her the will and thepower to live. It saved her from madness. She drew herself up atonce with an injured woman's pride, and, facing her dead Alan'sfather with a quick access of energy, --

"You are wrong, " she said, stilling her heart with one hand. "These rooms are mine, --my own, not dear Alan's. I engaged themmyself, for my own use, and in my own name, as Herminia Barton. You can stay here if you wish. I will not imitate your cruelty byrefusing you access to them; but if you remain here, you must treatme at least with the respect that belongs to my great sorrow, andwith the courtesy due to an English lady. "

Her words half cowed him. He subsided at once. In silence hestepped over to his dead son's bedside. Mechanically, almostunconsciously, Herminia went on with the needful preparations forAlan's funeral. Her grief was so intense that she bore up as ifstunned; she did what was expected of her without thinking orfeeling it. Dr. Merrick stopped on at Perugia till his son wasburied. He was frigidly polite meanwhile to Herminia. Deeply ashe differed from her, the dignity and pride with which she hadanswered his first insult impressed him with a certain sense ofrespect for her character, and made him feel at least he could notbe rude to her with impunity. He remained at the hotel, andsuperintended the arrangements for his son's funeral. As soon asthat was over, and Herminia had seen the coffin lowered into thegrave of all her hopes, save one, she returned to her roomsalone, --more utterly alone than she had ever imagined any humanbeing could feel in a cityful of fellow-creatures. 

She must shape her path now for herself without Alan's aid, withoutAlan's advice. And her bitterest enemies in life, she felt sure, would henceforth be those of Alan's household. 

Yet, lonely as she was, she determined from the first moment nocourse was left open for her save to remain at Perugia. Shecouldn't go away so soon from the spot where Alan was laid, --fromall that remained to her now of Alan. Except his unborn baby, --thebaby that was half his, half hers, --the baby predestined toregenerate humanity. Oh, how she longed to fondle it! Everyarrangement had been made in Perugia for the baby's advent; shewould stand by those arrangements still, in her shuttered room, partly because she couldn't tear herself away from Alan's grave;partly because she had no heart left to make the necessaryarrangements elsewhere; but partly also because she wished Alan'sbaby to be born near Alan's side, where she could present it afterbirth at its father's last resting-place. It was a fanciful wish, she knew, based upon ideas she had long since discarded; but theseancestral sentiments echo long in our hearts; they die hard with usall, and most hard with women. 

She would stop on at Perugia, and die in giving birth to Alan'sbaby; or else live to be father and mother in one to it. 

So she stopped and waited; waited in tremulous fear, half longingfor death, half eager not to leave that sacred baby an orphan. Itwould be Alan's baby, and might grow in time to be the world's truesavior. For, now that Alan was dead, no hope on earth seemed toogreat to cherish for Alan's child within her. 

And oh, that it might be a girl, to take up the task she herselfhad failed in!

The day after the funeral, Dr. Merrick called in for the last timeat her lodgings. He brought in his hand a legal-looking paper, which he had found in searching among Alan's effects, for he hadcarried them off to his hotel, leaving not even a memento of herill-starred love to Herminia. "This may interest you, " he saiddryly. "You will see at once it is in my son's handwriting. "

Herminia glanced over it with a burning face. It was a will in herfavor, leaving absolutely everything of which he died possessed "tomy beloved friend, Herminia Barton. "

Herminia had hardly the means to keep herself alive till her babywas born; but in those first fierce hours of ineffable bereavementwhat question of money could interest her in any way? She staredat it, stupefied. It only pleased her to think Alan had notforgotten her. 

The sordid moneyed class of England will haggle over bequests andsettlements and dowries on their bridal eve, or by the coffins oftheir dead. Herminia had no such ignoble possibilities. How couldhe speak of it in her presence at a moment like this? How obtrudesuch themes on her august sorrow?

"This was drawn up, " Dr. Merrick went on in his austere voice, "thevery day before my late son left London. But, of course, you willhave observed it was never executed. "

And in point of fact Herminia now listlessly noted that it lackedAlan's signature. 

"That makes it, I need hardly say, of no legal value, " the fatherwent on, with frigid calm. "I bring it round merely to show youthat my son intended to act honorably towards you. As things stand, of course, he has died intestate, and his property, such as it is, will follow the ordinary law of succession. For your sake, I amsorry it should be so; I could have wished it otherwise. However, Ineed not remind you"--he picked his phrases carefully with icyprecision--"that under circumstances like these neither you nor yourchild have any claim whatsoever upon my son's estate. Nor have Iany right over it. Still"--he paused for a second, and thatincisive mouth strove to grow gentle, while Herminia hot with shame, confronted him helplessly--"I sympathize with your position, and donot forget it was Alan who brought you here. Therefore, as an actof courtesy to a lady in whom he was personally interested . . . Ifa slight gift of fifty pounds would be of immediate service to youin your present situation, why, I think, with the approbation of hisbrothers and sisters, who of course inherit--"

Herminia turned upon him like a wounded creature. She thanked theblind caprice which governs the universe that it gave her strengthat that moment to bear up under his insult. With one angry handshe waved dead Alan's father inexorably to the door. "Go, " shesaid simply. "How dare you? how dare you? Leave my rooms thisinstant. "

Dr. Merrick still irresolute, and anxious in his way to do what hethought was just, drew a roll of Italian bank notes from hiswaistcoat pocket, and laid them on the table. "You may find theseuseful, " he said, as he retreated awkwardly. 

Herminia turned upon him with the just wrath of a great natureoutraged. "Take them up!" she cried fiercely. "Don't pollute mytable!" Then, as often happens to all of us in moments of deepemotion, a Scripture phrase, long hallowed by childish familiarity, rose spontaneous to her lips. "Take them up!" she cried again. "Thy money perish with thee!"

Dr. Merrick took them up, and slank noiselessly from the room, murmuring as he went some inarticulate words to the effect that hehad only desired to serve her. As soon as he was gone, Herminia'snerve gave way. She flung herself into a chair, and sobbed longand violently. 

It was no time for her, of course, to think about money. Sorepressed as she was, she had just enough left to see her safelythrough her confinement. Alan had given her a few pounds forhousekeeping when they first got into the rooms, and those shekept; they were hers; she had not the slightest impulse to restorethem to his family. All he left was hers too, by natural justice;and she knew it. He had drawn up his will, attestation clause andall, with even the very date inserted in pencil, the day beforethey quitted London together; but finding no friends at the club towitness it, he had put off executing it; and so had left Herminiaentirely to her own resources. In the delirium of his fever, thesubject never occurred to him. But no doubt existed as to thenature of his last wishes; and if Herminia herself had been placedin a similar position to that of the Merrick family, she would havescorned to take so mean an advantage of the mere legal omission. 

By this time, of course, the story of her fate had got across toEngland, and was being read and retold by each man or woman afterhis or her own fashion. The papers mentioned it, as seen throughthe optic lens of the society journalist, with what strangerefraction. Most of them descried in poor Herminia's tragedynothing but material for a smile, a sneer, or an innuendo. TheDean himself wrote to her, a piteous, paternal note, which bowedher down more than ever in her abyss of sorrow. He wrote as a deanmust, --gray hairs brought down with sorrow to the grave; infinitemercy of Heaven; still room for repentance; but oh, to keep awayfrom her pure young sisters! Herminia answered with dignity, butwith profound emotion. She knew her father too well not tosympathize greatly with his natural view of so fatal an episode. 

So she stopped on alone for her dark hour in Perugia. She stoppedon, untended by any save unknown Italians whose tongue she hardlyspoke, and uncheered by a friendly voice at the deepest moment oftrouble in a woman's history. Often for hours together she satalone in the cathedral, gazing up at a certain mild-featuredMadonna, enshrined above an altar. The unwedded widow seemed togain some comfort from the pitying face of the maiden mother. Every day, while still she could, she walked out along theshadeless suburban road to Alan's grave in the parched and crowdedcemetery. Women trudging along with crammed creels on their backsturned round to stare at her. When she could no longer walk, shesat at her window towards San Luca and gazed at it. There lay theonly friend she possessed in Perugia, perhaps in the universe. 

The dreaded day arrived at last, and her strong constitutionenabled Herminia to live through it. Her baby was born, abeautiful little girl, soft, delicate, wonderful, with Alan's blueeyes, and its mother's complexion. Those rosy feet saved Herminia. As she clasped them in her hands--tiny feet, tender feet--she feltshe had now something left to live for, --her baby, Alan's baby, thebaby with a future, the baby that was destined to regeneratehumanity. 

So warm! So small! Alan's soul and her own, mysteriously blended. 

Still, even so, she couldn't find it in her heart to give anyjoyous name to dead Alan's child. Dolores she called it, at Alan'sgrave. In sorrow had she borne it; its true name was Dolores. 

XIII. 

It was a changed London to which Herminia returned. She washomeless, penniless, friendless. Above all she was declassee. The world that had known her now knew her no more. Women who hadsmothered her with their Judas kisses passed her by in theirvictorias with a stony stare. Even men pretended to be looking theother way, or crossed the street to avoid the necessity forrecognizing her. "So awkward to be mixed up with such a scandal!"She hardly knew as yet herself how much her world was changedindeed; for had she not come back to it, the mother of anillegitimate daughter? But she began to suspect it the very firstday when she arrived at Charing Cross, clad in a plain black dress, with her baby at her bosom. Her first task was to find rooms; hernext to find a livelihood. Even the first involved no smallrelapse from the purity of her principles. After long hours ofvain hunting, she found at last she could only get lodgings forherself and Alan's child by telling a virtual lie, against whichher soul revolted. She was forced to describe herself as Mrs. Barton; she must allow her landlady to suppose she was really awidow. Woe unto you, scribes and hypocrites! in all ChristianLondon MISS Barton and her baby could never have found a"respectable" room in which to lay their heads. So she yielded tothe inevitable, and took two tiny attics in a small street off theEdgware Road at a moderate rental. To live alone in a cottage asof yore would have been impossible now she had a baby of her own totend, besides earning her livelihood; she fell back regretfully onthe lesser evil of lodgings. 

To earn her livelihood was a hard task, though Herminia'sindomitable energy rode down all obstacles. Teaching, of course, was now quite out of the question; no English parent could intrustthe education of his daughters to the hands of a woman who hasdared and suffered much, for conscience' sake, in the cause offreedom for herself and her sisters. But even before Herminiawent away to Perugia, she had acquired some small journalisticconnection; and now, in her hour of need, she found not a few ofthe journalistic leaders by no means unwilling to sympathize andfraternize with her. To be sure, they didn't ask the free woman totheir homes, nor invite her to meet their own women:--even anenlightened journalist must draw a line somewhere in the matter ofsociety; but they understood and appreciated the sincerity of hermotives, and did what they could to find employment and salary forher. Herminia was an honest and conscientious worker; she knewmuch about many things; and nature had gifted her with theinstinctive power of writing clearly and unaffectedly the Englishlanguage. So she got on with editors. Who could resist, indeed, the pathetic charm of that girlish figure, simply clad inunobtrusive black, and sanctified in every feature of the shrinkingface by the beauty of sorrow? Not the men who stand at the head ofthe one English profession which more than all others has escapedthe leprous taint of that national moral blight that calls itself"respectability. "

In a slow and tentative way, then, Herminia crept back intounrecognized recognition. It was all she needed. Companionshipshe liked; she hated society. That mart was odious to her wherewomen barter their bodies for a title, a carriage, a place at thehead of some rich man's table. Bohemia sufficed her. Her terriblewidowhood, too, was rendered less terrible to her by the care ofher little one. Babbling lips, pattering feet, made heaven in herattic. Every good woman is by nature a mother, and finds best inmaternity her social and moral salvation. She shall be saved inchild-bearing. Herminia was far removed indeed from that blatantand decadent sect of "advanced women" who talk as though motherhoodwere a disgrace and a burden, instead of being, as it is, the fullrealization of woman's faculties, the natural outlet for woman'swealth of emotion. She knew that to be a mother is the bestprivilege of her sex, a privilege of which unholy manmadeinstitutions now conspire to deprive half the finest and noblestwomen in our civilized communities. Widowed as she was, she stillpitied the unhappy beings doomed to the cramped life and dwarfedheart of the old maid; pitied them as sincerely as she despisedthose unhealthy souls who would make of celibacy, wedded orunwedded, a sort of anti-natural religion for women. Alan's death, however, had left Herminia's ship rudderless. Her mission hadfailed. That she acknowledged herself. She lived now for Dolores. The child to whom she had given the noble birthright of liberty wasdestined from her cradle to the apostolate of women. Alone of hersex, she would start in life emancipated. While others must say, "With a great sum obtained I this freedom, " Dolores could answerwith Paul, "But I was free born. " That was no mean heritage. 

Gradually Herminia got work to her mind; work enough to support herin the modest way that sufficed her small wants for herself and herbaby. In London, given time enough, you can live down anything, perhaps even the unspeakable sin of having struck a righteous blowin the interest of women. And day by day, as months and years wenton, Herminia felt she was living down the disgrace of having obeyedan enlightened conscience. She even found friends. Dear old MissSmith-Waters used to creep round by night, like Nicodemus--respectabilitywould not have allowed her to perform that Christian act in opendaylight, --and sit for an hour or two with her dear misguidedHerminia. Miss Smith-Waters prayed nightly for Herminia's"conversion, " yet not without an uncomfortable suspicion, afterall, that Herminia had very little indeed to be "converted" from. Other people also got to know her by degrees; an editor's wife;a kind literary hostess; some socialistic ladies who liked to be"advanced;" a friendly family or two of the Bohemian literary orartistic pattern. Among them Herminia learned to be as happy intime as she could ever again be, now she had lost her Alan. Shewas Mrs. Barton to them all; that lie she found it practicallyimpossible to fight against. Even the Bohemians refused to lettheir children ask after Miss Barton's baby. 

So wrapt in vile falsehoods and conventions are we. So far have wetravelled from the pristine realities of truth and purity. We lieto our children--in the interests of morality. 

After a time, in the intervals between doing her journalistic workand nursing Alan's baby, Herminia found leisure to write a novel. It was seriously meant, of course, but still it was a novel. Thatis every woman's native idea of literature. It reflects therelatively larger part which the social life plays in the existenceof women. If a man tells you he wants to write a book, nine timesout of ten he means a treatise or argument on some subject thatinterests him. Even the men who take in the end to writing novelshave generally begun with other aims and other aspirations, andhave only fallen back upon the art of fiction in the last resort asa means of livelihood. But when a woman tells you she wants towrite a book, nine times out of ten she means she wants to write anovel. For that task nature has most often endowed her richly. Her quicker intuitions, her keener interest in social life, herdeeper insight into the passing play of emotions and of motives, enable her to paint well the complex interrelations of every-dayexistence. So Herminia, like the rest, wrote her own pet novel. 

By the time her baby was eighteen months old, she had finished it. It was blankly pessimistic, of course. Blank pessimism is the onecreed possible for all save fools. To hold any other is to curlyourself up selfishly in your own easy chair, and say to your soul, "O soul, eat and drink; O soul, make merry. Carouse thy fill. Ignore the maimed lives, the stricken heads and seared hearts, the reddened fangs and ravening claws of nature all round thee. "Pessimism is sympathy. Optimism is selfishness. The optimistfolds his smug hands on his ample knees, and murmurs contentedly, "The Lord has willed it;" "There must always be rich and poor;""Nature has, after all, her great law of compensation. " Thepessimist knows well self-deception like that is either a fraud ora blind, and recognizing the seething mass of misery at his doorsgives what he can, --his pity, or, where possible, his faint aid, inredressing the crying inequalities and injustices of man or nature. 

All honest art is therefore of necessity pessimistic. Herminia'sromance was something more than that. It was the despairingheart-cry of a soul in revolt. It embodied the experiences andbeliefs and sentiments of a martyred woman. It enclosed a loftyethical purpose. She wrote it with fiery energy, for her baby'ssake, on waste scraps of paper, at stray moments snatched fromendless other engagements. And as soon as it was finished, she sentit in fear and trembling to a publisher. 

She had chosen her man well. He was a thinker himself, and hesympathized with thinkers. Though doubtful as to the venture, hetook all the risk himself with that generosity one so often sees inthe best-abused of professions. In three or four weeks' time "AWoman's World" came out, and Herminia waited in breathless anxietyfor the verdict of the reviewers. 

For nearly a month she waited in vain. Then, one Friday, as shewas returning by underground railway from the Strand to EdgewareRoad, with Dolores in her arms, her eye fell as she passed upon thedisplay-bill of the "Spectator. " Sixpence was a great deal ofmoney to Herminia; but bang it went recklessly when she saw amongthe contents an article headed, "A Very Advanced Woman's Novel. "She felt sure it must be hers, and she was not mistaken. Breathlessly she ran over that first estimate of her work. It was with no little elation that she laid down the number. 

Not that the critique was by any means at all favorable. How couldHerminia expect it in such a quarter? But the "Spectator" is atleast conspicuously fair, though it remains in other ways aninteresting and ivy-clad mediaeval relic. "Let us begin byadmitting, " said the Spectatorial scribe, "that Miss Montague'sbook" (she had published it under a pseudonym) "is a work ofgenius. Much as we dislike its whole tone, and still more itsconclusions, the gleam of pure genius shines forth undeniable onevery page of it. Whoever takes it up must read on against hiswill till he has finished the last line of this terrible tragedy; ahateful fascination seems to hold and compel him. Its very puritymakes it dangerous. The book is mistaken; the book is poisonous;the book is morbid; the book is calculated to do irremediablemischief; but in spite of all that, the book is a book ofundeniable and sadly misplaced genius. "

If he had said no more, Herminia would have been amply satisfied. To be called morbid by the "Spectator" is a sufficient proof thatyou have hit at least the right tack in morals. And to be accusedof genius as well was indeed a triumph. No wonder Herminia wenthome to her lonely attic that night justifiably elated. Shefancied after this her book must make a hit. It might be blamedand reviled, but at any rate it was now safe from the ignominy ofoblivion. 

Alas, how little she knew of the mysteries of the book-market! Aslittle as all the rest of us. Day after day, from that afternoonforth, she watched in vain for succeeding notices. Not a singleother paper in England reviewed her. At the libraries, her romancewas never so much as asked for. And the reason for these phenomenais not far to seek by those who know the ways of the British public. For her novel was earnestly and sincerely written; it breathed amoral air, therefore it was voted dull; therefore nobody cared forit. The "Spectator" had noticed it because of its manifestearnestness and sincerity; for though the "Spectator" is always onthe side of the lie and the wrong, it is earnest and sincere, andhas a genuine sympathy for earnestness and sincerity, even on theside of truth and righteousness. Nobody else even looked at it. People said to themselves, "This book seems to be a book with ateaching not thoroughly banal, like the novels-with-a-purpose afterwhich we flock; so we'll give it a wide berth. "

And they shunned it accordingly. 

That was the end of Herminia Barton's literary aspirations. Shehad given the people of her best, and the people rejected it. Nowshe gave them of her most mediocre; the nearest to their own levelof thought and feeling to which her hand could reduce itself. Andthe people accepted it. The rest of her life was hack-work; bythat, she could at least earn a living for Dolores. Her "Antigone, for the Use of Ladies' Schools" still holds its own at Girton andSomerville. 

XIV. 

I do not propose to dwell at any length upon the next ten or twelveyears of Herminia Barton's life. An episode or two must suffice;and those few told briefly. 

She saw nothing of her family. Relations had long been strainedbetween them; now they were ruptured. To the rest of the Bartons, she was even as one dead; the sister and daughter's name was neverpronounced among them. But once, when little Dolores was aboutfive years old, Herminia happened to pass a church door inMarylebone, where a red-lettered placard announced in bold typethat the Very Reverend the Dean of Dunwich would preach there onSunday. It flashed across her mind that this was Sunday morning. An overpowering desire to look on her father's face once more--shehad never seen her mother's--impelled Herminia to enter thoseunwonted portals. The Dean was in the pulpit. He looked statelyand dignified in his long white hair, a noticeable man, tall anderect to the last, like a storm-beaten pine; in spite of histhreescore years and ten, his clear-cut face shone thoughtful, andstriking, and earnest as ever. He was preaching from the text, "Ipress toward the mark for the prize of the high calling. " And hepreached, as he always did, eloquently. His river of speech flowedhigh between banks out of sight of the multitude. There was suchperfect sincerity, such moral elevation in all he said, thatHerminia felt acutely, as she had often felt before, the closelikeness of fibre which united her to him, in spite of extremesuperficial differences of belief and action. She felt it so muchthat when the sermon was over she waited at the vestry door for herfather to emerge. She couldn't let him go away without making atleast an effort to speak with him. 

When the Dean came out, a gentle smile still playing upon hisintellectual face, --for he was one of the few parsons who manage intheir old age to look neither sordid nor inane, --he saw standing bythe vestry door a woman in a plain black dress, like a widow of thepeople. She held by the hand a curly-haired little girl ofsingularly calm and innocent expression. The woman's dark hairwaved gracefully on her high forehead, and caught his attention. Her eyes were subtly sweet, her mouth full of pathos. She pressedforward to speak to him; the Dean, all benignity, bent his head tolisten. 

"Father!" Herminia cried, looking up at him. 

The Dean started back. The woman who thus addressed him was barelytwenty-eight, she might well have been forty; grief and hard lifehad made her old before her time. Her face was haggard. Beautifulas she still was, it was the beauty of a broken heart, of a MaterDolorosa, not the roundfaced beauty of the fresh young girl who hadgone forth rejoicing some ten years earlier from the Deanery atDunwich to the lecture-rooms at Girton. For a moment the Deanstared hard at her. Then with a burst of recognition he utteredaghast the one word "Herminia!"

"Father, " Herminia answered, in a tremulous voice, "I have fought agood fight; I have pressed toward the mark for the prize of a highcalling. And when I heard you preach, I felt just this once, letcome what come might, I must step forth to tell you so. "

The Dean gazed at her with melting eyes. Love and pity beamedstrong in them. "Have you come to repent, my child?" he asked, with solemn insistence. 

"Father, " Herminia made answer, lingering lovingly on the word, "Ihave nothing to repent of. I have striven hard to do well, andhave earned scant praise for it. But I come to ask to-day for onegrasp of your hand, one word of your blessing. Father, father, kiss me!"

The old man drew himself up to his full height, with his silveryhair round his face. Tears started to his eyes; his voicefaltered. But he repressed himself sternly. "No, no, my child, "he answered. "My poor old heart bleeds for you. But not till youcome with full proofs of penitence in your hands can I ever receiveyou. I have prayed for you without ceasing. God grant you mayrepent. Till then, I command you, keep far away from me, and fromyour untainted sisters. "

The child felt her mother's hand tremble quivering in her own, asshe led her from the church; but never a word did Herminia say, lest her heart should break with it. As soon as she was outside, little Dolly looked up at her. (It had dwindled from Dolores toDolly in real life by this time; years bring these mitigations ofour first fierce outbursts. ) "Who was that grand old gentleman?"the child asked, in an awe-struck voice. 

And Herminia, clasping her daughter to her breast, answered with astifled sob, "That was your grandpa, Dolly; that was my father, myfather. "

The child put no more questions just then as is the wont ofchildren; but she treasured up the incident for long in her heart, wondering much to herself why, if her grandpa was so grand an oldgentleman, she and her mamma should have to live by themselves insuch scrubby little lodgings. Also, why her grandpa, who looked sokind, should refuse so severely to kiss her mammy. 

It was the beginning of many doubts and questionings to Dolores. A year later, the Dean died suddenly. People said he might haverisen to be a bishop in his time, if it hadn't been for thatunfortunate episode about his daughter and young Merrick. Herminiawas only once mentioned in his will; and even then merely toimplore the divine forgiveness for her. She wept over that sadly. She didn't want the girls' money, she was better able to take careof herself than Elsie and Ermyntrude; but it cut her to the quickthat her father should have quitted the world at last without oneword of reconciliation. 

However, she went on working placidly at her hack-work, and livingfor little Dolly. Her one wish now was to make Dolly press towardthe mark for the prize of the high calling she herself by mereaccident had missed so narrowly. Her own life was done; Alan'sdeath had made her task impossible; but if Dolly could fill herplace for the sake of humanity, she would not regret it. Enoughfor her to have martyred herself; she asked no mercenary palm andcrown of martyrdom. 

And she was happy in her life; as far as a certain tranquil senseof duty done could make her, she was passively happy. Her kind ofjournalism was so commonplace and so anonymous that she was sparedthat worst insult of seeing her hack-work publicly criticised asthough it afforded some adequate reflection of the mind thatproduced it, instead of being merely an index of taste in the mindsof those for whose use it was intended. So she lived for years, amachine for the production of articles and reviews; and a devotedmother to little developing Dolly. 

On Dolly the hopes of half the world now centred. 

XV. 

Not that Herminia had not at times hard struggles and soretemptations. One of the hardest and sorest came when Dolly wasabout six years old. And this was the manner of it. 

One day the child who was to reform the world was returning fromsome errand on which her mother had sent her, when her attention wasattracted by a very fine carriage, stopping at a door not far fromtheir lodgings. Now Dolly had always a particular weakness foreverything "grand;" and so grand a turn-out as this one was rare intheir neighborhood. She paused and stared hard at it. "Whose is it, Mrs. Biggs?" she asked awe-struck of the friendly charwoman, whohappened to pass at the moment, --the charwoman who frequently camein to do a day's cleaning at her mother's lodging-house. Mrs. Biggsknew it well; "It's Sir Anthony Merrick's, " she answered in thatpeculiarly hushed voice with which the English poor always utter thenames of the titled classes. And so in fact it was; for the famousgout doctor had lately been knighted for his eminent services insaving a royal duke from the worst effects of his own self-indulgence. Dolly put one fat finger to her lip, and elevated her eyebrows, andlooked grave at once. Sir Anthony Merrick! What a very grand gentlemanhe must be indeed, and how nice it must seem to be able to drive in sodistinguished a vehicle with a liveried footman. 

As she paused and looked, lost in enjoyment of that beatificvision, Sir Anthony himself emerged from the porch. Dolly took agood stare at him. He was handsome, austere, close-shaven, implacable. His profile was clear-cut, like Trajan's on an aureus. Dolly thought that was just how so grand a gentleman ought to look;and, so thinking, she glanced up at him, and with a flash of herwhite teeth, smiled her childish approval. The austere oldgentleman, unwontedly softened by that cherub face, --for indeed shewas as winsome as a baby angel of Raphael's, --stooped down andpatted the bright curly head that turned up to him so trustfully. "What's your name, little woman?" he asked, with a sudden wave ofgentleness. 

And Dolly, all agog at having arrested so grand an old gentleman'sattention, spoke up in her clear treble, "Dolores Barton. "

Sir Anthony started. Was this a trap to entangle him? He was bornsuspicious, and he feared that woman. But he looked into Dolly'sblue eyes of wonder, and all doubt fled from him. Was it blood?was it instinct? was it unconscious nature? At any rate, thechild seemed to melt the grandfather's heart as if by magic. Longyears after, when the due time came, Dolly remembered that melting. To the profound amazement of the footman, who stood with thecarriage-door ready open in his hand, the old man bent down andkissed the child's red lips. "God bless you, my dear!" hemurmured, with unwonted tenderness to his son's daughter. Then hetook out his purse, and drew from it a whole gold sovereign. "That's for you, my child, " he said, fondling the pretty goldencurls. "Take it home, and tell your mammy an old man in the streetgave it to you. "

But the coachman observed to the footman, as they drove on togetherto the next noble patient's, "You may take your oath on it, Mr. Wells, that little 'un there was Mr. Alan's love-child!"

Dolly had never held so much money in her hand before; she ranhome, clutching it tight, and burst in upon Herminia with thestartling news that Sir Anthony Merrick, a very grand gentleman ina very fine carriage, had given a gold piece to her. 

Gold pieces were rare in the calm little attic, but Herminia caughther child up with a cry of terror; and that very same evening, shechanged the tainted sovereign with Dolly for another one, and sentSir Anthony's back in an envelope without a word to Harley Street. The child who was born to free half the human race from aeons ofslavery must be kept from all contagion of man's gold and man'sbribery. Yet Dolly never forgot the grand gentleman's name, thoughshe hadn't the least idea why he gave that yellow coin to her. 

Out of this small episode, however, grew Herminia's great temptation. 

For Sir Anthony, being a man tenacious of his purpose, went homethat day full of relenting thoughts about that girl Dolores. Hergolden hair had sunk deep into his heart. She was Alan's ownchild, after all; she had Alan's blue eyes; and in a world whereyour daughters go off and marry men you don't like, while your sonsturn out badly, and don't marry at all to vex you, it's somethingto have some fresh young life of your blood to break in upon yourchilly old age and cheer you. So the great doctor called a fewdays later at Herminia's lodgings, and having first ascertainedthat Herminia herself was out, had five minutes' conversation alonewith her landlady. 

There were times, no doubt, when Mrs. Barton was ill? The landladywith the caution of her class, admitted that might be so. Andtimes no doubt when Mrs. Barton was for the moment in arrears withher rent? The landlady, good loyal soul, demurred to thatsuggestion; she knit her brows and hesitated. Sir Anthony hastenedto set her mind at rest. His intentions were most friendly. Hewished to keep a watch, --a quiet, well-meaning, unsuspectedwatch, --over Mrs. Barton's necessities. He desired, in point of fact, if need were, to relieve them. Mrs. Barton was distantly connectedwith relations of his own; and his notion was that without seemingto help her in obtrusive ways, he would like to make sure Mrs. Barton got into no serious difficulties. Would the landlady be sogood--a half sovereign glided into that subservient palm--as to letSir Anthony know if she ever had reason to suspect a very seriousstrain was being put on Mrs. Barton's resources?

The landlady, dropping the modern apology for a courtesy, promisedwith effusion under pressure of hard cash, to accede to SirAnthony's benevolent wishes. The more so as she'd do anything toserve dear Mrs. Barton, who was always in everything a perfectlady, most independent, in fact; one of the kind as wouldn't bebeholden to anybody for a farthing. 

Some months passed away before the landlady had cause to report toSir Anthony. But during the worst depths of the next Londonwinter, when gray fog gathered thick in the purlieus of Marylebone, and shivering gusts groaned at the street corners, poor littleDolly caught whooping-cough badly. On top of the whooping-coughcame an attack of bronchitis; and on top of the bronchitis aserious throat trouble. Herminia sat up night after night, nursingher child, and neglecting the work on which both depended forsubsistence. Week by week things grew worse and worse; and SirAnthony, kept duly informed by the landlady, waited and watched, and bided his time in silence. At last the case became desperate. Herminia had no money left to pay her bill or buy food; and onestring to her bow after another broke down in journalism. Herplace as the weekly lady's-letter writer to an illustrated paperpassed on to a substitute; blank poverty stared her in the face, inevitable. When it came to pawning the type-writer, as thelandlady reported, Sir Anthony smiled a grim smile to himself. Themoment for action had now arrived. He would put on pressure to getaway poor Alan's illegitimate child from that dreadful woman. 

Next day he called. Dolly was dangerously ill, --so ill thatHerminia couldn't find it in her heart to dismiss the great doctorfrom her door without letting him see her. And Sir Anthony sawher. The child recognized him at once and rallied, and smiled athim. She stretched her little arms. She must surely get well if agentleman who drove in so fine a carriage, and scattered sovereignslike ha'pennies, came in to prescribe for her. Sir Anthony wasflattered at her friendly reception. Those thin small arms touchedthe grandfather's heart. "She will recover, " he said; "but sheneeds good treatment, delicacies, refinements. " Then he slippedout of the room, and spoke seriously to Herminia. "Let her come tome, " he urged. "I'll adopt her, and give her her father's name. It will be better for herself; better for her future. She shall betreated as my granddaughter, well-taught, well-kept; and you maysee her every six months for a fortnight's visit. If you consent, I will allow you a hundred a year for yourself. Let bygones bebygones. For the child's sake, say YES! She needs so much thatyou can never give her!"

Poor Herminia was sore tried. As for the hundred a year, shecouldn't dream of accepting it; but like a flash it went throughher brain how many advantages Dolly could enjoy in that wealthyhousehold that the hard-working journalist could not possiblyafford her. She thought of the unpaid bills, the empty cupboard, the wolf at the door, the blank outlook for the future. For asecond, she half hesitated. "Come, come!" Sir Anthony said; "forthe child's own sake; you won't be so selfish as to stand in herway, will you?"

Those words roused Herminia to a true sense of her duty. "SirAnthony Merrick, " she said holding her breath, "that child is mychild, and my dear dead Alan's. I owe it to Alan, --I owe it toher, --to bring her up in the way that Alan would approve of. Ibrought her into the world; and my duty is to do what I can todischarge the responsibilities I then undertook to her. I musttrain her up to be a useful citizen. Not for thousands would Iresign the delight and honor of teaching my child to those whowould teach her what Alan and I believed to be pernicious; whowould teach her to despise her mother's life, and to reject theholy memory of her father. As I said to you before, that day atPerugia, so I say to you now, 'Thy money perish with thee. ' Youneed never again come here to bribe me. "

"Is that final?" Sir Anthony asked. And Herminia answered with abow, "Yes, final; quite final. "

Sir Anthony bent his head and left. Herminia stood face to facewith abject poverty. Spurred by want, by indignation, by terror, by a sense of the absolute necessity for action, she carried herwriting materials then and there into Dolly's sick-room, andsitting by her child's cot, she began to write, she hardly knewwhat, as the words themselves came to her. In a fever ofexcitement she wrote and wrote and wrote. She wrote as one writesin the silence of midnight. It was late before she finished. Whenher manuscript was complete, she slipped out and posted it to aweekly paper. It appeared that same Saturday, and was thebeginning of Herminia's most valuable connection. 

But even after she had posted it the distracted mother could notpause or rest. Dolly tossed and turned in her sleep, and Herminiasat watching her. She pined for sympathy. Vague ancestralyearnings, gathering head within her, made her long to pray, --ifonly there had been anybody or anything to pray to. She claspedher bloodless hands in an agony of solitude. Oh, for a friend tocomfort! At last her overwrought feelings found vent in verse. She seized a pencil from her desk, and sitting by Dolly's side, wrote down her heart-felt prayer, as it came to her that moment, --

 A crowned Caprice is god of the world: On his stony breast are his white wings furled. No ear to hearken, no eye to see, No heart to feel for a man hath he. 

 But his pitiless hands are swift to smite, And his mute lips utter one word of might In the clash of gentler souls and rougher-- 'Wrong must thou do, or wrong must suffer. '

 Then grant, O dumb, blind god, at least that we Rather the sufferers than the doers be. 

XVI. 

A change came at last, when Dolly was ten years old. Among the menof whom Herminia saw most in these later days, were the littlegroup of advanced London socialists who call themselves theFabians. And among her Fabian friends one of the most active, themost eager, the most individual, was Harvey Kynaston. 

He was a younger man by many years than poor Alan had been; aboutHerminia's own age; a brilliant economist with a future before him. He aimed at the Cabinet. When first he met Herminia he was charmedat one glance by her chastened beauty, her breadth and depth ofsoul, her transparent sincerity of purpose and action. Thosewistful eyes captured him. Before many days passed he had fallenin love with her. But he knew her history; and, taking it forgranted she must still be immersed in regret for Alan's loss, hehardly even reckoned the chances of her caring for him. 

'Tis a common case. Have you ever noticed that if you meet awoman, famous for her connection with some absorbing grief, somehistoric tragedy, you are half appalled at first sight to find thatat times she can laugh, and make merry, and look gay with the restof us. Her callous glee shocks you. You mentally expect her to beforever engaged in the tearful contemplation of her own tragicfate; wrapt up in those she has lost, like the mourners in a Pieta. Whenever you have thought of her, you have connected her in yourmind with that one fact in her history, which perhaps may havehappened a great many years ago. But to you, it is as yesterday. You forget that since then many things have occurred to her. Shehas lived her life; she has learned to smile; human nature itselfcannot feed for years on the continuous contemplation of its owndeepest sorrows. It even jars you to find that the widow of apatriotic martyr, a murdered missionary, has her moments ofenjoyment, and must wither away without them. 

So, just at first, Harvey Kynaston was afraid to let Herminia seehow sincerely he admired her. He thought of her rather as onewhose life is spent, who can bring to the banquet but the cold deadashes of a past existence. Gradually, however, as he saw more andmore of her, it began to strike him that Herminia was still in allessentials a woman. His own throbbing heart told him so as he satand talked with her. He thrilled at her approach. Bit by bit theidea rose up in his mind that this lonely soul might still be won. He set to work in earnest to woo and win her. 

As for Herminia, many men had paid her attentions already in herunwedded widowhood. Some of them, after the fashion of men, havingheard garbled versions of her tragic story, and seeking to gainsome base advantage for themselves from their knowledge of herpast, strove to assail her crudely. Them, with unerring womanlyinstinct, she early discerned, and with unerring feminine tact, undeceived and humbled. Others, genuinely attracted by her beautyand her patience, paid real court to her heart; but all these fellfar short of her ideal standard. With Harvey Kynaston it wasdifferent. She admired him as a thinker; she liked him as a man;and she felt from the first moment that no friend, since Alan died, had stirred her pulse so deeply as he did. 

For some months they met often at the Fabian meetings andelsewhere; till at last it became a habit with them to spend theirSunday mornings on some breezy wold in the country together. Herminia was still as free as ever from any shrinking terror as towhat "people might say;" as of old, she lived her life for herselfand her conscience, not for the opinion of a blind and superstitiousmajority. On one such August morning, they had taken the train fromLondon to Haslemere, with Dolly of course by their side, and thenhad strolled up Hind Head by the beautiful footpath which mounts atfirst through a chestnut copse, and then between heather-clad hillsto the summit. At the loneliest turn of the track, where two purpleglens divide, Harvey Kynaston seated himself on the soft bed ofling; Herminia sank by his side; and Dolly, after awhile, notunderstanding their conversation, wandered off by herself a littleway afield in search of harebells and spotted orchises. Dolly foundher mother's friends were apt to bore her; she preferred the societyof the landlady's daughters. 

It was a delicious day. Hard by, a slow-worm sunned himself on thebasking sand. Blue dragon-flies flashed on gauze wings in thehollows. Harvey Kynaston looked on Herminia's face and saw thatshe was fair. With an effort he made up his mind to speak at last. In plain and simple words he asked her reverently the same questionthat Alan had asked her so long ago on the Holmwood. 

Herminia's throat flushed a rosy red, and an unwonted sense ofpleasure stole over that hard-worked frame as she listened to hiswords; for indeed she was fond of him. But she answered him atonce without a moment's hesitation. "Harvey, I'm glad you ask me, for I like and admire you. But I feel sure beforehand my answermust be NO. For I think what you mean is to ask, will I marryyou?"

The man gazed at her hard. He spoke low and deferentially. "Yes, Herminia, " he replied. "I do mean, will you marry me? I know, of course, how you feel about this matter; I know what you havesacrificed, how deeply you have suffered, for the sake of yourprinciples. And that's just why I plead with you now to ignorethem. You have given proof long ago of your devotion to the right. You may surely fall back this second time upon the easier way ofordinary humanity. In theory, Herminia, I accept your point ofview; I approve the equal liberty of men and women, politically, socially, personally, ethically. But in practice, I don't want tobring unnecessary trouble on the head of a woman I love; and tolive together otherwise than as the law directs does bringunnecessary trouble, as you know too profoundly. That is the onlyreason why I ask you to marry me. And Herminia, Herminia, " heleant forward appealingly, "for the love's sake I bear you, I hopeyou will consent to it. "

His voice was low and tender. Herminia, sick at heart with thatlong fierce struggle against overwhelming odds, could almost havesaid YES to him. Her own nature prompted her; she was very, veryfond of him. But she paused for a second. Then she answered himgravely. 

"Harvey, " she said, looking deep into his honest brown eyes, "aswe grow middle-aged, and find how impossible it must ever be toachieve any good in a world like this, how sad a fate it is to beborn a civilized being in a barbaric community, I'm afraid moralimpulse half dies down within us. The passionate aim grows cold;the ardent glow fades and flickers into apathy. I'm ashamed totell you the truth, it seems such weakness; yet as you ask me this, I think I WILL tell you. Once upon a time, if you had made such aproposal to me, if you had urged me to be false to my dearestprinciples, to sin against the light, to deny the truth, I wouldhave flashed forth a NO upon you without one moment's hesitation. And now, in my disillusioned middle age what do I feel? Do youknow, I almost feel tempted to give way to this Martinmas summer oflove, to stultify my past by unsaying and undoing everything. ForI love you, Harvey. If I were to give way now, as George Eliotgave way, as almost every woman who once tried to live a free lifefor her sisters' sake, has given way in the end, I shouldcounteract any little good my example has ever done or may ever doin the world; and Harvey, strange as it sounds, I feel more thanhalf inclined to do it. But I WILL not, I WILL not; and I'll tellyou why. It's not so much principle that prevents me now. I admitthat freely. The torpor of middle age is creeping over myconscience. It's simple regard for personal consistency, and forDolly's position. How can I go back upon the faith for which Ihave martyred myself? How can I say to Dolly, 'I wouldn't marryyour father in my youth, for honor's sake; but I have consented inmiddle life to sell my sisters' cause for a man I love, and for theconsideration of society; to rehabilitate myself too late with aworld I despise by becoming one man's slave, as I swore I neverwould be. ' No, no, dear Harvey; I can't do that. Some sense ofpersonal continuity restrains me still. It is the Nemesis of ouryouth; we can't go back in our later life on the holier and purerideals of our girlhood. "

"Then you say no definitely?" Harvey Kynaston asked. 

Herminia's voice quivered. "I say no definitely, " she answered;"unless you can consent to live with me on the terms on which Ilived with Dolly's father. "

The man hesitated a moment. Then he began to plead hard forreconsideration. But Herminia's mind was made up. She couldn'tbelie her past; she couldn't be false to the principles for whosesake she had staked and lost everything. "No, no, " she saidfirmly, over and over again. "You must take me my own way, or youmust go without me. "

And Harvey Kynaston couldn't consent to take her her own way. Hisfaith was too weak, his ambitions were too earthly. "Herminia, " hesaid, before they parted that afternoon, "we may still be friends;still dear friends as ever? This episode need make no differenceto a very close companionship?"

"It need make no difference, " Herminia answered, with a light touchof her hand. "Harvey, I have far too few friends in the worldwillingly to give up one of them. Come again and go down withDolly and me to Hind Head as usual next Sunday. "

"Thank you, " the man answered. "Herminia, I wish it could havebeen otherwise. But since I must never have you, I can promise youone thing; I will never marry any other woman. "

Herminia started at the words. "Oh, no, " she cried quickly. "Howcan you speak like that? How can you say anything so wrong, sountrue, so foolish? To be celibate is a very great misfortune evenfor a woman; for a man it is impossible, it is cruel, it is wicked. I endure it myself, for my child's sake, and because I find it hardto discover the help meet for me; or because, when discovered, herefuses to accept me in the only way in which I can bestow myself. But for a man to pretend to live celibate is to cloak hateful wrongunder a guise of respectability. I should be unhappy if I thoughtany man was doing such a vicious thing out of desire to please me. Take some other woman on free terms if you can; but if you cannot, it is better you should marry than be a party to still deeper andmore loathsome slavery. "

And from that day forth they were loyal friends, no more, one tothe other. 

XVII. 

And yet our Herminia was a woman after all. Some three yearslater, when Harvey Kynaston came to visit her one day, and told herhe was really going to be married, --what sudden thrill was thisthat passed through and through her. Her heart stood still. Shewas aware that she regretted the comparative loss of a very nearand dear acquaintance. 

She knew she was quite wrong. It was the leaven of slavery. Butthese monopolist instincts, which have wrought more harm in theworld we live in than fire or sword or pestilence or tempest, hardly die at all as yet in a few good men, and die, fighting hardfor life, even in the noblest women. 

She reasoned with herself against so hateful a feeling. Though sheknew the truth, she found it hard to follow. No man indeed istruly civilized till he can say in all sincerity to every woman ofall the women he loves, to every woman of all the women who lovehim, "Give me what you can of your love and of yourself; but neverstrive for my sake to deny any love, to strangle any impulse thatpants for breath within you. Give me what you can, while you can, without grudging, but the moment you feel you love me no more, don't pollute your own body by yielding it up to a man you haveceased to desire; don't do injustice to your own prospectivechildren by giving them a father whom you no longer respect, oradmire, or yearn for. Guard your chastity well. Be mine as muchas you will, as long as you will, to such extent as you will, butbefore all things be your own; embrace and follow every instinct ofpure love that nature, our mother, has imparted within you. " Nowoman, in turn, is truly civilized till she can say to every man ofall the men she loves, of all the men who love her, "Give me whatyou can of your love, and of yourself; but don't think I am sovile, and so selfish, and so poor as to desire to monopolize you. Respect me enough never to give me your body without giving me yourheart; never to make me the mother of children whom you desire notand love not. " When men and women can say that alike, the worldwill be civilized. Until they can say it truly, the world will beas now a jarring battlefield for the monopolist instincts. 

Those jealous and odious instincts have been the bane of humanity. They have given us the stiletto, the Morgue, the bowie-knife. Ourrace must inevitably in the end outlive them. The test of man'splane in the scale of being is how far he has outlived them. Theyare surviving relics of the ape and tiger. But we must let the apeand tiger die. We must cease to be Calibans. We must begin to behuman. 

Patriotism is the one of these lowest vices which most oftenmasquerades in false garb as a virtue. But what after all ISpatriotism? "My country, right or wrong, and just because it is mycountry!" This is clearly nothing more than collective selfishness. Often enough, indeed, it is not even collective. It means merely, "MY business-interests against the business-interests of otherpeople, and let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to supportthem. " At other times it means pure pride of race, and pure lust ofconquest; "MY country against other countries; MY army and navyagainst other fighters; MY right to annex unoccupied territoryagainst the equal right of all other peoples; MY power to oppressall weaker nationalities, all inferior races. " It NEVER means orcan mean anything good or true. For if a cause be just, likeIreland's, or once Italy's, then 'tis a good man's duty to espouseit with warmth, be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad, then 'tis a good man's duty to oppose it, tooth and nail, irrespective of your patriotism. True, a good man will feel moresensitively anxious that strict justice should be done by theparticular community of which chance has made him a component memberthan by any others; but then, people who feel acutely this jointresponsibility of all the citizens to uphold the moral right are notpraised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that ourown country should strive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, more generous than other countries, --the only kind ofpatriotism worth a moment's thought in a righteous man's eyes, isaccounted by most men both wicked and foolish. 

Then comes the monopolist instinct of property. That, on the faceof it, is a baser and more sordid one. For patriotism at least canlay claim to some sort of delusive expansiveness beyond mereindividual interest; whereas property stops short at the narrowestlimits of personality. It is no longer "Us against the world!" but"Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the last word of theintercivic war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars thefair face of our common country with its antisocial notice-boards, "Trespassers will be prosecuted. " It says in effect, "This is myland. As I believe, God made it; but I have acquired it, andtabooed it to myself, for my own enjoyment. The grass on the woldgrows green; but only for me. The mountains rise glorious in themorning sun; no foot of man, save mine and my gillies' shall treadthem. The waterfalls leap white from the ledge in the glen; avauntthere, non-possessors; your eye shall never see them. For you themuddy street; for me, miles of upland. All this is my own. And Ichoose to monopolize it. "

Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field, " he criesaloud, despite his own Scripture; "I will join railway to railway. I will juggle into my own hands all the instruments for theproduction of wealth that my cunning can lay hold of; and I willuse them for my own purposes against producer and consumer alikewith impartial egoism. Corn and coal shall lie in the hollow of myhand. I will enrich myself by making dear by craft the necessariesof life; the poor shall lack, that I may roll down fair streets inneedless luxury. Let them starve, and feed me!" That temper, too, humanity must outlive. And those who are incapable of outliving itof themselves must be taught by stern lessons, as in the splendiduprising of the spirit of man in France, that their race hasoutstripped them. 

Next comes the monopoly of human life, the hideous wrong ofslavery. That, thank goodness, is now gone. 'Twas the vilest ofthem all--the nakedest assertion of the monopolist platform:--"Youlive, not for yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregardyour claims to your own body and soul, and use you as my chattel. "That worst form has died. It withered away before the moralindignation even of existing humanity. We have the satisfaction ofseeing one dragon slain, of knowing that one monopolist instinct atleast is now fairly bred out of us. 

Last, and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes themonopoly of the human heart, which is known as marriage. Based uponthe primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, stunning herby repeated strokes of the club or spear, and dragging her off bythe hair of her head as a slave to her captor's hut or rock-shelter, this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time bysome strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin. The Man says now to himself, "This woman is mine. Law and the Churchhave bestowed her on me. Mine for better, for worse; mine, drunk orsober. If she ventures to have a heart or a will of her own, woebetide her! I have tabooed her for life: let any other man touchher, let her so much as cast eyes on any other man to admire ordesire him--and, knife, dagger, or law-court, they shall both ofthem answer for it. " There you have in all its native deformityanother monopolist instinct--the deepest-seated of all, thegrimmest, the most vindictive. "She is not yours, " says the moralphilosopher of the new dispensation; "she is her own; release her!The Turk hales his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and castsher quick into the eddying Bosphorus. The Christian Englishman, withmore lingering torture, sets spies on her life, drags what he thinksher shame before a prying court, and divorces her with contumely. All this is monopoly, and essentially slavery. Mankind must outliveit on its way up to civilization. "

And then the Woman, thus taught by her lords, has begun to retortin these latter days by endeavoring to enslave the Man in return. Unable to conceive the bare idea of freedom for both sexes alike, she seeks equality in an equal slavery. That she will neverachieve. The future is to the free. We have transcended serfdom. Women shall henceforth be the equals of men, not by levelling down, but by levelling up; not by fettering the man, but by elevating, emancipating, unshackling the woman. 

All this Herminia knew well. All these things she turned over inher mind by herself on the evening of the day when Harvey Kynastoncame to tell her of his approaching marriage. Why, then, did shefeel it to some extent a disappointment? Why so flat at hishappiness? Partly, she said to herself, because it is difficult tolive down in a single generation the jealousies and distrustsengendered in our hearts by so many ages of harem life. But morestill, she honestly believed, because it is hard to be a free soulin an enslaved community. No unit can wholly sever itself from thesocial organism of which it is a corpuscle. If all the world werelike herself, her lot would have been different. Affection wouldhave been free; her yearnings for sympathy would have been filledto the full by Harvey Kynaston or some other. As it was, she hadbut that one little fraction of a man friend to solace her; toresign him altogether to another woman, leaving herself bankrupt oflove, was indeed a bitter trial to her. 

Yet for her principles' sake and Dolly's, she never let HarveyKynaston or his wife suspect it; as long as she lived, she was atrue and earnest friend at all times to both of them. 

XVIII. 

Meanwhile, Dolores was growing up to woman's estate. And she wasgrowing into a tall, a graceful, an exquisitely beautiful woman. 

Yet in some ways Herminia had reason to be dissatisfied with herdaughter's development. Day by day she watched for signs of theexpected apostolate. Was Dolores pressing forward to the mark forthe prize of her high calling? Her mother half doubted it. Slowlyand regretfully, as the growing girl approached the years when shemight be expected to think for herself, Herminia began to perceivethat the child of so many hopes, of so many aspirations, the childpre-destined to regenerate humanity, was thinking for herself--in aretrograde direction. Incredible as it seemed to Herminia, in thedaughter of such a father and such a mother, Dolores' ideas--nay, worse her ideals--were essentially commonplace. Not that she hadmuch opportunity of imbibing commonplace opinions from any outsidesource; she redeveloped them from within by a pure effort ofatavism. She had reverted to lower types. She had thrown back tothe Philistine. 

Heredity of mental and moral qualities is a precarious matter. These things lie, as it were, on the topmost plane of character;they smack of the individual, and are therefore far less likely topersist in offspring than the deeper-seated and better-establishedpeculiarities of the family, the clan, the race, or the species. They are idiosyncratic. Indeed, when we remember how greatly themental and moral faculties differ from brother to brother, theproduct of the same two parental factors, can we wonder that theydiffer much more from father to son, the product of one like factoralone, diluted by the addition of a relatively unknown quality, thematernal influence? However this may be, at any rate, Doloresearly began to strike out for herself all the most ordinary andstereotyped opinions of British respectability. It seemed as ifthey sprang up in her by unmitigated reversion. She had neverheard in the society of her mother's lodgings any but the freestand most rational ideas; yet she herself seemed to hark back, ofinternal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of herremoter ancestry. She showed her individuality only by evolvingfor herself all the threadbare platitudes of ordinary convention. 

Moreover, it is not parents who have most to do with moulding thesentiments and opinions of their children. From the beginning, Dolly thought better of the landlady's views and ideas than of hermother's. When she went to school, she considered the moralstandpoint of the other girls a great deal more sensible than themoral standpoint of Herminia's attic. She accepted the beliefs andopinions of her schoolfellows because they were natural andcongenial to her character. In short, she had what the world callscommon-sense: she revolted from the unpractical Utopianism of hermother. 

From a very early age, indeed, this false note in Dolly had begunto make itself heard. While she was yet quite a child, Herminianoticed with a certain tender but shrinking regret that Dollyseemed to attach undue importance to the mere upholsteries andequipages of life, --to rank, wealth, title, servants, carriages, jewelry. At first, to be sure, Herminia hoped this might prove butthe passing foolishness of childhood: as Dolly grew up, however, itbecame clearer each day that the defect was in the grain--thatDolly's whole mind was incurably and congenitally aristocratic orsnobbish. She had that mean admiration for birth, position, adventitious advantages, which is the mark of the beast in theessentially aristocratic or snobbish nature. She admired peoplebecause they were rich, because they were high-placed, because theywere courted, because they were respected; not because they weregood, because they were wise, because they were noble-natured, because they were respect-worthy. 

But even that was not all. In time, Herminia began to perceivewith still profounder sorrow that Dolly had no spontaneous care orregard for righteousness. Right and wrong meant to her only whatwas usual and the opposite. She seemed incapable of consideringthe intrinsic nature of any act in itself apart from the praise orblame meted out to it by society. In short, she was sunk in thesame ineffable slough of moral darkness as the ordinary inhabitantof the morass of London. 

To Herminia this slow discovery, as it dawned bit by bit upon her, put the final thorn in her crown of martyrdom. The child on whoseeducation she had spent so much pains, the child whose success inthe deep things of life was to atone for her own failure, the childwho was born to be the apostle of freedom to her sisters indarkness, had turned out in the most earnest essentials ofcharacter a complete disappointment, and had ruined the last hopethat bound her to existence. 

Bitterer trials remained. Herminia had acted through life to agreat extent with the idea ever consciously present to her mindthat she must answer to Dolly for every act and every feeling. Shehad done all she did with a deep sense of responsibility. Now itloomed by degrees upon her aching heart that Dolly's verdict wouldin almost every case be a hostile one. The daughter was growingold enough to question and criticise her mother's proceedings; shewas beginning to understand that some mysterious difference markedoff her own uncertain position in life from the solid position ofthe children who surrounded her--the children born under thosespecial circumstances which alone the man-made law chooses to stampwith the seal of its recognition. Dolly's curiosity was shylyaroused as to her dead father's family. Herminia had done her bestto prepare betimes for this inevitable result by setting before herchild, as soon as she could understand it, the true moral doctrineas to the duties of parenthood. But Dolly's own developmentrendered all such steps futile. There is no more silly andpersistent error than the belief of parents that they can influenceto any appreciable extent the moral ideas and impulses of theirchildren. These things have their springs in the bases ofcharacter: they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot bealtered or affected after birth by the foolishness of preaching. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, youwill find soon enough he will choose his own course for himself anddepart from it. 

Already when Dolly was a toddling little mite and met her mother'sfather in the church in Marylebone, it had struck her as odd thatwhile they themselves were so poor and ill-clad, her grandpapashould be such a grand old gentleman of such a dignified aspect. As she grew older and older, and began to understand a little morethe world she lived in, she wondered yet more profoundly how itcould happen, if her grandpapa was indeed the Very Reverend, theDean of Dunwich, that her mamma should be an outcast from herfather's church, and scarcely well seen in the best carriagecompany. She had learnt that deans are rather grand people--almostas much so as admirals; that they wear shovel-hats to distinguishthem from the common ruck of rectors; that they lived in finehouses in a cathedral close; and that they drive in a victoria witha coachman in livery. So much essential knowledge of the church ofChrist she had gained for herself by personal observation; forfacts like these were what interested Dolly. She couldn'tunderstand, then, why she and her mother should live precariouslyin a very small attic; should never be visited by her mother'sbrothers, one of whom she knew to be a Prebendary of Old Sarum, while the other she saw gazetted as a Colonel of Artillery; andshould be totally ignored by her mother's sister, Ermyntrude, whololled in a landau down the sunny side of Bond Street. 

At first, indeed, it only occurred to Dolly that her mother'sextreme and advanced opinions had induced a social breach betweenherself and the orthodox members of her family. Even that Dollyresented; why should mamma hold ideas of her own which shut herdaughter out from the worldly advantages enjoyed to the full by therest of her kindred? Dolly had no particular religious ideas; thesubject didn't interest her; and besides, she thought the NewTestament talked about rich and poor in much the same unpracticalnebulous way that mamma herself did--in fact, she regarded it withsome veiled contempt as a rather sentimental radical publication. But, she considered, for all that, that it was probably true enoughas far as the facts and the theology went; and she couldn'tunderstand why a person like mamma should cut herself offcontumaciously from the rest of the world by presuming todisbelieve a body of doctrine which so many rich and well-gaiteredbishops held worthy of credence. All stylish society accepted thetenets of the Church of England. But in time it began to occur toher that there might be some deeper and, as she herself would havesaid, more disgraceful reason for her mother's alienation from sorespectable a family. For to Dolly, that was disgraceful which theworld held to be so. Things in themselves, apart from the world'sword, had for her no existence. Step by step, as she grew up toblushing womanhood, it began to strike her with surprise that hergrandfather's name had been, like her own, Barton. "Did you marryyour cousin, mamma?" she asked Herminia one day quite suddenly. 

And Herminia, flushing scarlet at the unexpected question, thefirst with which Dolly had yet ventured to approach that dangerousquicksand, replied with a deadly thrill, "No, my darling. Why doyou ask me?"

"Because, " Dolly answered abashed, "I just wanted to know why yourname should be Barton, the same as poor grandpapa's. "

Herminia didn't dare to say too much just then. "Your dearfather, " she answered low, "was not related to me in any way. "

Dolly accepted the tone as closing the discussion for the present;but the episode only strengthened her underlying sense of a mysterysomewhere in the matter to unravel. 

In time, Herminia sent her child to a day-school. Though she hadalways taught Dolly herself as well as she was able, she felt it amatter of duty, as her daughter grew up, to give her something morethan the stray ends of time in a busy journalist's moments ofleisure. At the school, where Dolly was received without question, on Miss Smith-Water's recommendation, she found herself thrown muchinto the society of other girls, drawn for the most part from thenarrowly Mammon-worshipping ranks of London professional society. Here, her native tendencies towards the real religion of England, the united worship of Success and Respectability, were encouragedto the utmost. But she noticed at times with a shy shrinking thatsome few of the girls had heard vague rumors about her mother as amost equivocal person, who didn't accept all the currentsuperstitions, and were curious to ask her questions as to herfamily and antecedents. Crimson with shame, Dolly parried suchenquiries as best she could; but she longed all the more herself topierce this dim mystery. Was it a runaway match?--with the groom, perhaps, or the footman? Only the natural shamefacedness of abudding girl in prying into her mother's most domestic secretsprevented Dolores from asking Herminia some day point-blank allabout it. 

But she was gradually becoming aware that some strange atmosphereof doubt surrounded her birth and her mother's history. It filledher with sensitive fears and self-conscious hesitations. 

And if the truth must be told, Dolly never really returned hermother's profound affection. It is often so. The love whichparents lavish upon their children, the children repay, not toparents themselves, but to the next generation. Only when webecome fathers or mothers in our turn do we learn what our fathersand mothers have done for us. Thus it was with Dolly. When oncethe first period of childish dependence was over, she regardedHerminia with a smouldering distrust and a secret dislike thatconcealed itself beneath a mask of unfelt caresses. In her heartof hearts, she owed her mother a grudge for not having put her in aposition in life where she could drive in a carriage with asnarling pug and a clipped French poodle, like Aunt Ermyntrude'schildren. She grew up, smarting under a sullen sense of injustice, all the deeper because she was compelled to stifle it in theprofoundest recesses of her own heart. 

XIX. 

When Dolly was seventeen, a pink wild rose just unrolling itspetals, a very great event occurred in her history. She receivedan invitation to go and stop with some friends in the country. 

The poor child's life had been in a sense so uneventful that thebare prospect of this visit filled her soul beforehand withtremulous anticipation. To be sure, Dolly Barton had always livedin the midmost centre of the Movement in London; she had knownauthors, artists, socialists, the cream of our race; she had beenbrought up in close intercourse with the men and women who areengaged in revolutionizing and remodelling humanity. But this veryfact that she had always lived in the Thick of Things made a changeto the Thin of Things only by so much the more delicious andenchanting. Not that Dolores had not seen a great deal, too, ofthe country. Poor as they were, her mother had taken her to cheaplittle seaside nooks for a week or two of each summer; she had madepilgrimages almost every Sunday in spring or autumn to Leith Hillor Mapledurham; she had even strained her scanty resources to theutmost to afford Dolly an occasional outing in the Ardennes or inNormandy. But what gave supreme importance to this coming visitwas the special fact that Dolly was now for the first time in herlife to find herself "in society. "

Among the friends she had picked up at her Marylebone day-schoolwere two west-country girls, private boarders of the head-mistress's, who came from the neighborhood of Combe Neville in Dorset. Theirname was Compson, and their father was rector of their nativevillage, Upcombe. Dolly liked them very much, and was proudof their acquaintance, because they were reckoned about the mostdistinguished pupils in the school, their mother being the niece ofa local viscount. Among girls in middle-class London sets, even soremote a connection with the title-bearing classes is counted for adistinction. So when Winnie Compson asked Dolly to go and stop withher at her father's rectory during three whole weeks of the summerholidays, Dolly felt that now at last by pure force of native worthshe was rising to her natural position in society. It flattered herthat Winnie should select her for such an honor. 

The preparations for that visit cost Dolly some weeks of thoughtand effort. The occasion demanded it. She was afraid she had nofrocks good enough for such a grand house as the Compsons. "Grand" was indeed a favorite epithet of Dolly's; she applied itimpartially to everything which had to do, as she conceived, withthe life of the propertied and privileged classes. It was a wordat once of cherished and revered meaning--the shibboleth ofher religion. It implied to her mind something remote andunapproachable, yet to be earnestly striven after with all theforces at her disposal. Even Herminia herself stretched a point infavor of an occasion which she could plainly see Dolly regarded asso important; she managed to indulge her darling in a couple ofdainty new afternoon dresses, which touched for her soul the veryutmost verge of allowable luxury. The materials were oriental; thecut was the dressmaker's--not home-built, as usual. Dolly lookedso brave in them, with her rich chestnut hair and her creamycomplexion, --a touch, Herminia thought, of her Italian birthplace, --thatthe mother's full heart leapt up to look at her. It almost madeHerminia wish she was rich--and anti-social, like the richpeople--in order that she might be able to do ample justice to theexquisite grace of Dolly's unfolding figure. Tall, lissome, supple, clear of limb and light of footstep, she was indeed a girlany mother might have been proud of. 

On the day she left London, Herminia thought to herself she hadnever seen her child look so absolutely lovely. The unwonted unionof blue eyes with that olive-gray skin gave a tinge of waywardshyness to her girlish beauty. The golden locks had ripened tonut-brown, but still caught stray gleams of nestling sunlight. 'Twas with a foreboding regret that Herminia kissed Dolly on bothpeach-bloom cheeks at parting. She almost fancied her child mustbe slipping from her motherly grasp when she went off so blithelyto visit these unknown friends, away down in Dorsetshire. YetDolly had so few amusements of the sort young girls require thatHerminia was overjoyed this opportunity should have come to her. She reproached herself not a little in her sensitive heart for evenfeeling sad at Dolly's joyous departure. Yet to Dolly it was adelight to escape from the atmosphere of Herminia's lodgings. Those calm heights chilled her. 

The Compsons' house was quite as "grand" in the reality as Dollyhad imagined it. There was a man-servant in a white tie to wait attable, and the family dressed every evening for dinner. Yet, muchto her surprise, Dolly found from the first the grandeur did not inthe least incommode her. On the contrary, she enjoyed it. Shefelt forthwith she was to the manner born. This was clearly thelife she was intended by nature to live, and might actually havebeen living--she, the granddaughter of so grand a man as the lateDean of Dunwich--had it not been for poor Mamma's ridiculousfancies. Mamma was so faddy! Before Dolly had spent three wholedays at the rectory, she talked just as the Compsons did; shepicked up by pure instinct the territorial slang of the countyfamilies. One would have thought, to hear her discourse, she haddressed for dinner every night of her life, and passed her days inthe society of the beneficed clergy. 

But even that did not exhaust the charm of Upcombe for Dolly. Forthe first time in her life, she saw something of men, --real men, with horses and dogs and guns, --men who went out partridge shootingin the season and rode to hounds across country, not the paleabstractions of cultured humanity who attended the Fabian Societymeetings or wrote things called articles in the London papers. Hermother's friends wore soft felt hats and limp woollen collars; thesereal men were richly clad in tweed suits and fine linen. Dolly wascharmed with them all, but especially with one handsome and manlyyoung fellow named Walter Brydges, the stepson and ward of aneighboring parson. "How you talked with him at tennis to-day!"Winnie Compson said to her friend, as they sat on the edge ofDolly's bed one evening. "He seemed quite taken with you. "

A pink spot of pleasure glowed on Dolly's round cheek to think thata real young man, in good society, whom she met at so grand a houseas the Compsons', should seem to be quite taken with her. 

"Who is he, Winnie?" she asked, trying to look less self-conscious. "He's extremely good-looking. "

"Oh, he's Mr. Hawkshaw's stepson, over at Combe Mary, " Winnieanswered with a nod. "Mr. Hawkshaw's the vicar there till Mamma'snephew is ready to take the living--what they call a warming-pan. But Walter Brydges is Mrs. Hawkshaw's son by her first husband. Old Mr. Brydges was the squire of Combe Mary, and Walter's his onlychild. He's very well off. You might do worse, dear. He'sconsidered quite a catch down in this part of the country. "

"How old is he?" Dolly asked, innocently enough, standing up by thebedside in her dainty white nightgown. But Winnie caught at hermeaning with the preternatural sharpness of the girl brought up inimmediate contact with the landed interest. "Oh, he's of age, " sheanswered quickly, with a knowing nod. "He's come into theproperty; he has nobody on earth but himself to consult about hisdomestic arrangements. "

Dolly was young; Dolly was pretty; Dolly's smile won the world;Dolly was still at the sweetest and most susceptible of ages. Walter Brydges was well off; Walter Brydges was handsome; WalterBrydges had all the glamour of a landed estate, and an Oxfordeducation. He was a young Greek god in a Norfolk shooting-jacket. Moreover, he was a really good and pleasant young fellow. Whatwonder, therefore, if before a week was out, Dolly was very reallyand seriously in love with him? And what wonder if Walter Brydgesin turn, caught by that maiden glance, was in love with Dolly? Hehad every excuse, for she was lithe, and beautiful, and a joyouscompanion; besides being, as the lady's maid justly remarked, aperfect lady. 

One day, after Dolly had been a fortnight at Upcombe, the Compsonsgave a picnic in the wild Combe undercliff. 'Tis a broken wall ofchalk, tumbled picturesquely about in huge shattered masses, anddeliciously overgrown with ferns and blackthorn and golden clustersof close-creeping rock-rose. Mazy paths thread tangled labyrinths offallen rock, or wind round tall clumps of holly-bush and bramble. They lighted their fire under the lee of one such buttress of brokencliff, whose summit was festooned with long sprays of clematis, or"old man's beard, " as the common west-country name expressivelyphrases it. Thistledown hovered on the basking air. There they satand drank their tea, couched on beds of fern or propped firm againstthe rock; and when tea was over, they wandered off, two and two, ostensibly for nothing, but really for the true business of thepicnic--to afford the young men and maidens of the group some chanceof enjoying, unspied, one another's society. 

Dolly and Walter Brydges strolled off by themselves toward therocky shore. There Walter showed her where a brook bubbled clearfrom the fountain-head; by its brink, blue veronicas grew, and tallyellow loosestrife, and tasselled purple heads of great Englisheupatory. Bending down to the stream he picked a little bunch offorget-me-nots, and handed them to her. Dolly pretendedunconsciously to pull the dainty blossoms to pieces, as she sat onthe clay bank hard by and talked with him. "Is that how you treatmy poor flowers?" Walter asked, looking askance at her. 

Dolly glanced down, and drew back suddenly. "Oh, poor littlethings!" she cried, with a quick droop of her long lashes. "Iwasn't thinking what I did. " And she darted a shy glance at him. "If I'd remembered they were forget-me-nots, I don't think I couldhave done it. "

She looked so sweet and pure in her budding innocence, like ahalf-blown water-lily, that the young man, already more thantwo-thirds in love, was instantly captivated. "Because they wereforget-me-nots, or because they were MINE, Miss Barton?" he askedsoftly, all timorousness. 

"Perhaps a little of both, " the girl answered, gazing down, andblushing at each word a still deeper crimson. 

The blush showed sweet on that translucent skin. Walter turned toher with a sudden impulse. "And what are you going to do with themNOW?" he enquired, holding his breath for joy and half-suppressedeagerness. 

Dolly hesitated a moment with genuine modesty. Then her liking forthe well-knit young man overcame her. With a frightened smile herhand stole to her bodice; she fixed them in her bosom. "Will thatdo?" she asked timidly. 

"Yes, that WILL do, " the young man answered, bending forward andseizing her soft fingers in his own. "That will do very well. And, Miss Barton--Dolores--I take it as a sign you don't whollydislike me. "

"I like you very much, " Dolly answered in a low voice, pulling arock-rose from a cleft and tearing it nervously to pieces. 

"Do you LOVE me, Dolly?" the young man insisted. 

Dolly turned her glance to him tenderly, then withdrew it in haste. "I think I MIGHT, in time, " she answered very slowly. 

"Then you will be mine, mine, mine?" Walter cried in an ecstasy. 

Dolly bent her pretty head in reluctant assent, with a torrent ofinner joy. The sun flashed in her chestnut hair. The triumph ofthat moment was to her inexpressible. 

But as for Walter Brydges, he seized the blushing face boldly inhis two brown hands, and imprinted upon it at once three respectfulkisses. Then he drew back, half-terrified at his own temerity. 

XX. 

From that day forth it was understood at Upcombe that Dolly Bartonwas informally engaged to Walter Brydges. Their betrothal would beannounced in the "Morning Post"--"We learn that a marriage has beenarranged, " and so forth--as soon as the chosen bride had returnedto town, and communicated the great news in person to her mother. For reasons of her own, Dolly preferred this delay; she didn't wishto write on the subject to Herminia. Would mamma go and spoil itall? she wondered. It would be just like her. 

The remaining week of her stay at the rectory was a golden dream ofdelight to Dolly. Beyond even the natural ecstasy of first love, the natural triumph of a brilliant engagement, what visions ofuntold splendor danced hourly, day and night, before her dazzledeyes! What masques of magnificence! county balls, garden parties!It was heaven to Dolly. She was going to be grander than hergrandest daydream. 

Walter took her across one afternoon to Combe Mary, and introducedher in due form to his mother and his step-father, who found thepink-and-white girl "so very young, " but saw no other grave faultin her. He even escorted her over the ancestral home of themasters of Combe Mary, in which they were both to live, and whichthe young squire had left vacant of set purpose till he found awife to his mind to fill it. 'Twas the ideal crystallized. Rookscawed from the high elms; ivy clambered to the gables; the tower ofthe village church closed the vista through the avenue. The cup ofDolly's happiness was full to the brim. She was to dwell in amanor-house with livery servants of her own, and to dress fordinner every night of her existence. 

On the very last evening of her stay in Dorsetshire, Walter cameround to see her. Mrs. Compson and the girls managed to keepdiscreetly out of the young people's way; the rector was in hisstudy preparing his Sunday sermon, which arduous intellectualeffort was supposed to engage his close attention for five hours orso weekly. Not a mouse interrupted. So Dolly and her lover hadthe field to themselves from eight to ten in the rectory drawing-room. 

From the first moment of Walter's entry, Dolly was dimly aware, womanlike, of something amiss, something altered in his manner. Not, indeed, that her lover was less affectionate or less tenderthan usual, --if anything he seemed rather more so; but his talk wasembarrassed, pre-occupied, spasmodic. He spoke by fits and starts, and seemed to hold back something. Dolly taxed him with it atlast. Walter tried to put it off upon her approaching departure. But he was an honest young man, and so bad an actor that Dolly, with her keen feminine intuitions, at once detected him. "It'smore than that, " she said, all regret, leaning forward with aquick-gathering moisture in her eye, for she really loved him. "It's more than that, Walter. You've heard something somewherethat you don't want to tell me. "

Walter's color changed at once. He was a man, and therefore buta poor dissembler. "Well, nothing very much, " he admitted, awkwardly. 

Dolly, drew back like one stung; her heart beat fast. "What haveyou heard?" she cried trembling; "Walter, Walter, I love you! Youmust keep nothing back. Tell me NOW what it is. I can bear tohear it. "

The young man hesitated. "Only something my step-father heard froma friend last night, " he replied, floundering deeper and deeper. "Nothing at all about you, darling. Only--well--about yourfamily. "

Dolly's face was red as fire. A lump rose in her throat; shestarted in horror. Then he had found out the Truth. He had probedthe Mystery. 

"Something that makes you sorry you promised to marry me?" shecried aloud in her despair. Heaven faded before her eyes. Whatevil trick could mamma have played her?

As she stood there that moment--proud, crimson, breathless--WalterBrydges would have married her if her father had been a tinker andher mother a gipsy girl. He drew her toward him tenderly. "No, darling, " he cried, kissing her, for he was a chivalrous young man, as he understood chivalry; and to him it was indeed a most cruelblow to learn that his future wife was born out of lawful wedlock. "I'm proud of you; I love you. I worship the very ground yoursweet feet tread on. Nothing on earth could make me anything butgrateful and thankful for the gift of your love you're graciousenough to bestow on me. "

But Dolly drew back in alarm. Not on such terms as those. She, too, had her pride; she, too, had her chivalry. "No, no, " shecried, shrinking. "I don't know what it is. I don't know what itmeans. But till I've gone home to London and asked about it frommother, --oh, Walter, we two are no longer engaged. You are freefrom your promise. "

She said it proudly; she said it bravely. She said it with womanlygrace and dignity. Something of Herminia shone out in her thatmoment. No man should ever take her--to the grandest home--unlesshe took her at her full worth, pleased and proud to win her. 

Walter soothed and coaxed; but Dolores stood firm. Like a rock inthe sea, no assault could move her. As things stood at present, she cried, they were no longer engaged. After she had seen hermother and talked it all over, she would write to him once more, and tell him what she thought of it. 

And, crimson to the finger-tips with shame and modesty, she rushedfrom his presence up to her own dark bed-room. 

XXI. 

Next morning early, Dolly left Combe Neville on her way to London. When she reached the station, Walter was on the platform with abunch of white roses. He handed them to her deferentially as shetook her seat in the third-class carriage; and so sobered was Dollyby this great misfortune that she forgot even to feel a passingpang of shame that Walter should see her travel in that humblefashion. "Remember, " he whispered in her ear, as the train steamedout, "we are still engaged; I hold you to your promise. "

And Dolly, blushing maidenly shame and distress, shook her headdecisively. "Not now, " she answered. "I must wait till I know thetruth. It has always been kept from me. And now I WILL know it. "

She had not slept that night. All the way up to London, she keptturning her doubt over. The more she thought of it, the deeper itgalled her. Her wrath waxed bitter against Herminia for this evilturn she had wrought. The smouldering anger of years blazed forthat last. Had she blighted her daughter's life, and spoiled so faira future by obstinate adherence to those preposterous ideas ofhers?

Never in her life had Dolly loved her mother. At best, she hadfelt towards her that contemptuous toleration which inferior mindsoften extend to higher ones. And now--why, she hated her. 

In London, as it happened, that very morning, Herminia, walkingacross Regent's Park, had fallen in with Harvey Kynaston, and theirtalk had turned upon this self-same problem. 

"What will you do when she asks you about it, as she must, sooneror later?" the man inquired. 

And Herminia, smiling that serene sweet smile of hers, made answerat once without a second's hesitation, "I shall confess the wholetruth to her. "

"But it might be so bad for her, " Harvey Kynaston went on. Andthen he proceeded to bring up in detail casuistic objections onthe score of a young girl's modesty; all of which fell flat onHerminia's more honest and consistent temperament. 

"I believe in the truth, " she said simply; "and I'm never afraid ofit. I don't think a lie, or even a suppression, can ever be goodin the end for any one. The Truth shall make you Free. That oneprinciple in life can guide one through everything. "

In the evening, when Dolly came home, her mother ran out proudlyand affectionately to kiss her. But Dolly drew back her face witha gesture of displeasure, nay, almost of shrinking. "Not now, mother!" she cried. "I have something to ask you about. Till Iknow the truth, I can never kiss you. "

Herminia's face turned deadly white; she knew it had come at last. But still she never flinched. "You shall hear the truth from me, darling, " she said, with a gentle touch. "You have always heardit. "

They passed under the doorway and up the stairs in silence. Assoon as they were in the sitting-room, Dolly fronted Herminiafiercely. "Mother, " she cried, with the air of a wild creature atbay, "were you married to my father?"

Herminia's cheek blanched, and her pale lips quivered as she nervedherself to answer; but she answered bravely, "No, darling, I wasnot. It has always been contrary to my principles to marry. "

"YOUR principles!" Dolores echoed in a tone of ineffable, scorn. "YOUR principles! Your PRINCIPLES! All my life has beensacrificed to you and your principles!" Then she turned on hermadly once more. "And WHO was my father?" she burst out in heragony. 

Herminia never paused. She must tell her the truth. "Yourfather's name was Alan Merrick, " she answered, steadying herselfwith one hand on the table. "He died at Perugia before you wereborn there. He was a son of Sir Anthony Merrick, the great doctorin Harley Street. "

The worst was out. Dolly stood still and gasped. Hot horrorflooded her burning cheeks. Illegitimate! illegitimate!Dishonored from her birth! A mark for every cruel tongue to aimat! Born in shame and disgrace! And then, to think what she mighthave been, but for her mother's madness! The granddaughter of twosuch great men in their way as the Dean of Dunwich and Sir AnthonyMerrick. 

She drew back, all aghast. Shame and agony held her. Something ofmaiden modesty burned bright in her cheek and down her very neck. Red waves coursed through her. How on earth after this could sheface Walter Brydges?

"Mother, mother!" she broke out, sobbing, after a moment's pause, "oh, what have you done? What have you done? A cruel, cruelmother you have been to me. How can I ever forgive you?"

Herminia gazed at her appalled. It was a natural tragedy. Therewas no way out of it. She couldn't help seizing the thing at once, in a lightning flash of sympathy, from Dolly's point of view, too. Quick womanly instinct made her heart bleed for her daughter'smanifest shame and horror. 

"Dolly, Dolly, " the agonized mother cried, flinging herself uponher child's mercy, as it were; "Don't be hard on me; don't be hardon me! My darling, how could I ever guess you would look at itlike this? How could I ever guess my daughter and his would seethings for herself in so different a light from the light we sawthem in?"

"You had no right to bring me into the world at all, " Dolly cried, growing fiercer as her mother grew more unhappy. "If you did, youshould have put me on an equality with other people. "

"Dolly, " Herminia moaned, wringing her hands in her despair, "mychild, my darling, how I have loved you! how I have watched overyou! Your life has been for years the one thing I had to live for. I dreamed you would be just such another one as myself. EQUAL withother people! Why, I thought I was giving you the noblest heritageliving woman ever yet gave the child of her bosom. I thought youwould be proud of it, as I myself would have been proud. I thoughtyou would accept it as a glorious birthright, a supreme privilege. How could I foresee you would turn aside from your mother's creed?How could I anticipate you would be ashamed of being the firstfree-born woman ever begotten in England? 'Twas a blessing I meantto give you, and you have made a curse of it. "

"YOU have made a curse of it!" Dolores answered, rising and glaringat her. "You have blighted my life for me. A good man and truewas going to make me his wife. After this, how can I dare to palmmyself off upon him?"

She swept from the room. Though broken with sorrow, her step wasresolute. Herminia followed her to her bed-room. There Dolly satlong on the edge of the bed, crying silently, silently, and rockingherself up and down like one mad with agony. At last, in one fierceburst, she relieved her burdened soul by pouring out to her motherthe whole tale of her meeting with Walter Brydges. Though she hatedher, she must tell her. Herminia listened with deep shame. Itbrought the color back into her own pale cheek to think any manshould deem he was performing an act of chivalrous self-devotion inmarrying Herminia Barton's unlawful daughter. Alan Merrick's child!The child of so many hopes! The baby that was born to regeneratehumanity!

At last, in a dogged way, Dolly rose once more. She put on her hatand jacket. 

"Where are you going?" her mother asked, terrified. 

"I am going out, " Dolores answered, "to the post, to telegraph tohim. "

She worded her telegram briefly but proudly:

"My mother has told me all. I understand your feeling. Ourarrangement is annulled. Good-by. You have been kind to me. "

An hour or two later, a return telegram came:--

"Our engagement remains exactly as it was. Nothing is changed. Ihold you to your promise. All tenderest messages. Letterfollows. "

That answer calmed Dolly's mind a little. She began to think afterall, --if Walter still wanted her, --she loved him very much; shecould hardly dismiss him. 

When she rose to go to bed, Herminia, very wistful, held out herwhite face to be kissed as usual. She held it out tentatively. Worlds trembled in the balance; but Dolly drew herself back with alook of offended dignity. "Never!" she answered in a firm voice. "Never again while I live. You are not fit to receive a puregirl's kisses. "

And two women lay awake all that ensuing night sobbing low on theirpillows in the Marylebone lodging-house. 

XXII. 

It was half-past nine o'clock next morning when the man-servant atSir Anthony Merrick's in Harley Street brought up to his master'sroom a plain hand-written card on which he read the name, "DoloresBarton. "

"Does the girl want to blackmail me?" Sir Anthony thought testily. 

The great doctor's old age was a lonely and a sordid one. He wasclose on eighty now, but still to this day he received his patientsfrom ten to one, and closed his shrivelled hand with a clutch ontheir guineas. For whom, nobody knew. Lady Merrick was long dead. His daughters were well married, and he had quarrelled with theirhusbands. Of his two younger sons, one had gone into the Fusiliersand been speared at Suakim; the other had broken his neck on ahunting-field in Warwickshire. The old man lived alone, and huggedhis money-bags. They were the one thing left for which he seemedto retain any human affection. 

So, when he read Dolly's card, being by nature suspicious, he feltsure the child had called to see what she could get out of him. 

But when he descended to the consulting-room with stern set face, and saw a beautiful girl of seventeen awaiting him, --a tallsunny-haired girl, with Alan's own smile and Alan's own eyes, --hegrew suddenly aware of an unexpected interest. The sun went back onthe dial of his life for thirty years or thereabouts, and Alanhimself seemed to stand before him. Alan, as he used to burst in forhis holidays from Winchester! After all, this pink rosebud was hiseldest son's only daughter. 

Chestnut hair, pearly teeth, she was Alan all over. 

Sir Anthony bowed his most respectful bow, with old-fashionedcourtesy. 

"And what can I do for you, young lady?" he asked in his bestprofessional manner. 

"Grandfather, " the girl broke out, blushing red to the ears, butsaying it out none the less; "Grandfather, I'm your granddaughter, Dolores Barton. "

The old man bowed once more, a most deferential bow. Strange tosay, when he saw her, this claim of blood pleased him. 

"So I see, my child, " he answered. "And what do you want with me?"

"I only knew it last night, " Dolly went on, casting down those blueeyes in her shamefaced embarrassment. "And this morning . . . I'vecome to implore your protection. "

"That's prompt, " the old man replied, with a curious smile, halfsuspicious, half satisfied. "From whom, my little one?" And hishand caressed her shoulder. 

"From my mother, " Dolly answered, blushing still deeper crimson. "From the mother who put this injustice upon me. From the motherwho, by her own confession, might have given me an honorablebirthright, like any one else's, and who cruelly refused to. "

The old man eyed her with a searching glance. 

"Then she hasn't brought you up in her own wild ideas?" he said. "She hasn't dinged them into you!"

"She has tried to, " Dolly answered. "But I will have nothing to dowith them. I hate her ideas, and her friends, and her faction. "

Sir Anthony drew her forward and gave her a sudden kiss. Herspirit pleased him. 

"That's well, my child, " he answered. "That's well--for abeginning. "

Then Dolly, emboldened by his kindness, --for in a moment, somehow, she had taken her grandfather's heart by assault, --began to tellhim how it had all come about; how she had received an offer from amost excellent young man at Combe Mary in Dorsetshire, --very wellconnected, the squire of his parish; how she had accepted him withjoy; how she loved him dearly; how this shadow intervened; howthereupon, for the first time, she had asked for and learned thehorrid truth about her parentage; how she was stunned and appalledby it; how she could never again live under one roof with such awoman; and how she came to him for advice, for encouragement, forassistance. She flung herself on his mercy. Every word she spokeimpressed Sir Anthony. This was no mere acting; the girl reallymeant it. Brought up in those hateful surroundings, innate purityof mind had preserved her innocent heart from the contagion ofexample. She spoke like a sensible, modest, healthy Englishmaiden. She was indeed a granddaughter any man might be proud of. 'Twas clear as the sun in the London sky to Sir Anthony that sherecoiled with horror from her mother's position. He sympathizedwith her and pitied her. Dolores, all blushes, lifted her eyelidsand looked at him. Her grandfather drew her towards him with asmile of real tenderness, and, unbending as none had seen himunbend before since Alan's death, told her all the sad history ashe himself envisaged it. Dolores listened and shuddered. The oldman was vanquished. He would have taken her once to himself, hesaid, if Herminia had permitted it; he would take her to himselfnow, if Dolores would come to him. 

As for Dolly, she lay sobbing and crying in Sir Anthony's arms, asthough she had always known him. After all, he was her grandfather. Nearer to her in heart and soul than her mother. And the butlercould hardly conceal his surprise and amazement when three minuteslater Sir Anthony rang the bell, and being discovered alone with astrange young lady in tears, made the unprecedented announcementthat he would see no patients at all that morning, and was at hometo nobody. 

But before Dolly left her new-found relation's house, it was allarranged between them. She was to come there at once as hisadopted daughter; was to take and use the name of Merrick; was tosee nothing more of that wicked woman, her mother; and was to bemarried in due time from Sir Anthony's house, and under SirAnthony's auspices, to Walter Brydges. 

She wrote to Walter then and there, from her grandfather'sconsulting-room. Numb with shame as she was, she nerved her handto write to him. In what most delicate language she could find, she let him plainly know who Sir Anthony was, and all else that hadhappened. But she added at the end one significant clause: "Whilemy mother lives, dear Walter, I feel I can never marry you. "

XXIII. 

When she returned from Sir Anthony's to her mother's lodgings, shefound Herminia, very pale, in the sitting-room, waiting for her. Her eyes were fixed on a cherished autotype of a Pinturicchia atPerugia, --Alan's favorite picture. Out of her penury she hadbought it. It represented the Madonna bending in worship over herdivine child, and bore the inscription: "Quem genuit adoravit. "Herminia loved that group. To her it was no mere emblem of a dyingcreed, but a type of the eternal religion of maternity. The Motheradoring the Child! 'Twas herself and Dolly. 

"Well?" Herminia said interrogatively, as her daughter entered, forshe half feared the worst. 

"Well, " Dolores answered in a defiant tone, blurting it out insudden jerks, the rebellion of a lifetime finding vent at last. "I've been to my grandfather, my father's father; and I've told himeverything; and it's all arranged: and I'm to take his name; andI'm to go and live with him. "

"Dolly!" the mother cried, and fell forward on the table with herface in her hands. "My child, my child, are you going to leaveme?"

"It's quite time, " Dolly answered, in a sullen, stolid voice. "Ican't stop here, of course, now I'm almost grown up and engaged tobe married, associating any longer with such a woman as you havebeen. No right-minded girl who respected herself could do it. "

Herminia rose and faced her. Her white lips grew livid. She hadcounted on every element of her martyrdom, --save one; and this, theblackest and fiercest of all, had never even occurred to her. "Dolly, " she cried, "oh, my daughter, you don't know what you do!You don't know how I've loved you! I've given up my life for you. I thought when you came to woman's estate, and learned what wasright and what wrong, you would indeed rise up and call me blessed. And now, --oh, Dolly, this last blow is too terrible. It will killme, my darling. I can't go on out-living it. "

"You will, " Dolly answered. "You're strong enough and wiry enoughto outlive anything. . . . But I wrote to Walter from SirAnthony's this morning, and told him I would wait for him if Iwaited forever. For, of course, while YOU live, I couldn't thinkof marrying him. I couldn't think of burdening an honest man withsuch a mother-in-law as you are!"

Herminia could only utter the one word, "Dolly!" It was aheart-broken cry, the last despairing cry of a wounded and strickencreature. 

XXIV. 

That night, Herminia Barton went up sadly to her own bed-room. Itwas the very last night that Dolores was to sleep under the sameroof with her mother. On the morrow, she meant to remove to SirAnthony Merrick's. 

As soon as Herminia had closed the door, she sat down to herwriting-table and began to write. Her pen moved of itself. Andthis was her letter:--

"MY DARLING DAUGHTER, --By the time you read these words, I shall beno longer in the way, to interfere with your perfect freedom ofaction. I had but one task left in life--to make you happy. Now Ifind I only stand in the way of that object, no reason remains whyI should endure any longer the misfortune of living. 

"My child, my child, you must see, when you come to think it overat leisure, that all I ever did was done, up to my lights, to serveand bless you. I thought, by giving you the father and the birth Idid, I was giving you the best any mother on earth had ever yetgiven her dearest daughter. I believe it still; but I see I shouldnever succeed in making YOU feel it. Accept this reparation. Forall the wrong I may have done, all the mistakes I may have made, Isincerely and earnestly implore your forgiveness. I could not havehad it while I lived; I beseech and pray you to grant me dead whatyou would never have been able to grant me living. 

"My darling, I thought you would grow up to feel as I did; Ithought you would thank me for leading you to see such things asthe blind world is incapable of seeing. There I made a mistake;and sorely am I punished for it. Don't visit it upon my head inyour recollections when I can no longer defend myself. 

"I set out in life with the earnest determination to be a martyr tothe cause of truth and righteousness, as I myself understood them. But I didn't foresee this last pang of martyrdom. No soul cantell beforehand to what particular cross the blind chances of theuniverse will finally nail it. But I am ready to be offered, andthe time of my departure is close at hand. I have fought a goodfight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith I startedin life with. Nothing now remains for me but the crown ofmartyrdom. My darling, it is indeed a very bitter cup to me thatyou should wish me dead; but 'tis a small thing to die, above allfor the sake of those we love. I die for you gladly, knowing thatby doing so I can easily relieve my own dear little girl of onetrouble in life, and make her course lie henceforth throughsmoother waters. Be happy! be happy! Good-by, my Dolly! Yourmother's love go forever through life with you!

"Burn this blurred note the moment you have read it. I inclose amore formal one, giving reasons for my act on other grounds, to beput in, if need be, at the coroner's inquest. Good-night, myheart's darling. Your truly devoted and affectionate

MOTHER. 

"Oh, Dolly, my Dolly, you never will know with what love I lovedyou. "

When she had finished that note, and folded it reverently withkisses and tears, she wrote the second one in a firm hand for theformal evidence. Then she put on a fresh white dress, as pure as herown soul, like the one she had worn on the night of her self-madebridal with Alan Merrick. In her bosom she fastened two innocentwhite roses from Walter Brydges's bouquet, arranging them withstudious care very daintily before her mirror. She was always awoman. "Perhaps, " she thought to herself, "for her lover's sake, myDolly will kiss them. When she finds them lying on her dead mother'sbreast, my Dolly may kiss them. " Then she cried a few minutes verysoftly to herself; for no one can die without some little regret, some consciousness of the unique solemnity of the occasion. 

At last she rose and moved over to her desk. Out of it she took asmall glass-stoppered phial, that a scientific friend had given herlong ago for use in case of extreme emergency. It containedprussic acid. She poured the contents into a glass and drank itoff. Then she lay upon her bed and waited for the only friend shehad left in the world, with hands folded on her breast, like somesaint of the middle ages. 

Not for nothing does blind fate vouchsafe such martyrs to humanity. From their graves shall spring glorious the church of the future. 

When Dolores came in next morning to say good-by, she found hermother's body cold and stiff upon the bed, in a pure white dress, with two crushed white roses just peeping from her bodice. 

Herminia Barton's stainless soul had ceased to exist forever. 

THE END.