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THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



Uf^S*-^ 



'^'<«bj(K 




THE WOMAN WHO DID 

BY GRANT ALLEN 
/ 



BOSTON : ROBERTS BROS-, 1895 
LONDON : JOHN LANE. VIGO ST 




Copyright, 18t)5, 
By Roberts Broth kks. 



Ail rights reserved 



John Wjlson and Son, CAMBRincF., U.S.A. 



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 THP 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 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



I. 



Mrs. Dewsbury's lawn was held by those 
who knew it the loveliest in Surrey. The 
smooth and springy sward that stretched in 
front of the house was all composed of a tiny 
yellow clover. It gave beneath the foot like 
the pile on velvet. One's gaze looked forth 
from 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 palu- 
dina limestone stood out in successive tiers, 
each thrown up against its neighbor by the 
misty haze that broods eternally over the 
wooded valley; till, roaming across them all, 
the eye rested at last on the rearing scarp of 
Chanctonbury Ring, faintly pencilled on the 
furthest sky-line. Shadowy phantoms of dim 
heights framed the verge to east and west. 
Alan Merrick drank it in with profound satis- 
faction. After those sharp and clear-cut Italian 



8 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

outlines, hard as lapis lazuli, the mysterious 
vagueness, the pregnant suggestiveness, of our 
English scenery strikes the imagination; and 
Alan was fresh home from an early summer 
tour among the Peruginesque solidities of the 
Umbrian Apennines. " How beautiful it all is, 
after all," he said, turning to his entertainer. 
" In Italy 't is the background the painter dwells 
upon ; in England, we look rather at the middle 
distance." 

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

Alan Merrick drew back with a vague ges- 
ture of distaste. "Oh, thank you," he replied; 
"but, do you know, I don't think I like deans„ 
Mrs. Dewsbury." 

Mrs. Dewsbury's smile was recondite and 
diplomatic. "Then you '11 exactly suit one an- 
other," she answered with gay wisdom. " For, to 
tell you the truth, I don't think she does either." 

The young man allowed himself to be led 
with a passive protest in the direction where 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 9 

Mrs. Dewsbury so impulsively hurried him^ 
He heard that cultivated voice murmuring in 
the usual inaudible tone of introduction, " Miss 
Barton, Mr. Alan Merrick." Then he raised 
his hat. As he did so, he looked down at 
Herminia Barton's face with a sudden start of 
surprise. Why, this was a girl of most unusual 
beauty ! 

She was tall and dark, with abundant black 
hair, richly waved above the ample forehead; 
and she wore a curious Oriental-looking navy- 
blue robe of some soft woollen stuff, that fell 
in natural folds and set off to the utmost the 
lissome grace of her rounded figure. It was 
a sort of sleeveless sack, embroidered in front 
with arabesques in gold thread, and fastened 
obliquely two inches below the 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 and neck, with loose sleeves 
in keeping. The whole costume, though quite 
simple in style, a compromise either for after- 
noon or evening, was charming in its novelty, 
charming too in the way it permitted the utmost 
liberty and variety of movement to the lithe 
limbs of its wearer. But it was her face par- 
ticularly that struck Alan Merrick at first sight. 
That face was above all things the face of a free 
woman. Something so frank and fearless shone 



\ 



lO THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

in Herminia's glance, as her eye met his, that 
Alan, who respected human freedom above all 
other qualities in man or woman, was taken on 
the spot by its perfect air of untrammelled 
liberty. Yet it was subtle and beautiful too, 
undeniably beautiful. Herminia Barton's fea- 
tures, I think, were even more striking in their 
way in later life, when sorrow had stamped her, 
and the mark of her willing martyrdom for 
humanity's sake was deeply printed upon them. 
But their beauty then was the beauty of holiness, 
which not all can appreciate. In her younger 
days, as Alan Merrick first saw her, she was 
beautiful still with the first flush of health and 
strength and womanhood in a free and vigorous 
English girl's body. A certain lofty serenity, 
not untouched with pathos, seemed to strike 
the keynote. But that was not all. Some hint 
of every element in the highest loveliness met 
in that face and form, — physical, intellectual, 
emotional, moral. 

"You '11 like him, Herminia," Mrs. Dewsbury 
said, nodding. " He 's one of your own kind, as 
dreadful as you are; very free and advanced; 
a perfect firebrand. In fact, my dear child, I 
don't know which of you makes my hair stand 
on end most." And with that introductory 
hint, she left the pair forthwith to their own 
devices. 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. II 

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

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

"Yes, at Girton," Herminia answered, sink- 
ing easily upon the bench, and letting one arm 
rest on the back in a graceful attitude of 
unstudied attention. "But I didn't take my 
degree,*' she went on hurriedly, as one who is 
anxious to disclaim some too great honor thrust 
upon her. " I did n't care for the life ; I thought 
it cramping. 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 education at 
Girton made only a pretence at freedom. At 
heart, our girls were as enslaved to conventions 
as any girls elsewhere. The whole object of 
the training was to see just how far you could 
manage to push a woman's education without 
the faintest danger of her emancipation." 



12 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

"You are right," Alan answered briskly, for 
the point was a pet one with 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 ground in the mill at Somer- 
ville, I 'm heartily sorry for them. It 's worse 
for them than for us; they miss the only part 
of university life that has educational value. 
When we men were undergraduates, we lived 
our whole lives, — lived them all round, devel- 
oping equally every fibre of our natures. We 
read Plato, and Aristotle, and John Stuart Mill, 
to be sure, — and I *m not quite certain we got 
much good from them ; but then our talk and 
thought were not all of books, and of what we 
spelt out in them. We rowed on the river, we 
played in the cricket-field, we lounged in the 
billiard-rooms, we ran up to town for the day, 
we had wine in one another's rooms after hall 
in the evening, and behaved like young fools, 
and threw oranges wildly at one another's 
heads, and generally enjoyed ourselves. It was 
all very silly and irrational, no doubt, but it 
was life, it was reality; while the pretended 
earnestness of those pallid Somerville girls is 
all an affectation of one-sided culture." 

"That 's just it," Herminia answered, leaning 
back on the rustic seat like David's Madame 
R^camier. "You put your finger on the real 






THE WOMAN WHO DID. I3U- 

blot when you said those words, developing 
equally every fibre of your natures. That 's 
what nobody yet wants us women to do. 
They *re trying hard enough to develop us 
intellectually; but morally 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 'm sure, if you begin by edu- 
cating women, you must end by emancipating 
them. " 

"So I think too," Alan answered, growing 
every moment more interested. " And for my 
part, it *s the emancipation, not the mere edu- 
cation, that most appeals to me." , 

"Yes, I 've always felt that," Herminia went 
on, letting herself out more freely, for she felt 
she was face to face with a sympathetic listener. 
"And for that reason, it 's the question of social 
and moral emancipation that interests me far 
mor% than the mere political one, — woman's 
rights as they call it. Of course I *m a mem- 
ber of all the woman's franchise leagues and 
everything of that sort, — they can't afford to do 
without a single friend's name on their lists at 
present ; but the vote is a matter that troubles 
me little 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 in our total 
existence. It 's the perpetual pressure of social 



14 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

and ethical restrictions that most weighs down 



women. " 



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

Herminia laughed lightly, — a ringing girlish 
laugh. Alan noticed it with pleasure. He felt 
at once that the iron of Girton had not entered 
into her soul, as into so many of our modern 
young women's. There was vitality enough left 
in her for a genuine laugh of innocent amuse- 
ment. "Oh yes," she said, merrily; "that's 
what I always answer to all possible objectors 
to my ways and ideas. I reply with dignity, 
* / was brought up in the family of a clergyman 
of the Church of England. ' " 

"And what does the Dean say to your 
views .^" Alan interposed doubtfully. 

Herminia laughed again. If her eyes were 
profound, two dimples saved her. " I thought 
you were with us," she answered with a twinkle; 
"now, I begin to doubt it. 'You don't expect a 
man of twenty- two to be governed in all things, 
especially in the formation of his abstract 
ideas, by his father's opinions. Why then a 
woman ? " 

"Why, indeed?" Alan answered. "There I 
quite agree with you. I was thinking not so 
much of what is right and reasonable as of what 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 5 

is practical and usual. For most women, of 
course, are — well, more or less dependent upon 
their fathers. " 

^'But I am not," Herminia answered, with 
a faint suspicion of just pride in the undercur- 
rent of her tone. "That 's in part why I went 
away so soon from Girton. I felt that if women 
are ever to be free, they must first of all be 
independent. It is the dependence of women 
that has allowed men to make laws for them, 
socially and ethically. So I wouldn't stop at 
Girton, partly because I felt the life was one- 
sided, — our girls thought and talked of nothing 
else on earth except Herodotus, trigonometry, 
and the higher culture, — but partly also be- 
cause I wouldn't be dependent on any man, 
not even 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 interfere with your education. 
And now you support yourself?" he went on 
quite frankly. 

Herminia nodded assent. 

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

"Then you 're just down here for your holi- 



l6 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

days, I suppose?" Alan put in, leaning for- 
ward. 

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

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

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

"Why not, indeed?" Alan echoed in turn. 
"It's not at all that I disapprove. Miss Bar- 
ton; on the contrary, I admire it; it 's only that 
one 's surprised to find a woman, or for the 
matter of that anybody, acting up to his or her 
convictions. That's what I've always felt; 
'tis the Nemesis of reason; if people begin by 
thinking rationally, the danger is that they 
may end by acting rationally also." 

Herminia laughed. "I'm afraid," she an- 
swered, " I *ve already reached that pass. 
You '11 never find me hesitate to do anything 
on earth, once I 'm convinced it 's right, merely 



\ . 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1/ 

because other people think differently on the 
subject.'* 

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

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

" How so ? " Alan inquired. 

"Well, my father was a Senior Wrangler," 
Herminia replied, blushing faintly; "and I sup- 
pose that implies a certain moderate develop- 
ment of the logical faculties. In Ais generation, 
people did n't apply the logical faculties to the 
grounds of belief; they took those for granted; 
but within his own limits, my father is still an 
acute reasoner. And then he had always the 
ethical and social interests. Those two things 
— a love of logic, and a love of right — are 
the forces that tend to make us what we call 
religious. Worldly people don't care for fun- 
damental questions of the universe at all; they 
accept passively whatever is told them; they 
think they think, and believe they believe it. 
But people with an interest in fundamental 



1 8 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

truth inquire for themselves into the constitu- 
tion of the cosmos; if they are convinced one 
way, they become what we call theologians ; if 
they are convinced the other way, they become 
what we call free-thinkers. Interest in the 
problem is common to both ; it 's the nature 
of the solution alone that differs in the two 
cases." 

"That's quite true," Alan assented. "And 
have you ever noticed this curious corollary, 
that you and I can talk far more sympathetically 
with an earnest Catholic, for example, or an 
earnest Evangelical, than we can talk with a 
mere ordinary worldly person." 

"Oh dear, yes," Herminia answered with 
conviction. "Thought will always sympathize 
with thought. It 's the unthinking mass one 
can get no further with." 

Alan changed the subject abruptly. This 
girl so interested him. She wa,s the girl he 
had imagined, the girl he had dreamt of, the 
girl he had thought possible, but never yet met 
with. "And you're in lodgings on the Holm- 
wood here.? " he said, musing. " For how much 
longer? " 

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

" At what cottage ? " 

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



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 19 

" 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 went on; "and it *s so rare 
to find a man who can sympathize with the 
higher 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 or thereabouts. " 
Six weeks," Alan repeated, more to himself 
than to her. Those six week were precious. 
Not a moment of them must be lost. "Then 
I think," he went on quietly, "I shall call to- 
morrow. " 

A wave of conscious pleasure broke over Her- 
minia's cheek, blush rose on white lily; but she 
answered nothing. She was glad this kindred 
soul should seem in such a hurry to renew her 
acquaintance. 






20 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



11. 



Next afternoon, about two o'clock, Alan called 
with a tremulous heart at the cottage. Her- 
minia had heard not a little of him meanwhile 
from her friend Mrs. Dewsbury. " He *s a 
charming young man, my dear," the woman 
of the world observed with confidence. " I felt 
quite sure you *d attract one another. He 's so 
clever and advanced, and everything that 's 
dreadful, — just like yourself, Herminia. But 
then he 's also very well connected. That 's 
always something, especially when one *s an 
oddity. You would n't go down one bit your- 
self, dear, if you weren't a dean's daughter. 
The shadow of a cathedral steeple covers a mul- 
titude of sins. Mr. Merrick 's the son of the 
famous London gout doctor, — you must know 
his name, — all the royal dukes flock to him. 
He 's a barrister himself, and in excellent prac- 
tice. You might do worse, do you know, than 
to go in for Alan Merrick." 

Herminia's lip curled an almost impercep- 
tible curl as she answered gravely, "I don't 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 21 

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," 
she answered at once with her society glibness ; 
" but when the right man turned up, they soon 
forgot their protestations. It makes a lot of 
difference, dear, when a man really asks you! " 

Herminia bent her head. "You misunder- 
stand me," she replied. "I don*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. I only mean to .say, I don't 
think anything will ever induce me to marry, — 
that is to say, legally." / 

Mrs. Dewsbury gave a start of surprise and 
horror. She really did n't know what girls 
were coming to nowadays, — which, considering 
her first principles, was certainly natural. But 
if only she had seen the conscious flush with 
which Herminia received her visitor that after- 
noon, she would have been confirmed in her- 
belief that Herminia, after all, in spite of her 
learning, was much like other girls. In which 
conclusion Mrs. Dewsbury would not in the end 
have been fully justified. 

When Alan arrived, Herminia sat at the win- 



22 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

dow by the quaintly clipped box-tree, a volume 
of verse held half closed in her hand, though 
she was a great deal too honest and transparent 
to pretend she was reading it. She expected 
Alan to call, in accordance with his promise, 
for she had seen at Mrs. Dewsbury's how great 
an impression she produced upon him; and, 
having taught herself that it was every true 
woman's duty to avoid the affectations and self- 
deceptions which the rule of man has begotten 
in women, she did n*t try to conceal from her- 
self the fact that she on her side was by no 
means without interest in the question how 
soon he would pay her his promised visit. As 
he appeared at the rustic gate in the privet 
hedge, Herminia looked out, and changed color 
with pleasure when she saw him push it open. 

" Oh, how nice of you to look me up so soon ! " 
she cried, jumping from her seat (with just a 
glance at the glass) and strolling out bare- 
headed into the cottage garden. "Isn't this a 
charming place .^ Only look at our hollyhocks! 
Consider what an oasis after six months of 
London ! " 

She seemed even prettier than last night, in 
her simple white morning dress, a mere ordi- 
nary English gown, without affectation of any 
sort, yet touched with some faint reminiscence 
of a flowing Greek chiton. Its half-classical 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 2$ 

drapery Exactly suited the severe regularity of 
her pensive features and her graceful figure. 
Alan thought as he looked at her he had never 
before seen anybody who appeared at all points 
so nearly to approach his ideal of womanhood. 
She was at once so high in type, so serene, so 
tranquil, and yet so purely womanly. 

"Yes, it is a lovely place," he answered, 
looking around at the clematis that drooped 
from the gable-ends. "I'm staying myself 
with the Watertons at the Park, but I 'd rather 
have this pretty little rose-bowered garden than 
all their balustrades and Italian terraces. The 
cottagers have chosen the better part. What 
gillyflowers and what columbines! And here 
you look out so directly on the common. I 
love the gorse and the bracken, I love the 
stagnant pond, I love the very geese that tug 
hard at the silverweed, they make it all seem 
so deliciously English." 

"Shall we walk to the ridge .^" Herminia 
asked with a sudden burst of suggestion. "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 the fresh air on the hill-top." 

Nothing could have suited Alan Merrick 
better, and he said so at once. Herminia dis- 
appeared for a moment to get her hat. Alan 
observed almost without observing it that she 



24 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

was gone but for a second. She asked none of 
that long interval that most women require for 
the simplest matter of toilet. She was back 
again almost instantly, bright and fresh and 
smiling, in the most modest of hats, set so art- 
lessly on her head that it became her better 
than all art could have made it. Then they 
started for a long stroll across the breezy com- 
mon, yellow in places with upright spikes of 
small summer furze, and pink with wild pea- 
blossom. Bees buzzed, broom crackled, the 
chirp of the field-cricket rang shrill from the 
sand-banks. Herminia's light foot tripped over 
the spongy turf. By the top of the furthest 
ridge, looking down on North Holmwood 
church, they sat side by side for a while on 
the close short grass, brocaded with daisies, and 
gazed across at the cropped sward of Denbies 
and the long line of the North Downs stretching 
away towards Reigate. Tender grays and greens 
melted into one another on the larches hard by; 
Betchworth chalk-pit gleamed dreamy white in 
the middle distance. They had been talking 
earnestly all the way, like two old friends 
together; for they were both of them young, 
and they felt at once that nameless bond which 
often draws one closer to a new acquaintance 
at first sight than years of converse. "How 
seriously you look at life," Alan cried at last. 



N 

THE WOMAN WHO DTD. 2$ 

in answer to one of Herminia's graver thoughts. 
"I wonder what makes you take it so much 
more earnestly than all other women?" 

" It came to me all at once when I was about 
sixteen," Herminia answered with quiet com- 
posure, like one who remarks upon some objec- 
tive fact of exernal nature. " It came to me in 
listening to a sermon of my father's, — which I 
always look upon as one more instance of the 
force of heredity. He was preaching on the 
text, * The Truth shall make you Free,' and all 
that he said about it seemed to me strangely 
alive, to be heard from a pulpit. He said we 
ought to seek the Truth before all things, and 
never to rest till we felt sure we had found it. 
We should not suffer our souls to be beguiled 
into believing a falsehood merely because we 
wouldn't take the trouble to find out the Truth 
for ourselves by searching. We must dig for 
it ; we must grope after it. And as he spoke, 
I made up my mind, in a flash of resolution, 
to find out the Truth ^for myself about every- 
thing, and never to be deterred from seeking it, 
and embracing it, and ensuing it when found, 
by any convention or preconception. Thpn he 
went on to say how the Truth would make us 
Free, and I felt he was right. It would open 
our eyes, and emancipate us from social and 
moral slaveries. So I made up my mind, at the 



26 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

same time, that whenever I found the Truth 
I would not scruple to follow it to its logical 
conclusions, but would practise it in my life, 
and let it make me Free with perfect freedom. 
Then, in search of Truth, I got my father to 
send me to Girton; and when I had lighted 
on it there half by accident, and it had made me 
Free indeed, I went away from Girton again, 
because I saw 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 a second on the dark thread of 
clambering pines that crest the down just above 
Brockham. **This is dreadfully egotistical," 
she cried, with a sharp little start. "I ought 
to apologize for talking so much to you about 
my own feelings." 

Alan gazed at her and smiled. "Why apol- 
ogize," he asked, "for managing to be interest- 
ing.? You are not egotistical at all. What you 
are telling me is history, — the history of a soul, 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 2/^ 

which is always the one thing on earth worth 
hearing. I take it as a compliment that you 
should hold me worthy to hear it. It is a proof 
of confidence. Besides," he went on, after a 
second's pause, " I am a man; you are a woman. 
Under those circumstances, what would other- 
wise be egotism becomes common and mutual. 
When two people sympathize with one another, 
all they can s^y about themselves loses its per- 
sonal tinge and merges into pure human and 
abstract interest." 

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



28 THE WOMAN WHO DID, 



III. 



From that day forth, Alan and Herminia met 
frequently. Alan was given to sketching, and 
he sketched a great deal in his idle times on 
the common. He translated the cottages from 
real estate into poetry. On such occasions, 
Herminia*s walks often led her in the same 
direction. For Herminia was frank; she liked 
the young man, and, the truth having made 
her free, she knew no reason why she should 
avoid or pretend to avoid his company. She 
had no fear of that sordid impersonal goddess 
who rules Philistia; it mattered not to her what 
"people said," or whether or not they said any- 
thing about her. "Aiunt: quid aiunt.^ aiant," 
was her motto. Could she have known to a 
certainty that her meetings on the common 
with Alan Merrick had excited unfavorable 
comment among the old ladies of Holmwood, 
the point would have seemed to her unworthy 
of an emancipated soul's consideration. She 
could estimate at its true worth the value of 
all human criticism upon human action. 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 29 

So, day after day, she met Alan Merrick, half 
by accident, half by design, 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 and aspira- 
tions. Often as he sketched he would look up 
and wait, expecting to catch the faint sound of 
her light step, or see her lithe figure poised 
breezy against the sky on the neighboring 
ridges. Whenever she drew near, his pulse 
thrilled at her coming, — a somewhat unusual 
experience with Alan Merrick. For Alan, 
though a pure soul in his way, and mixed of 
the finer paste, was not quitCxlike those best of 
men, who are, so to speak, born married. A 
man with an innate genius for loving and being 
loved cannot long remain single. He must 
marry young ; or at least, if he does not marry, 
he must find a companion, a woman to his 
heart, a help that is meet for him. What is 
commonly called prudence in such concerns is 
only another name for vice and cruelty. The 
purest and best of men necessarily mate them- 
selves before they are twenty. As a rule, it 
is the selfish, the mean, the calculating, who 
wait, as they say, "till they can afford to 
marry." That vile phrase scarcely veils hidden 
depths of depravity. A man who is really a 



".* 



30 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

man, and who has a genius for loving, must 
love from the very first, and must feel himself 
surrounded by those who love him. 'Tis the 
first necessity of life to him ; bread, meat, rai- 
ment, a house, an income, rank far second to 
that prime want in the good man's economy. 

But Alan Merrick, though an excellent fellow 
in his way, and of noble fibre, was not quite 
one of the first, the picked souls of humanity. 
He did not count among the finger-posts who 
point the way that mankind will travel. Though 
Herminia always thought him so. That was 
her true woman's gift of the highest idealizing 
power. Indeed, it adds, to my mind, to the 
tragedy of Herminia Barton's life that the man 
for whom she risked and lost everything was 
never quite worthy of her; and that Herminia 
to the end not once suspected it. Alan was 
over thirty, and was still "looking about him." 
That alone, you will admit, is a sufficiently 
grave condemnation. That a man should have 
arrived at the ripe age of thirty and not yet have 
lighted upon the elect lady — the woman with- 
out whose companionship life would be to him 
unendurable is in itself a strong proof tA much 
underlying selfishness, or, what comes to the 
same thing, of a calculating disposition. The 
right sort of man does n't argue with himself 
at all on these matters. He does n't say with 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 3 1 

selfish coldness, "I can't afford a wife;" or, 
"If I marry now, I shall ruin my prospects." 
He feels and acts. He mates, like the birds, 
because he can't help himself. A woman crosses 
his path who is to him indispensable, a part of 
himself, the needful complement of his own per- 
sonality ; and without heed or hesitation he takes, 
her to himself, lawfully or unlawfully, because he 
has need of her. That is how nature has made 
us ; that is how every man worthy of the name 
of man has always felt, and thought, and acted. 
The worst of all possible and conceivable checks 
upon population is the vile one which Malthus 
glossed over as "the prudential," and which con- 
sists in substituting prostitution for marriage 
through the spring-tide of one's manhood. 

Alan Merrick, however, was over thirty and 
still unmarried. More than that, he was heart- 
free, — a very evil record. And, like most other 
unmarried men of thirty, he was a trifle fas- 
tidious. He was "looking about him." That 
means to say, he was waiting to find some 
woman who suited him. No man does so at 
twenty. He sees and loves. But Alan Mer- 
rick, having let slip the golden moment when 
nature prompts every growing youth to fling 
himself with pure devotion at the feet of the 
first good angel who happens to cross his path 
and attract his worship, had now outlived the 



y 



32 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

early flush of pure passion, and was thinking 
only of "comfortably settling himself." In one 
word, when a man is young, he asks himself 
with a thrill what he can do to make happy 
this sweet soul he loves ; when he has let that 
critical moment flow by him unseized, he asks 
only, in cold blood, what woman will most 
agreeably make life run smooth for him. The 
first stage is pure love; the second, pure 
selfishness. 

Still, Alan Merrick was now ** getting on in 
his profession,'' and, as people said, it was 
high time he should be settled. They said it 
as they might have said it was high time he 
should take a business partner. From that 
lowest depth of emotional disgrace Herminia 
Barton was to preserve him. It was her task 
in life, though she knew it not, to save Alan 
Merrick's soul. And nobly she saved it. 

Alan, "looking about him," with some fine 
qualities of nature underlying in the back- 
ground that mean social philosophy of the class 
from which he sprang, fell frankly in love 
almost at first sight with Herminia. He ad- 
mired and respected her. More than that, he 
understood her. She had power in her purity 
to raise his nature for a time to something 
approaching her own high level. True woman 
has the real Midas gift: all that she touches 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 33 

turns to purest gold. Seeing Herminia much 
and talking with her, Alan could not fail to be 
impressed with the idea that here was a soul 
which could do a great deal more for him than 
"make him comfortable," — which could raise 
him to moral heights he' had hardly yet dreamt 
of, — which could wake in him the best of which 
he was capable. And watching her thus, he soon 
fell in love with her, as few men of thirty are 
able to fall in love for the first time, — as the 
young man falls in love, with the unselfish 
energy of an unspoilt nature. He asked no 
longer whether Herminia was the sort of girl 
who could make him comfortable; he asked 
only, with that delicious tremor of self-distrust 
which belongs to naive youth, whether he dare 
offer himself to one so pure and good and 
beautiful. And his hesitation was justified; 
for our sordid England has not brought forth 
many such serene .and single-minded souls as 
Herminia Barton. 

At last one afternoon they had climbed 
together the steep red face of the sandy slope 
that rises abruptly from the Holmwood towards 
Leith Hill, by the Robin Gate entrance. Near 
the top, they had seated themselves on a carpet 
of sheep-sorrel, looking out across the impertur- 
bable expanse of the Weald, and the broad pas- 
tures of Sussex. A solemn blue haze brooded 

3 



34 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

soft over the land. The sun was sinking low ; 
oblique afternoon lights flooded the distant 
South Downs. Their combes came out aslant 
in saucer-shaped shadows. Alan turned and 
gazed at Herminia; she was hot with climbing, 
and her calm face was flushed. A town-bred 
girl would have looked red and blowsy ; but the 
color and the exertion just suited Herminia. 
On that healthy brown cheek it seemed natural 
to discern the visrble marks of effort. Alan 
gazed at her with a sudden rush of untram- 
melled 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 
name alone, " how glad I am I happened to go 
that afternoon to Mrs. Dewsbury*s. For other- 
wise perhaps I might never have known you." 

Herminia's heart gave a delicious bound. 
She was a woman, and therefore she was g^ad 
he should speak so. She was a woman, and 
therefore she shrank from acknowledging it. 
But she looked him back in the face tranquilly, 
none the less on that account, and answered 
with sweet candor, "Thank you so much, Mr. 
Merrick." 

" /said * Herminia, * " the young man corrected, 
smiling, yet aghast at his own audacity. 

"And I thanked you for it," Herminia an- 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 35 

swered, casting down those dark lashes, and 
feeling the heart throb violently under her neat 
bodice. 

Alan drew a deep breath. " And it was that 
you thanked me for," he ejaculated, tingling. 

"Yes, it was that I thanked you for," Her- 
minia answered, with a still deeper rose spread- 
ing down to her bare throat. " I like you very 
much, and it pleases me to hear you call me 
Herminia. Why should I shrink from admit- 
ting W. *T is the Truth, you know; and the 
Truth shall make us Free. I 'm not afraid of 
my freedom." 

Alan paused for a second, irresolute. " Her- 
minia," he said at last, leaning forward till his 
face was very close to hers, and he could feel 
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 great deal about you 
these last three weeks or so. You have filled 
my mind; filled it to the brim, and I think you 
know it." 

Philosopher as she was, Herminia plucked a 
blade of grass, and drew it quivering through 
her tremulous fingers. It caught and hesitated. 
"I guessed as much, I think," she answered, 
low but frankly. 

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



36 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

Herminia was true to the Truth. "I've 
thought a great deal about you too, Mr. Mer- 
rick," she answered, looking down, but with a 
great gladness thrilling her. 

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

Herminia hesitated a second. Then two 
crimson spots flared forth on her speaking face, 
as she answered with an effort, "About you 
too, 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 to retire as not your peer, and leave 
you to some man who could rise more easily 
to the height of your dignity.?" 

"I've thought about that too," Herminia 
answered, still firm to her principles. " I 've 
thought it all over. I 've said to myself. Shall 
I do right in monopolizing him, when he is so 
great, and sweet, and true, and generous .? Not 
monopolizing, of course, for that would be wrong 
and selfish ; but making you my own more than 
any other woman's. And I answered my own 
heart. Yes, yes, I shall do right to accept him, 
if he asks me; for I love him, that is enough. 
The thrill within me tells me so. Nature put 
that thrill in our souls to cry out to us with a 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 3/ 

clear voice when we had met the soul she then 
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 sweet 
you are. What have I done to deserve it ? " 

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

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

"Not wz// be yours," Herminia corrected in 
that silvery voice of hers. " Am yours already, 
Alan. I somehow feel as if I had always been 
yours. I am yours this moment. You may do 
what you would with me." 

She said it so simply, so purely, so naturally, 
with all the supreme faith of the good woman, 
enamoured, who can yield herself up without 
blame to the man who loves her, that it hardly 
even occurred to Alan's mind to wonder at her 



38 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

self-surrender. Yet he drew back all the same 
in a sudden little crisis of doubt and uncer- 
tainty. 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 flush of shame and horror 
overspread Herminia's cheek. "Never!" she 
cried firmly, drawing away. "Oh, Alan, what 
can you mean by it.^ Don't tell me, after all 
I 've tried to make you feel and understand, 
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 pre- 
pared for such devotion to principle. "Oh, 
Herminia," he cried, "you can't mean it. You 
can't have thought of what it entails. Surely, 
surely, you won't carry your ideas of freedom 
to such an extreme, such a dangerous conclu- 
sion ! " 

Herminia looked up at him, half hurt. 
"Can't have thought of what it entails!" she 
repeated. Her dimples deepened. "Why, 
Alan, haven't I had my whole lifetime to think 
of it.^ What else have I thought about in any 
serious way, save this one great question of a 
woman's duty to herself, and her sex, and her 
unborn children? It's been my sole study. 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 39 

How could you fancy I spoke hastily, or with- 
out due consideration on such a subject? 
Would you have me like the blind girls who 
go unknowing to the altar, as sheep go to the 
shambles ? Could you suspect m« of such care- 
lessness ? — such culpable thoughtlessness ? — 
you, to whom I have spoken of all this so 
freely?" 

Alan stared at her, disconcerted, hardly 
knowing how to answer. "But what alterna- 
tive do you propose, then ? " he asked in his 
amazement. 

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

She said it so softly, with some womanly 
gentleness, yet with such lofty candor, that 
Alan could n't help admiring her more than 
ever before for her translucent simplicity, and 
directness of purpose. Yet her suggestion 
frightened him. It was so much more novel 
to him than to her. Herminia had reasoned 
it all out with herself, as she truly said, for 
years, and knew exactly how she felt and 
thought about it. To Alan, on the contrary. 



40 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

it came with the shock of a sudden surprise, 
and he could hardly tell on the spur of the 
moment how to deal with it. He paused and 
reflected. "But do you mean to say, Herminia," 
he asked, still holding that soft brown hand 
unresisted in his, "you've made up your mind 
never to marry any one.^ made up your mind to 
brave the whole mad world, that can't possibly 
understand the motives of your conduct, and live 
with some friend, as you put it, unmarried.? " 

"Yes, I've made up my mind," Herminia 
answered, with a faint tremor in her maidenly 
voice, but with hardly a trace now of a trait- 
orous blush, where no blush was needed. " I *ve 
made up my mind, Alan; and from all we had 
said and talked over together, I thought you 
at least 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. He felt 
it was shame to him that he could not rise at 
once to the height of her splendid self-renuncia- 
tion. " You mistake me, dearest," he answered, 
petting her hand in his own (and she allowed 
him to pet it). "It wasn't for myself, or for 
the world I hesitated. My thought was for 
you. You are very young yet. You say you 
have counted the cost. I wonder if you have. 
I wonder if you realize it." 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 4I 

"Only too well,'* Herminia replied, in a very 
earnest mood. " I have wrought it all out in 
my mind beforehand, — covenanted with my 
soul that for women's sake I would be a free 
woman. Alan, whoever would be free must 
himself strike the blow. I know what you 
will say, — what every man would say to the 
woman he loved under similar circumstances, 
— * Why should you be the victim } Why 
should you be the martyr.^ Bask in the sun 
yourself; leave this doom to some other.' But, 
Alan, I can't. I feel / must face it. Unless 
one woman begins, there will be no begin- 
ning." She lifted his hand in her own, and 
fondled it in her turn with caressing tender- 
ness. "Think how easy it would be for me, dear 
friend," she cried, with a catch in her voice, 
" to do as other women do ; to accept the hon- 
arable marriage you offer me, as other women 
would call it; to be false to my sex, a traitor 
to my convictions; to sell my kind for a mess 
of pottage, a name and a home, or even for 
thirty pieces of 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 
what marriage is, from what vile slavery it has 
sprung; on what unseen horrors for my sister 
women it is reared and buttressed; by what 
unholy sacrifices it is sustained, and made pos- 



42 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

sible. I know it has a history. I know its 
past, I know its present, and I can't embrace 
it; I can't be untrue to my most sacred beliefs. 
I can't pander to the malignant thing, just 
because a man who loves me would be pleased 
by my giving way and would kiss me, and 
fondle me for it. And I love you to fondle 
me. But I must keep my proper place, the 
freedom which I have gained for myself by 
such arduous efforts. I have said to you al- 
ready, * So far as my will goes, I am yours; 
take me, and do as you choose with me. ' That 
much I can yield, 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 
be treason to my sex; not my life, not my 
future, not my individuality, not my freedom." 

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

Still Herminia shook her head. "No, no," 



,'ni 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 43 

she cried vehemently. " I deny and decline 
those terms; they are part and parcel of a sys- 
tem of slavery. I have learnt that the righteous 
soul should avoid all appearance of evil. I will 
not palter and parley with the unholy thing. 
Even though you go to a registry-office and 
get rid as far as you can of every relic of the 
sacerdotal and sacramental idea, yet the mar- 
riage itself is still an assertion of man's supre- 
macy over woman. It ties her to him for life, 
it ignores her individuality, it compels her to 
promise what no human heart can be sure of 
performing; for you can contract to do or not 
to do, easily enough, but contract to feel or 
not to feel, — what transparent absurdity! 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 perfect freedom. I can't bind myself down 
to live with him to my shame one day longer 
than I love him; or to love him at all if I find 
him unworthy of my purest love, or unable to 
retain it ; or if I discover some other more fit to 
be loved by me. You admitted the other day 
that all this was abstractly true; why should you 
wish this morning to draw back from following 
it out to its end in practice.? " 

Alan was only an Englishman, and shared, 
of course, the inability of his countrymen to 
carry any principle to its logical conclusion. 



44 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

He was all for admitting that though things 
must really be so, yet it were prudent in life 
to pretend they were otherwise. This is the 
well-known English virtue of moderation and 
compromise; it* has made England what she 
is, the shabbiest, sordidest, worst-organized of 
nations. So he paused for a second and tem- 
porized. "It's for your sake, Herminia," he 
said again; " I can't bear to think of your mak- 
ing yourself a martyr. And I don't see how, 
if you act as you propose, you could escape 
martyrdom." 

Herminia looked up at him' with pleading 
eyes. Tears just trembled on the edge of 
those glistening lashes. "It never occurred 
to me to think," she said gently but bravely, 
"my life could ever end in anything else but 
martyrdom. It viust needs be so with all true 
lives, and all good ones. For whoever sees the 
tfuth, whoever strives earnestly with all his 
soul to be good, must be raised many planes 
above the common mass of men around him ; he 
must be a moral pioneer, and the moral pioneer 
is always a martyr. People won't allow others 
to be wiser and better than themselves, unpun- 
ished. They can forgive anything except moral 
superiority. We have each to choose between 
acquiescence in the wrong, with a life of ease, 
and struggle for the right, crowned at last by 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 45 

inevitable failure. To succeed is to fail, and 
failure is the only success worth aiming at. 
Every great and good life can but end in a 
Calvary." 

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

^^ Not to save me from myself, but to save 
me from my own higher and better nature," 
Herminia answered with passionate serious- 
ness. "Alan, I don't want any man to save 
me from that ; I want you rather to help me, 
to strengthen me, to sympathize with me. I 
want you to love me, not for my face and form 
alone, not for what I share with every other 
woman, but for all that is holiest and deepest 
within me. If you can't love me for that, I 
don't ask you to love me; I want to be loved 
for what I am in myself, for the yearnings I 
possess that are most of all peculiar to me. I 
know you are attracted to me by those yearn- 
ings above everything; why wish me untrue 
to them } It was because I saw you could sym- 
pathize with me in these impulses that I said 
to myself. Here, at last, is the man who can go 
through life as an aid and a spur to me. Don't 



46 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

tell me I 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! 
raise me! exalt me! Take me on the sole 
terms on which I can give myself up to you.'* 

She stretched her arms out, pleading; she 
turned those subtle eyes to him, appealingly. 
She was a beautiful woman. Alan Merrick was 
human. The man in him gave way; he seized 
her in his clasp, and pressed her close to his 
bosom. It heaved tumultuously. " I could do 
anything for you, Herminia,*' he cried, "and 
indeed, I do sympathize with you. But give 
me, at least, till to-morrow to think this 
thing over. It is a momentous question; don't 
let us be precipitate." 

Herminia drew a long breath. His embrace 
thrilled through her. "As you will," she 
answered with a woman's meekness. "But 
remember, Alan, what I say I mean; on these 
terms it shall be, and upon none others. Brave 
women before me have tried for awhile to act 
on their own responsibility, for the good of 
their sex; but never of their own free will 
from the very beginning. They have avoided 
marriage, not because they thought it a shame 
and a surrender, a treason to their sex, a base 
yielding to the unjust pretensions of men, but 
because there existed at the time some obstacle 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 47 

in their way in the shape of the vested interest 
of some other 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 principle of 
action involved, by marrying Shelley. When 
George Eliot chose to pass her life with Lewes 
on terms of equal freedom, she defied the man- 
made law; but still, there was his wife to pre- 
vent the possibility of a legalized union. As 
soon as Lewes was dead, George Eliot showed 
she had no principle involved, by marrying 
another man. Now, / have the rare chance of 
acting otherwise; I can 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 is the man of my choice, the man 
I love, truly, and purely, the man any one of 
you would willingly have seen offering himself 
in lawful marriage to your own daughters. If 
I would, I might go the beaten way you pre- 
scribe, and marry him legally. But of my own 
free will I disdain that degradation; I choose 
rather to be free. No fear of your scorn, no 
dread of your bigotry, no shrinking at your 
cruelty, shall prevent me from following the 
thorny path I know to be the right one. I 
seek no temporal end. I will not prove false 



48 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

to the future of my kind in order to protect 
myself from your hateful indignities. I know 
on what vile foundations your temple of wed- 
lock is based and built, what pitiable victims 
languish and die in 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 your sanctions ! No woman that I know 
of has ever yet done that. Other women have 
fallen, as men choose to put it in their odious 
dialect; no other has voluntarily risen as I pro- 
pose to do. ' " She paused a moment for breath. 
"Now you know how I feel," she continued, 
looking straight into his eyes. "Say no more 
at present ; it is wisest so. But go home and 
think it out, and talk it over with me to- 
morrow. " 






THE WOMAN WHO DID. 49 



IV. 



That night Alan slept little. Even at dinner 
his hostess, Mrs. Waterton, noticed his preoc- 
cupation; and, on the pretext of a headache, 
he retired early to his own bedroom. His 
mind was full of Herminia and these strange 
ideas of hers; how could he listen with a be- 
coming show of interest to Ethel Waterton's 
aspirations on the grand piano after a gipsy 
life, — oh, a gipsy life for her! — when in point 
of fact she was a most insipid blonde from the 
cover of a chocolate box.^ So he went to bed 
betimes, and there lay long awake, deep won- 
dering 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 he 
could 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 might have observed a horse or any other 
intended purchase, he had come to the conclu- 

4 



.Ml 



so THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

sion "she wouldn't do," and had ceased to 
entertain her. But with Herminia, he was in 
love. The potent god had come upon him. 
That imperious inner monitor which cries aloud 
to a man, "You must have this girl, because 
you can't do without her; you must strive to 
make her happy, because her happiness is more 
to you now ten thousand fold than your own," 
that imperious inner monitor had spoken out 
at last in no uncertain tone to Alan Merrick. 
He knew for the first time what it is to be in 
love ; in love with a true and beautiful woman, 
not with his own future convenience and com- 
fort. The keen fresh sense it quickened within 
him raised him for the moment some levels 
above himself. For Herminia's sake, he felt, 
he could 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, how noble the woman was; tread- 
ing her own ideal world of high seraphic har- 
monies. He was in love with her stainless 
soul; he could not have loved her so well, 
could not have admired her so profoundly, had 
she been other than she was, had she shared 
the common prejudices and preconceptions of 
women. It was just because she was Herminia 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 51 

that he felt so irresistibly attracted towards 
her. She drew him like a magnet. What he 
loved and admired was not so much the fair, 
frank face itself, as the lofty Cornelia-like 
spirit behind it. 

And yet, — he hesitated. 

Could he accept the sacrifice this white soul 
wished to make for him.** Coujd he aid and 
abet her in raising up for herself so much unde- 
served obloquy } Could he help her to become 
Anathema niaranatha among her sister women } 
Even if she felt brave enough to try the experi- 
ment herself for humanity's sake, was it not 
his duty as a man to protect her from her own 
sublime and generous impulses.? Is it not for 
that in part that nature makes us virile.? We 
must shield the weaker vessel. He was flattered 
not a little that this leader among women 
should have picked him out for herself among 
the ranks of men as her predestined companion 
in her chosen task of emancipating her sex. 
And he was thoroughly sympathetic (as every 
good man must needs be) with her aims and 
her method. Yet, still he hesitated. Never 
before could he have conceived such a problem 
of the soul, such a moral dilemma possible.' It 
rent heart and brain at once asunder. Instinc- 
tively he felt to himself he would be doing 
wrong should he try in any way to check these 



52 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

splendid and unselfish impulses which led 
Herminia to offer herself willingly up as a 
living sacrifice on behalf of her enslaved sis- 
ters everywhere. Yet the innate feeling of 
the man, that 't is his place to protect and 
guard the woman, even from her own higher 
and purer self, intervened to distract him. He 
couldn't bear to feel he might be instrumental 
in bringing upon his pure Herminia the tor- 
tures that must be in store for her; he could n't 
bear to think his name might be coupled with 
hers in shameful ways, too base for any man to 
contemplate. 

And then, intermixed with these higher 
motives, came others that he hardly liked to 
confess to himself where Herminia was con- 
cerned, but which nevertheless would obtrude 
themselves, will he, nill he, upon him. What 
would other people say about such an innocent 
union as Herminia contemplated ? Not indeed, 
'* What effect would it have upon his position 
and prospects?" Alan Merrick's place as a 
barrister was fairly well assured; and the Bar 
is luckily one of the few professions in lie- 
loving England where a man need not grovel 
at the mercy of the moral judgment of the 
meanest and grossest among his fellow-crea- 
tures, as is the case with the Church, with 
medicine, with the politician, and with the 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. S3 

schoolmaster. But Alan could not help think- 
ing all the same how people would misinter- 
pret and misunderstand his relations with the 
woman he loved, if he modelled them strictly 
upon Herminia's wishes. It was hateful, it 
was horrible to have to con the thing over, 
where that faultless soul was concerned, in the 
vile and vulgar terms other people would apply 
to it; but for Herminia's sake, con it over so 
he must ; and though he shrank from the efifort 
with a deadly shrinking, he nevertheless faced 
it. Men at the clubs would say he had seduced 
Herminia. Men at the clubs would lay the 
whole blame of the episode upon him; and he 
could n*t bear to be so blamed for the sake of 
a woman, to save whom from the faintest 
shadow of disgrace or shame he would willingly 
have died a thousand times over. For since 
Herminia had confessed her love to him yes- 
terday, he had begun to feel how much she was 
to him. His admiration and appreciation of 
her had risen inexpressibly. And was he now 
to be condemned for having dragged down to 
the dust that angel whose white wings he felt 
himself unworthy to touch with the hem of his 
garment ? 

And yet, once more, when he respected her 
so much for the sacrifice she was willing to 
make for humanity, would it be right for him 



54 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

to stand in her way, to deter her from realizing 
her own highest nature? She was Herminia 
just because she lived in that world of high 
hopes, just because she had the courage and 
the nobility to dare this great thing. Would 
it be right of him to bring her down from that 
pedestal whereon she stood so austere, and 
urge upon her that she should debase herself 
to be as any other woman, — even as Ethel 
Waterton? For the Watertons had brought 
him there to propose to Ethel. 

For hours he tossed and turned and revolved 
these problems. Rain beat on the leaded panes 
of the Waterton dormers. Day dawned, but no 
light came with it to his troubled spirit. The 
more he thought of this dilemma, the more pro- 
foundly he shrank from the idea of allowing 
himself to be made into the instrument for 
what the world would call, after its kind, Her- 
minia's shame and degradation. For even if 
the world could be made to admit that Her- 
minia had done what she did from chaste and 
noble motives, — which considering what we 
all know of the world, was improbable, — yet 
at any rate it could never allow that he himself 
had acted from any but the vilest and most 
unworthy reasons. Base souls would see in 
the sacrifice he made to Herminia's ideals, only 
the common story of a trustful woman cruelly 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. $5 

betrayed by the man who pretended to love 
her, and would proceed to treat him with the 
coldness and contempt with which such a man 
deserves to be treated! 

As the morning wore on, this view of the 
matter obtruded itself more and more forcibly 
every mortient on Alan. Over and over again 
he said to himself, let come what come might, 
he must never aid and abet that innocent soul 
in rushing blindfold over a cliff to her own 
destruction. It is so easy at twenty-two to 
ruin yourself for life; so difficult at thirty to 
climb slowly back again. No, no, holy as Her- 
minia's impulses were, he must save her from 
herself; he must save her from her own purity; 
he must refuse to be led astray by her romantic 
aspirations. He must keep her to the beaten 
path trod by all petty souls, and preserve her 
from the painful crown of martyrdom she her- 
self designed as her eternal diadem. 

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

He mistook the solid rock of ethical resolu- 
tion he was trying to disturb with so frail an 
engine. The fulcrum itself would yield far 



56 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

■ 

sooner to the pressure than the weight of Her- 
minia's uncompromising rectitude. Passionate 
as she was, — and with that opulent form sKe 
could hardly be otherwise, — principle was still 
deeper and more imperious with her than 
passion. 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. $7 



V. 



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

When Alan reached the trysting-place, under 
a broad-armed oak, in a glade of the woodland, 
Herminia was there before him; a good woman 
always is, *t is the prerogative of her affection. 
She was simply dressed in her dainty print 
gown, a single tea-rosebud peeped out from 
her bodice; she looked more lily-like, so Alan 
thought in his heart, than he had ever yet 
seen her. She held out her hand to him with 
parted lips and a conscious blush. Alan took 
it, but bent forward at the same time, and with 
a hasty glance around, just touched her rich 
mouth. Herminia allowed him without a 
struggle; she was too stately of mien ever to 
grant a favor without granting it of pure grace, 
and with queenly munificence. 



58 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

Alan led her to a grassy bank where thyme 
and basil grew matted, and the hum of myriad 
wings stirred the sultry air; Herminia let him 
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 her along the 
path that her conscience approved of. Alan 
seated himself by her side, and took her hand 
in his; Herminia let him hold it. This love- 
making was pure honey. Dappled spots of 
light and shade flecked the ground beneath 
the trees like a jaguar's skin. Wood-pigeons 
crooned, unseen, from the leafy covert. She 
sat there long without uttering a word. Once 
Alan essayed to speak, but Herminia cut him ' 
short. "Oh, no, not yet," she cried half petu- 
lantly; "this silence is so delicious. I love 
best just to 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 feel her heart 
beating. At last Alan interposed, and began 
to speak to her. The girl drew a long breath; 
then she sighed for a second, as she opened her 
eyes again. Every curve of her bosom heaved 
and swayed mysteriously. It seemed such a 
pity to let articulate words disturb that reverie. 
Still, if Alan wished it. For a woman is 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 59 

a woman, let Girton do^ its worst; and Her- 
minia not less but rather more than the rest 
of them. 

Then Alan began. With her hand clasped 
in his, and fondling it while he spoke, he urged 
all he could urge to turn her from her purpose. 
He pointed out to her how unwise, how irre- 
trievable her position would be, if she once 
assumed it. On such a road as that there is no 
turning back. The die once cast, she must for- 
ever abide by it. He used all arts to persuade 
and dissuade; all eloquence to save her from 
herself and her salvation. If he loved her less, 
he said with truth, he might have spoken less 
earnestly. It was for her own sake he spoke, 
because he so loved her. He waxed hot in his 
eager desire to prevent her from taking this 
fatal step. He drew his breath hard, and 
paused. Emotion and anxiety overcame him 
visibly. 

But as for Herminia, though she listened 
with affection afnd with a faint thrill of pleasure 
to much that he said, seeing how deeply he 
loved her, she leaned back from time to time, 
half weary with his eagerness, and his conse- 
quent iteration. ^ "Dear Alan," she said at last, 
soothing his hand with her own. as a sister 
might have soothed it, "you talk about all this 
as though it were to me some new resolve, 



6o THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

some new idea of my making. You forget it 
is the outcome of my ^ life's philosophy. I 
have grown up to it slowly. I have thought 
of all this, and of hardly anything else, ever 
since I was old enough to think for myself 
about anything. Root and branch, it is to me 
a foregone conclusion. I love you. You love 
me. So far as I am concerned, there ends the 
question. One way there 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 from 
my purpose. You won't save me from myself, 
as you call it; you will only hand me over to 
some one less fit for me by far than you are." 
A quiet moisture glistened in her eyes, and 
she gazed at him pensively. " How wonderful 
it is," she went on, musing. "Three weeks 
ago, I didn't know there was such a man in 
the world at all as you; and now — why, Alan, 
I feel as if the world would be nothing to me 
without you. Your name seems to sing in my 
ears all day long with the song of the birds, 
and to thrill through and through me as I lie 
awake on my pillow with the cry of the night- 
jar. Yet, if you won't take me on my own 
terms, I know well what will happen. I shall 
go away, and grieve over you, of course, and 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 6l 

feel bereaved for months, as if I could never 
possibly again love any man. At present it 
seems to me I never could love him. But 
though my heart tells me that, my reason tells 
me I should some day find some other soul I 
might perhaps fall back upon. But it would 
only be falling back. For the sake of my prin- 
ciples alone, and of the example I wish to set 
the world, could I ever fall back upon any 
other. Yet fall back I would. And what good 
would you have done me then by refusing me.^ 
You would merely have cast me off from the 
man I love best, the man who I know by imme- 
diate instinct, which is the voice of 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 evidence told me you were 
the one love meant for me. Why force me to 
decline upon some other less meet for me? *' 

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

The tenderness of woman let her hand glide 
over his cheek. She was not ash'amed of her 
love. "O Alan," she cried, "if it were only 
for myself, I could trust you with my life'; I 
could trust you with anything. But I haven't 
only myself to think of. I have to think of 
right and wrong; I have to think of the world; 



62 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

« 

I have to think of the cause which almost 
wholly hangs upon me. Not for nothing are 
these impulses implanted in my breast. They 
are the voice of the soul' of all women within 
me. If I were to neglect them for the sake of 
gratifying your wishes, — if I were to turn 
traitor to my sex for the sake of the man I 
love, as so many women have turned before me, 
I should hate and despise myself. I could n't 
love you, Alan, quite so much, loved I not 
honor more, and the battle imposed upon me." 

Alan wavered as she spoke. He felt what 
she said was true; even if he refused to take 
her on the only terms she could accept, he 
would not thereby save her. She would turn 
in time and bestow herself upon some man 
who would perhaps be less worthy of her, — 
nay *even on some man who might forsake her 
in the sequel with unspeakable treachery. Of 
conduct like that, Alan knew himself incapable. 
He knew that if he took Herminia once to his 
heart, he would treat her with such tenderness, 
such constancy, such devotion as never yet was 
shown to living woman. (Love always thinks 
so.) But still, he shrank from the idea of being 
himself the man to take advantage of her; 
for so in his unregenerate mind he phrased to 
himself their union. And still he temporized. 
"Even so, Herminia," he cried, bending for- 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 63 

ward and gazing hard at her, ** I could n't endure 
to have it 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 
you can think of tkatf she murmured, gazing 
across at him half in tears. "O Alan, for my 
part I can think of nothing now but the truths 
of life and the magnitude of the issues. Our 
hearts against the 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 ten- 
derest chords as a loving woman. Herminia 
was moved, for her heart went forth to him, 
and she knew why he tried so hard to save her 
from her own higher and truer nature. But 
she never yielded an inch. She stood firm to 
her colors. She shook her head to the last, 
and murmured over and over again, "There is 
only one right way, and no persuasion 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 final resort of delay. He saw 
much merit in procrastination. There was no 
hurry, he said. They need n't make up their 



64 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

minds, one way or the other, immediately. 
They could take their time to think. Perhaps, 
with a week or two to decide in, Herminia 
might persuade him; or he might persuade her. 
Why rush on fate so suddenly? 

But at that, to his immense surprise, Her- 
minia demurred. "No, no," she said, shaking 
her head, "that *s not at all what I want. We 
must decide to-day one way or the other. Now 
is the accepted time; now is the day of salva- 
tion. I couldn't let you wait, and slip by de- 
grees into some vague arrangement we hardly 
contemplated definitely. To do that would be 
to sin against my ideas of decorum. Whatever 
we do we must do, as the apostle says, decently 
and in order, with a full sense of the obliga- 
tions it imposes upon us. We must say to one 
another in so many words, * I am yours; you 
are 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 ; but 
for my dignity's sake, I put it to you now, 
choose one way or the other." 

Alan looked at her hard. Her face was crim- 
son by this with maidenly shame; but she made 
no effort to hide or avert it. For the good of 
humanity, this question must be settled once 
for all ; and no womanish reserve should make 
her shrink from settling it. Happier maidens 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 65 

in ages to come, when society had reconstructed 
itself on the broad basis of freedom, would never 
have to go through what she was going through 
that moment. They would be spared the quiv- 
ering shame, the tingling regret, the struggle 
with which she braced up her maiden modesty 
to that supreme effort. But she would go 
through with it all the same. For eternal 
woman's sake 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 level to understand her to 
the core. "Herminia," he cried, bending over 
her, "you drive me to bay. You press me very 
hard. I feel myself yielding. I am a man; 
and when you speak to me like that, I know it. 
You enlist on your side all that is virile within 
me. Yet how can 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 per- 
haps say j/es; because I love you so well, I feel 
compelled to say no to you. " 

Herminia looked at him hard in return. Her 
cheeks were glowing now with something like 
the shame of the woman who feels her love is 
lightly rejected. "Is that final .^" she asked, 
drawing herself up as she sat, and facing him 
proudly. 

5 



66 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

"No, no, it 's not final," Alan answered, feel- 
ing the woman's influence course through body 
and blood to his quivering finger-tips. Magi- 
cal touches stirred him. " How can iX be final, 
Herminia, when you look at me like that? 
How can it be final, when you 're so gracious, 
so graceful, so beautiful? Oh, my child, I am 
a man; don't play too hard on those fiercest 
chords in my nature." 

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

"Yes, I agree with you in principle," Alan 
answered. "It isn't there that I hesitate. 
Even before I met you, I had arrived at pretty 
much the same ideas myself, as a matter of 
abstract reasoning. I saw that the one way of 
freedom for the woman is to cast off, root and 
branch, the evil growth of man's supremacy. 
I saw that the honorableness of marriage, the 
disgrace of free union, were just so many 
ignoble masculine devices to keep up man's 
lordship; vile results of his determination to 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 6/ 

taboo to himself beforehand and monopolize 
for life some particular woman. I know all 
that; I acknowledge all that. I see as plainly 
as you do that sooner or later there must come 
a revolution. But, Herminia, the women who 
devote, themselves to carrying out that revolu- 
tion, will take their souls in their hands, and 
will march in line to the freeing of their sex 
through shame and caluAiny and hardships 
innumerable. I shrink from letting you, the 
woman that I love, bring that fate upon your- 
self; I shrink still more from being the man to 
aid and abet you in doing it.'* 

Herminia fixed her piercing eyes upon his 
face once more. Tears stood in them now. 
The tenderness of woman was awakened within 
her. "Dear Alan," she said gently, "don't I 
tell you I have thought long since of all that ? 
I am prepared to face it. It is only a question 
of with whom I shall do so. Shall it be with 
thq man 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. She was splendid when 



68 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

she stood so with her panting bosom. "Then 
you decide 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 a woman says that, what 
can a man refuse her.^ From such a woman 
as you, I am so proud, so proud, so proud of 
such a confession; how could I ever cease to 
feel you were mine, — mine, mine, wholly mine 
for a lifetime.?" 

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

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

Herminia made no direct answer; she only 
laid her head with perfect trust 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." 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 69 



VL 



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

Next came that more difficult matter, the dis- 
cussion of ways and means, the more practical 
details. Alan hardly knew at first on what pre- 
cise terms it was Herminia's wish that they 
two should pass their lives together. His ideas 
were all naturally framed on the old model of 
marriage; in that matter, Herminia' said, he 
was still in the gall of bitterness, and the bond 
of iniquity. He took it for granted that of 
course they must dwell under one roof with 
one another. But that simple ancestral notion, 
derived from man's lordship in his own house, 
was wholly adverse to Herminia's views of the 
reasonable and natural. She had debated these 
problems at full in her own mind for years, and 
had arrived at definite and consistent solutions 
for every knotty point in them. Why should 
this friendship differ at all, she asked, in 
respect of time and place, from any other 
friendship.? The notion of necessarily keeping 



70 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

house together, the cramping idea of the family 
tie, belonged entirely to the regime of the man- 
made patriarchate, where the woman and the 
children were the slaves and chattels of the 
lord and master. In a free society, was it not 
obvious that each woman would live her own 
life apart, would preserve her independence, 
and would receive the visits of the man for 
whom she cared, — the father of her children ? 
Then only could she be free. Any other 
method meant the economic and social superi- 
ority of the man, and was irreconcilable with 
the perfect individuality of the woman. 

So Herminia reasoned. She rejected at once, 
therefore, the idea of any change in her exist- 
ing mode of life. To her, the friendship she 
proposed with Alan Merrick was no social rev- 
olution; it was but the due fulfilment of her 
natural functions. To make of it an occasion 
for ostentatious change in her way of living 
seemed to her as unnatural as is the practice 
of the barbarians in our midst who use a wed- 
ding — that most sacred and private event in a 
young girl's life — as an opportunity for display 
of the coarsest and crudest character. To rivet 
the attention of friends on bride and bride- 
groom is to offend against the most delicate 
susceptibilities of modesty. From all such 
hateful practices, Herminia's pure mind re- 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 7 1 

volted by instinct. She felt that here at least 
was the one moment in a woman's history when 
she would shrink with timid reserve from every 
eye save one man's, — when publicity of any 
sort was most odious and horrible. 

Only the blinding effect of custom, indeed, 
could ever have shut good women's eyes to the 
shameful indecorousness of wedding ceremonial. 
We drag a young girl before the prying gaze 
of all the world at the very crisis in her life, 
when natural modesty would most lead her to 
conceal herself from her dearest acquaintance. 
And our women themselves have grown so 
blunted by use to the hatefulness of the ordeal 
that many of them face it now with inhuman 
effrontery. Familiarity with marriage has al- 
most killed out in the maidens of our race the 
last lingering relics of native modesty. 

Herminia, however, could dispense with all 
that show. She had a little 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 she lived by 
herself; for she kept no servants. There she 
should continue to live; why need this purely 
personal compact between them two make any 
difference in her daily habits.^ She would go 
on with her school-work for the present, as 



^2 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

usual. Oh, no, she certainly did n't intend to 
notify the head-mistress of the school or any 
one else, of her altered position. It was no 
alteration of position at all, so far as she was 
concerned; merely the addition to life of a 
new and very dear and natural friendship. 
Herminia took her own point of view so in- 
stinctively indeed, — lived so wrapped in an 
ideal world of her own and the future's, — that 
Alan was often quite alarmed in his soul when 
he thought of the rude awakening that no doubt 
awaited her. Yet whenever he hinted it to her 
with all possible delicacy, she seemed so per- 
fectly prepared for the worst the world could 
do, so fixed and resolved in her intention of 
martyrdom, that he had no argument left, and 
could only sigh over her. 

It was not, she explained to him further, tliat 
she wished to conceal anything. The least 
tinge of concealment was wholly alien to that 
frank fresh nature. If her head-mistress asked 
her a point-blank question, she would not 
attempt to parry it, but would reply at once 
with a point blank answer. Still, her very 
views on the subject made it impossible for 
her to volunteer information unasked to any 
one. Here was a personal matter of the utmost 
privacy; a matter which concerned nobody on 
earth, save herself and Alan ; a matter on which 




THE WOMAN WHO DID. 73 

it was the grossest impertinence for any one 
else to make any inquiry or hold any opinion. 
They two chose to be friends; and there, so 
far as the rest of the world was concerned, the 
whole thing ended. What else took place 
between them was wholly a subject for their 
own consideration. But if ever circumstances 
should arise which made it necessary for her to 
avow to the world that she must soon be a 
mother, then it was for the world to take the 
first step, if it would act upon its own hateful 
and cruel initiative. She would never deny, 
but she would never go out of her way to confess. 
She stood upon her individuality as a human being. 
As to other practical matters, about which 
Alan ventured delicately to throw out a pass- 
ing question or two, Herminia was perfectly 
frank, with the perfect frankness of one who 
thinks and does nothing to be ashamed of. 
She had always been self-supporting, she said, 
and she would be self-supporting still. To her 
mind, that was an essential step towards the 
emancipation of women. Their friendship im- 
plied for her no change of existence, merely an 
addition to the fulness of her living. He was 
the complement of her being. Every woman 
should naturally wish to live her whole life, to 
fulfil her whole functions; and that she could do 
only by becoming a mother, accepting the orbit 



74 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

for which nature designed her. In the end, no 
doubt, complete independence would be secured 
for each woman by the civilized state, or in 
other words by the whole body of men, who do 
the hard work of the world, and who would col- 
lectively guarantee every necessary and luxury 
to every woman of the community equally. In 
that way alone could perfect liberty of choice 
and action be secured for women; and she held 
it just that women should so be provided for, 
because the mothers of the community fulfil in 
the state as important and necessary a function 
as the men themselves do. It would be well, 
too, that the mothers should be free to perform 
that function without preoccupation of any sort. 
So a free world would order things. But in 
our present barbaric state of industrial slavery, 
capitalism, monopoly, — in other words under 
the organized rule of selfishness, — such a 
course was impossible. Perhaps, as. an inter- 
mediate condition, it might happen in time 
that the women of certain classes would for the 
most part be made independent at maturity 
each by her own father; which would produce 
for them in the end pretty much the same gen- 
eral effect of freedom. She saw as a first step 
the endowment of the daughter. But mean- 
while there was nothing for it save that as 
many women as could should aim for them- 




THE WOMAN WHO DID. 75 

selves at economic liberty, in other words at 
self-support. That was an evil in itself, because 
obviously the prospective mothers of a com- 
munity should be relieved as far as possible 
from the stress and strain of earning a liveli- 
hood; should be set free to build up their 
nervous systems to the highest attainable level 
against the calls of maternity. But above all 
things we must be practical; and in the prac- 
tical world here and now around us, no other 
way existed for women to be free save the 
wasteful way of each earning her own liveli- 
hood. Therefore she would continue her school- 
work with her pupils as long as the school 
would allow her; and when that became impos- 
sible, would fall back upon literature. 

One other question Alan ventured gently to 
raise. — the question of children. Fools always 
put that question, and think it a crushing one. 
Alan was no fool, yet it puzzled him strangely. 
He did not see for himself how easy is the so- 
lution; how absolutely Herminia's plan leaves 
the position unaltered. But Herminia herself 
was as modestly frank on the subject as on 
every other. It was a moral and social point 
of the deepest importance; and it would be 
wrong of them to rush into it without due con- 
sideration. She had duly considered it. She 
would give her children, should any come, the 
unique and glorious birthright of being the 



76 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

only human beings ever born into this world 
as the deliberate result of a free union, con- 
tracted on philosophical and ethical principles. 
Alan hinted certain doubts as to their up-bring- 
ing 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 discuss these 
matters like the squalid rich, who make their 
marriages a questioo of settlements and dow- 
ries and business arrangements.^ They two 
were friends and lovers; in love, such base 
doubts could never arise. Not for worlds 
would she import into their mutual relations 
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 by Herminia's more perfect 
and logical conception of her own principles. 
She knew exactly what she felt, and wanted; 
while he knew only in a vague and formless 
way that his reason agreed with her. 

A week later, he knocked timidly one evening 
at the door of a modest little workman-looking 
cottage, down a small side street in the back- 
wastes of Chelsea. *Twas a most unpretending 
street; Bower Lane by name, full of brown 
brick houses, all as like as peas, and with 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. ^^ 

nothing of any sort to redeem their plain fronts 
from the common blight of the London jerry- 
builder. Only a soft serge curtain and a pot of 
mignonette on the ledge of the window, dis- 
tinguished the cottage at which Alan Merrick 
knocked from the others beside it. Externally 
that is to say; for within it was a« dainty as 
Morris wall-papers and merino hangings and 
a delicate feminine taste in form and color 
could make it. Keats and Shelley lined the 
shelves; Rossetti's wan maidens gazed un- 
earthly from the over-mantel. The door was 
opened for him by Herminia in person; for she 
kept no servant, — that was one of her prin- 
ciples. She was dressed from head to foot in 
a simple white gown, as pure and sweet as the 
soul it covered. A white rose nestled in her 
glossy hair; three sprays of white lily decked 
a vase on the mantel-piece. Some dim sur- 
vival of ancestral ideas made Herminia Barton 
so array herself in the white garb of affiance 
for her bridal .evening. Her cheek was aglow 
with virginal shrinking as she opened the door, 
and welcomed Alan in. But she held out her 
hand just as frankly as ever to the man of her 
free choice as he advanced to greet her. Alan 
caught her in his arms and kissed her forehead 
tenderly. And thus was Herminia Barton's 
espousal consummated. 



78 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



VII. 

The next six months were the happiest time of 
her life, for Herminia. All day long she worked 
hard with her classes; and often in the even- 
ings Alan Merrick dropped in for sweet con- 
verse and companionship. Too free from any 
taint of sin or' shame herself ever to suspect 
that others could misinterpret her actions, 
Herminia was hardly aware how the gossip of 
Bower Lane made free in time with the name 
of the young lady who had taken a cottage in 
the row, and whose relations with the tall 
gentleman that called so much in the evenings 
were beginning to attract the attention of the 
neighborhood. The poor slaves of washer- 
women and working men's wives all around, 
with whom contented slavery to a drunken hus- 
band was the only " respectable " condition, — 
couldn't understand for the life of them how 
the pretty young lady could make her name so 
cheap; "and her that pretends to be so chari- 
table and that, and goes about in the parish 
like a district visitor!" Though to be sure it 



J 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 79 

had already struck the minds of Bower Lane 
that Herminia never went "to church nor 
chapel;" and when people cut themselves 
adrift from church and chapel, why, what 
sort of morality can you reasonably expect of 
them? Nevertheless, Herminia's manners were 
so sweet and engaging, to rich and poor alike, 
that Bower Lane seriously regretted what it 
took to be her lapse from grace. Poor purblind 
Bower Lane ! A life-time would have failed it 
to discern for itself how infinitely higher than 
its slavish "respectability" was Herminia's 
freedom. In which respect, indeed, Bower Lane 
was no doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, or, 
for the matter of that, 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 that 
perfect purity. And though Bower Lane lay 
but some few hundred yards off from the 
Carlyle Place Girl's School, the social gulf 
between them yet yawned so wide that good 
old Miss Smith-Waters from Cambridge, the 
head-mistress of the school, never caught a 
single echo of the washerwomen's gossip. 
Herminia's life through those six months was 
one unclouded honeymoon. On Sundays, she 
and Alan would go out of town together, and 
stroll across the breezy summit of Leith Hill, 



80 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

or among the brown heather and garrulous 
pine-woods that perfume the radiating spurs of 
Hind Head with their aromatic resins. Her 
love for Alan was profound and absorbing; 
while as for Alan, the more he gazed into the 
calm depths of that crystal soul, the more 
deeply did he admire it. Gradually she was 
raising him to her own level. It is impossible 
to mix with a lofty nature and not acquire in 
time some tincture of its nobler and more gen- 
erous sentiments. Herminia was weaning Alan 
by degrees from the world ; she was teaching 
him to see that moral purity and moral earnest- 
ness are worth more, after all, than to dwell with 
purple hangings in all the tents of iniquity. 
She was making him understand and sympathize 
with the motives which led her stoutly on to 
her final martyrdom, which made her submit 
without a murmur of discontent to her great 
renunciation. 

As yet, however, there was no' hint or fore- 
cast of actual martyrdom. On the contrary, 
her life flowed in all the halo of a honeymoon. 
It was a honeymoon, too, undisturbed by the 
petty jars and discomforts of domestic life; 
she saw Alan too seldom for either ever to lose 
the keen sense of fresh delight in the other's 
presence. When she met him, she thrilled to 
the delicate finger-tips. Herminia had planned 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 8 1 

it SO of set purpose. In her reasoned philos- 
ophy of life, she had early decided that 't is 
the wear and tear of too close daily intercourse 
which turns unawares the lover into the hus- 
band; and she had determined that in her own 
converse with the man she loved that cause of 
disillusion should never intrude itself. They 
conserved their romance through all their 
plighted and united life. Herminia had after- 
wards no recollections of Alan to look back 
upon save ideally happy ones. 

So six months wore away. On the memory 
of those six months Herminia was to subsist 
for half a lifetime. At the end of that time, 
Alan began to fear that if she did not soon 
withdraw from the Carlyle Place School, Miss 
Smith-Waters might begin to ask inconvenient 
questions. Herminia, ever true to her prin- 
ciples, was for stopping on till the bitter end, 
and compelling Miss Smith-Waters to dismiss 
her from her situation. But Alan, more worldly 
wise, foresaw that such a course must inevitably 
result in needless annoyance and humiliation 
for Herminia; and Herminia was now begin- 
ning to be so far influenced by Alan's person- 
ality that she yielded the point with reluctance 
to his masculine judgment'. It must be always 
so. The man must needs retain for many years 
to come the personal hegemony he has usurped 

6 



I 



82 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

over the woman ; and the woman who once ac- 
cepts him as lover or as husband must give 
way in the end, even in matters of principle, 
to his virile self-assertion. She would be less 
a woman, and he less a man, were any other 
result possible. Deep down in the very roots 
of the idea of sex we come on that prime 
antithesis, — the male, active and aggressive; 
the female, sedentary, passive, and receptive. 

And even on the broader question, experience 
shows one it is always so in the world we live 
in. No man or woman can go through life in 
consistent obedience to any high principle, — 
not even the willing and deliberate martyrs. 
We must bow to circumstances. Herminia had 
made up her mind beforehand for the crown 
of martyrdom, the one possible guerdon this 
planet can bestow upon really noble and disin- 
terested action. And she never shrank from 
any necessary pang, incidental to the prophet's 
and martyr's existence. Yet even so,* in a 
society almost wholly composed of mean and 
petty souls, incapable of comprehending or 
appreciating any exalted moral standpoint, it 
is practically impossible to live from day to 
day in accordance with a higher or purer 
standard. The martyr who should try so to walk 
without deviation of any sort, turning neither 
to the right nor to the left in the smallest par- 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 83 

ticular, must accomplish his martyrdom pre- 
maturely on the pettiest side-issues, and would 
never live at all to assert at the stake the great 
truth which is the lodestar and goal of his 
existence. 

So Herminia gave way. Sadly against her 
will she gave way. One morning in early 
March, she absented herself from her place in 
the class-room without even taking leave of 
her beloved schoolgirls, whom she had tried 
so hard unobtrusively to train up towards a 
rational understanding of the universe around 
them, and sat down to write a final letter of 
farewell to poor straight-laced kind-hearted 
Miss Smith -Waters. She sat down to it with 
a sigh; for Miss Smith-Waters, though her out- 
look upon the cosmos was through one narrow 
chink, was a good soul up to her lights, and 
had been really fond and proud of Herminia. 
She had rather shown her off, indeed, as a 
social trump card to the hesitating parent, — 
"This is our second mistress. Miss Barton; you 
know her father, perhaps; such an excellent 
man, the Dean of Dunwich. " And now, Her- 
minia sat down with a heavy heart, thinking to 
herself what a stab of pain the avowal she had 
to make would send throbbing through that 
gentle old breast, and how absolutely incapable 
dear Miss Smith-Waters could be of ever appre- 



84 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

ciating 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 fem- 
inine reticence. She told Miss Smith-Waters 
frankly enough all it was necessary Miss Smith- 
Waters should know ; but she said it with such 
daintiness that even that conventionalized and 
hide-bound old maid couldn't help feeling and 
recognizing the purity and nobility of her mis- 
guided action. Poor child. Miss Smith-Waters 
thought; she was mistaken, of course, sadly and 
grievously mistaken; but, then, 'twas her heart 
that misled her, no doubt; and Miss Smith- 
Waters, having dim recollections of a far-away 
time when she herself too possessed some rudi- 
mentary fragment of such a central vascular 
organ, fairly cried over the poor girl's letter 
with sympathetic shame, and remorse, and vex- 
ation. Miss Smith-Waters could hardly be 
expected to understand that if Herminia had 
thought her conduct in the faintest degree 
wrong, or indeed anything but the highest and 
best for humanity, she could never conceivably 
have allowed even that loving heart of hers to 
hurry her into it. For Herminia's devotion to 
principle was not less but far greater than 
Miss Smith-Waters's own; only, as it happened, 




THE WOMAN WHO DID. 85 

the principles themselves were diametrically 
opposite. 

Herminia wrote her note with not a few tears 
for poor Miss Smith-Waters 's disappointment. 
That is the worst of living a life morally ahead 
of your contemporaries ; what you do with pro- 
foundest conviction of its eternal rightness can- 
not fail to arouse hostile and painful feelings 
even in the souls of the most right-minded of 
your friends who still live in bondage to the 
conventional lies and the conventional injus- 
tices. It is the good, indeed, who are most 
against you. Still, Herminia steeled her heart 
to tell the simple truth, — how, for the right's 
sake and humanity's she had made up her mind 
to eschew the accursed thing, and to strike 
one bold blow for the freedom and unfettered 
individuality of women. She knew in what 
obloquy 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 upon every 
one of us; and that the clearer we could see 
ahead, and the farther in front we could look, 
the more profoundly did that duty shine forth 
for us. For her own part, she had never shrunk 
from doing what she knew to be right for man- 
kind in the end, though she felt sure it must 
lead her to personal misery. Yet unless one 
woman were prepared to lead the way, no free- 



86 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

dom was possible. She had found a man with 
whom she could spend her life in sympathy and 
united usefulness; and with him she had elected 
to spend it in the way pointed out to us by 
nature. Acting on his advice, though some- 
what against her own judgment, she meant to 
leave England for the present, only returning 
again when she could return with the dear life 
they had both been instrumental in bringing 
into the world, 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 as- 
tonishing, that incredible letter in a perfect 
whirl of amazement and stupefaction. She 
did n't know what to make of it. It seemed 
to run counter to all her preconceived ideas of 
moral action. That a young girl should ven- 
ture to think for herself at all about right and 
wrong was passing strange; that she should 
arrive at original notions upon those abstruse 
subjects, which were not the notions of con- 
stituted authority and of the universal slave- 
drivers and obscurantists generally, — notions 
full of luminousness upon the real relations 
and duties of our race, — was to poor, cramped 
Miss Smith-Waters well-nigh inconceivable. 
That a young girl should prefer freedom to 
slavery; should deem it more moral to retain 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 8/ 

her divinely-conferred individuality in spite of 
the world than to yield it up to a man for life 
in return for the price of her board and lodg- 
ing; should refuse to sell her own body for a 
comfortable home and the shelter of a name, — 
these things seemed to Miss Smith-Waters, 
with her smaller-catechism standards of right 
and wrong, scarcely short of sheer madness. 
Yet Herminia had so endeared herself to the 
old lady's soul that on receipt of her letter 
Miss Smith-Waters went upstairs to her own 
room with a neuralgic headache, and never 
again in her life referred to her late second 
mistress in any other terms than as "my poor 
dear sweet' misguided Herminia." 

But when it became known next morning in 
Bower Lane that the queenly-looking school- 
mistress who used to go round among "our 
girls " with tickets for concerts and lectures 
and that, had disappeared suddenly with the 
nice-looking young man who used to come 
a-courting her on Sundays and evenings, the 
amazement and surprise of respectable Bower 
Lane was simply unbounded. " Who would have 
thought," the red-faced matrons of the cottages 
remarked, over their quart of bitter, " the pore 
thing had it in her! But there, it's these 
demure ones as is always the slyest ! " For 
Bower Lane could only judge that austere soul 



\ 

88 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

by its own vulgar standard (as did also Bel- 
gravia). Most low minds, indeed, imagine abso- 
lute hypocrisy must be involved in any striving 
after goodness and abstract right -doing on the 
part of any who happen to disbelieve in their 
own blood-thirsty deities, or their own vile 
woman-degrading and prostituting morality. In 
the topsy-turvy philosophy of Bower Lane and 
of Belgravia, what is usual is right; while any 
conscious striving to be better and nobler than 
the mass around one is regarded at once as 
either insane or criminal. 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 89 



VIII. 

They were bound for Italy; so Alan had de- 
cided. Turning over in his mind the pros and 
cons of the situation, he had wisely determined 
that Herminia's confinement had better take 
place somewhere else than in England. The 
difficulties and inconveniences which block the 
way in English lodgings would have been well- 
nigh insufferable; in Italy, people would only 
know that an English signora and her husband 
had taken apartments for a month or two in 
some solemn old palazzo. To Herminia, in- 
deed, this expatriation at such a moment was 
in many ways to the last degree distasteful ; for 
her own part, she hated the merest appearance 
of concealment, and would rather have flaunted 
the open expression of her supreme moral faith 
before the eyes of all London. But Alan 
pointed out to her the many practical difficul- 
ties, amounting almost to impossibilities, which 
beset such a course; and Herminia, though it 
was hateful to her thus to yield to the immoral 
prejudices of a false social system, gave way 



go THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

at last to Alan's repeated expression of the 
necessity for prudent and practical action. She 
would go with him to Italy, she said, as a proof 
of her affection and her confidence in his judg- 
ment, though she still thought the right thing 
was to stand by her guns fearlessly, and fight it 
out to the bitter end undismayed in England. 

On the morning of their departure, Alan 
called to see his father, and explain the situa- 
tion. He felt some explanation was by this 
time necessary. As yet no one in London 
knew anything oflficially as to his relations with 
Herminia; and for Herminia's sake, Alan had 
hitherto kept them perfectly private. But now, 
further reticence was both useless and undesir- 
able; he determined to make a clean breast of 
the whole story to his father. It was early for 
a barrister to be leaving town for the Easter 
vacation; and though Alan had chambers of 
his own in Lincoln's Inn, where he lived by 
himself, he was so often in and out of the house 
in Harley Street that his absence from Lon- 
don would at once have attracted the parental 
attention. 

Dr. Merrick was a model of the close-shaven 
clear-cut London consultant. His shirt-front 
was as impeccable as his moral character was 
spotless — in the way that Belgravia and Har- 
ley Street still understood spotlessness. He 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 91 

was tall and straight, and unbent by age; the 
professional poker which he had swallowed in 
early life seemed to stand him in good stead 
after sixty years, though his hair had whitened 
fast, and his brow was furrowed with most 
deliberative wrinkles. So unapproachable he 
looked, that not even his own sons dared* speak 
frankly before him. His very smile was re- 
strained; he hardly permitted himself for a 
moment that weak human relaxation. 

Alan called at Harley Street immediately 
after breakfast, just a quarter of an hour before 
the time allotted to his father's first patient. 
Dr. Merrick received him in the consulting- 
room with an interrogative raising of those 
straight, thin eyebrows. The mere look on his 
face disconcerted Alan. With an effort the son 
began and explained his errand. His father 
settled himself down into his ample and digni- 
fied professional chair — old oak round-backed, 
— and with head half turned, and hands folded 
in front of him, seemed to diagnose with rapt 
attention this singular form of psychological 
malady. When Alan paused for a second be- 
tween his halting sentences and floundered 
about in search of a more delicate way of glid- 
ing over the thin ice, his father eyed him 
closely with those keen, gray orbs, and after a 
moment's hesitation put in a "Well, continue," 



92 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

without the faintest sign of any human emotion. 
Alan, thus driven to it, admitted awkwardly bit 
by bit that he was leaving London before the 
end of term because he had managed to get 
himself 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. "Quite different from that. A real 
lady. " 

"They always are real ladies, — for the most 
part brought down by untoward 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, to prevent your saying any- 
thing you might afterwards regret, I think I *d 
better mention the lady's name. It 's Miss 
Herminia Barton, the Dean of Dunwich's 
daughter." 

His father drew a long breath. The corners 
of the clear-cut mouth dropped down for a 
second, and the straight, thin eyebrows were 
momentarily elevated. But he gave no other 
overt sign of dismay or astonishment. 

"That makes a great difference, of course," 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 93 

he answered, after a long 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 a minute or two. This 
was most inconvenient in a professional family. 

"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 advisable to 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 with paternal candor; "but I never 
yet knew you were quite such a fool as this 
business shows you. You '11 have to marry the 
girl now in the end. Why the devil could n't 
you marry her outright at first, instead of se- 
ducing her.?" 

" I did not seduce her," Alan answered stoutly. 
" No man on earth could ever succeed in seduc- 
ing that stainless woman. " 

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

"You have seduced her," he said slowly. 



94 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

"And she is not stainless if she has allowed 
you to do so." 

" It is the innocence which survives experience 
that I value, not the innocence which dies with 
it," Alan answered gravely. 

"I don't understand these delicate distinc- 
tions," Dr. Merrick interposed with a polite 
sneer. " I gather from what you said just now 
that the lady is shortly expecting her confine- 
ment; and as she isn't married, you tell me, I 
naturally infer that somebody must have 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 in such a tone about a 
lady in Miss Barton's position. Miss Barton 
has conscientious scruples about the marriage- 
tie, which in theory I share with her; she was 
unwilling to enter into any relations with me 
except on terms of perfect freedom." 

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

Alan rose indignantly. "Father," he said, 
with just wrath, " if you insist upon discussing 
this matter with me in such a spirit, I must 
refuse to stay here. I came to tell you the 
difficulty in which I find myself, and to explain 



i 



THE WOMAN WHO BID. 95 

to you my position. If you won't let me tell 
you in my own way, I must leave the house 
without having laid the facts before you.*' 

The father spread his two palms in front of 
him with demonstrative openness. " 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 to expound to his 
father Herminia's point of view. Dr. Merrick 
listened for a second or two in calm impatience. 
Then he consulted his watch. " Excuse me," he 
said. " I have just three minutes. Let us get 
at once to the practical part — the therapeutics 
of the case, omitting its aetiology. You 're go- 
ing to take the young lady to Italy. When she 
gets there, will she marry you? And do you 
expect me 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 gets to Italy," he answered 
decisively. "And I don't want you to do any- 
thing to provide for either of us." 

The father looked at him with the face he 
was wont to assume in scanning the appearance 
of a confirmed monomaniac. "She will not 
marry you," he answered slowly; "and you 
intend to go on living with her in open con- 



96 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

cubinaj^e! A lady of birth and position! Is 
that your meaning?" 

"Father,** Alan cried despairingly, " Her- 
minia would not consent to live with me on 
any other terms. To her it would be disgraceful, 
shameful, a sin, a reproach, a dereliction of 
prineiple. She could nt go back upon her 
whole past life. She lives for nothing else 
but the emancipation of women.** 

" And you will aid and abet her in her folly .? " 
the father asked, looking up sharply at him. 
** Vou 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 purchase her own ease by prov- 
ing false to her convictions," Alan answered 
stoutly. 

Dr. Merrick gazed at the watch on his table 
once more. Then he rose and rang the bell. 
"Patient here?*' he asked curtly. "Show him 
in then at once. And, Nappcr, if Mr. Alan 
Merrick ever calls again, will you tell him I *m 
out? — and your mistress as well, and all the 
young ladies." He turned coldly to Alan. "I 
must guard your mother and sisters at least," 
he said in a chilly voice, "from the contamina- 
tion of this woman's opinions." 

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



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 97 



IX. 



Alan Merrick strode from his father's door 
that day stung with a burning sense of wrong 
and injustice. More than ever before in his life 
he realized to himself the abject hollowness of 
that conventional code which masquerades in 
our midst as a system of morals. If he had 
continued to "live single " as we hypocritically 
phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread 
the festering social canker of prostitution, on 
which as basis, like some mediaeval castle on 
its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstruc- 
ture of our outwardly decent modern society is 
reared, his father no doubt would have shrugged 
his shoulders and blinked his cold eyes, and 
commended the wise young man for abstaining 
from marriage till his means could permit him 
to keep a wife of his own class in the way she 
was accustomed to. The wretched victims of 
that vile system might die unseen and unpitied 
in some hideous back slum, without touching one 
chord of remorse or regret in Dr. Merrick's 
nature. He was steeled against their suffering. 

7 



98 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

Or again, if Alan had sold his virility for gold 
to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel Water- 
ton — had bartered his freedom to be her wedded 
paramour in a loveless marriage, his father would 
not only have gladly acquiesced, but would 
have congratulated his son on his luck and his 
prudence. Yet, because Alan had chosen rather 
to form a blameless union of pure affection 
with a woman who was in every way his moral 
and mental superior, but in despite of the con- 
ventional ban of society, Dr. Merrick had cast 
him off as an open reprobate. And why.^ 
Simply because that union was unsanctioned 
by the exponents of a law they despised, and 
unblessed by the priests of a creed they rejected. 
Alan saw at once it is not the intrinsic moral 
value of an act such people think about, but 
the light in which it is regarded by a selfish 
society. 

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

He went back to Herminia more than ever 
convinced of that spotless woman's moral supe% 
riority to every one else he had ever met with. 
She sat, a lonely soul, enthroned amid the halo 
of her own perfect purity. To Alan, she seemed 
like one of those early Italian Madonnas, lost 
in a glory of light that surrounds and half hides 
them. He reverenced her far too much to tell 



J 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 99 

her all that had happened. How could he 
wound those sweet ears with his father's coarse 
epithets ? 

They took the club train that afternoon to 
Paris, There they slept the night in a fusty 
hotel near the Gare du Nord, and went on in 
the morning by the daylight express to Switzer- 
land. At Lucerne and Milan they broke the 
journey once more. Herminia had never yet 
gone further afield from England than Paris; 
and this first glimpse of a wider world was 
intensely interesting to her. Who can help 
being pleased, indeed, with that wonderful St. 
Gothard — the crystal green Reuss shattering 
itself in white spray into emerald pools by the 
side of the .railway; Wasen church perched 
high upon its. solitary hilltop; the Biaschina 
ravine, the cleft rocks of Faido, the serpen- 
tine twists and turns of the ramping line as 
it mounts or descends its spiral zigzags.? 
Dewy AJpine pasture, tossed masses of land- 
slip, white narcissus on the banks, snowy peaks 
in the background — all alike were fresh visions 
of delight to Herminia; and she drank it all in 
with the pure childish joy of a poetic nature. 
It was the Switzerland of her dreams, reinforced 
and complemented by unsuspected detail. 

One trouble alone disturbed her peace of 
mind upon that delightful journey. Alan 



100 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

entered their names at all the hotels where 
they stopped 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 other description was 
practically possible; and Herminia yielded with 
a sigh to his greater worldly wisdom. She had 
yet to learn the lesson which sooner or later 
comes home to all the small minority who care 
a pin about righteousness, that in a world like 
our own, it is impossible for the righteous 
always to act consistently up to their most 
sacred convictions. 

At Milan, they stopped long enough to snatch 
a glimpse of the cathedral, and to take a hasty 
walk through the pictured glories 'of the Brera. 
A vague suspicion began to cross Herminia's 
mind, as she gazed at the girlish Madonna of 
the Sposalizio, that perhaps she was n't quite as 
well adapted to love Italy as Switzerland. Na- 
ture she understood ; was art yet a closed book 
to her.? If so, she would be sorry; for Alan, in 
whom the artistic sense was largely developed, 
loved his Italy dearly; and it would be a real 
cause of regret to her if she fell short in any 
way of Alan's expectations. Moreover, at table 
cThote that evening, a slight episode occurred 
which roused to the full once more poor Her- 



i 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. lOI 

minia's tender conscience. Talk had somehow 
turned on Shelley's Italian wanderings; and a 
benevolent -looking clergyman opposite, with 
that vacantly well-meaning smile, peculiar to 
a certain type of country rector, was apologiz- 
ing in what he took to be a broad and generous 
spirit of divine toleration for the great moral 
teacher's supposed lapses from the normal rule 
of right Jiving. Much, the benevolent-looking 
gentleman opined, with beaming spectacles, must 
be forgiven to men of genius. Their tempta- 
tions no doubt are far keener than with most of 
us. An eager imagination — a vivid sense of 
beauty — quick readiness to be moved by the 
sight of physical or moral loveliness — these 
were palliations, the old clergyman held, of 
much that seemed wrong and contradictory to 
our eyes in the lives of so many great men and 
women. 

At sound of such immoral and unworthy 
teaching, Herminia's ardent soul 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 the duties of 
genius. Not less but more than most of us is 
the genius bound to act up with all his might 
to the highest moral law, to be the prophet and 
interpreter of the highest moral excellence. 



I02 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

To whom much is given, of him much shall be 
required. JUst because the man or woman of 
genius stands raised on a pedestal so far above 
the mass have we the right to expect that he or 
she should point us the way, should go before 
us as pioneer, should be more careful of the 
truth, more disdainful of the wrong, down to 
the smallest particular, than the ordinary per- 
son. There are poor souls born into this world 
so petty and narrow and wanting in originality 
that one can only expect them to tread the 
beaten track, be it ever so cruel and wicked and 
mistaken. But from a Shelley or a George Eliot, 
we expect greater things, and we have a right to 
expect them. That *s why I can never quite for- 
give George Eliot — who knew the truth, and 
found freedom for herself, and practised it in 
her life — for upholding in her books the con- 
ventional lies, the conventional prejudices; and 
that 's why I can never admire Shelley enough, 
who, in an age of slavery, refused to abjure or 
to deny his freedom, but acted unto death to 
the full height of his principles.'* 

The benevolent-looking clergyman gazed 
aghast at Herminia. Then he turned slowly 
to Alan. "Your wife," he said in a mild and 
terrified voice, "is a very advanced lady." 

Herminia longed to blurt out the whole 
simple truth. " I am not his wife. I am not. 



i 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. IO3 

and could never be wife or slave to any man. 
This is a very dear friend, and he and I are 
travelling as friends together.** But a warning 
glance from Alan made her hold her peace with 
difficulty and acquiesce as best she might in 
the virtual deception. Still, the incident went 
to her heart, and made her more anxious than 
ever to declare her convictions and her practi- 
cal obedience to them openly before the world. 
She remembered, oh, so well one of her father's 
sermons that had vividly impressed her in the 
dear old days at Dunwich Cathedral. It was 
preached upon the text, " Come ye out and be 
ye separate." 

From Milan they went on direct to Florence. 
Alan had decided to take rooms for the summer 
at Perugia, and there to see Herminia safely 
through her maternal troubles. He loved Peru- 
gia, he said; it was cool and high-perched; and 
then, too, it was such a capital place for sketch- 
ing. Besides, he was anxious to complete his 
studies of the early Umbrian painters. But 
they must have just one week at Florence 
together before they went up among the hills. 
Florence was the place for a beginner to find 
out what Italian art was aiming at. You got 
it there in. its full logical development — every 
phase, step by step, in organic unity; while 
elsewhere you saw but stages and jumps and 



I04 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

results, interrupted here and there by disturb- 
ing lacunae. So at Florence they stopped for 
a week en route^ and Herminia first learnt what 
Florentine art proposed to itself. 

Ah, that week in Florence! What a dream 
of delight! *Twas pure gold to Herminia. 
How could it well be otherwise ? It seemed to 
her 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 
which to view Florence, the beloved city, whose 
ineffable glories need at least one whole winter 
adequately to grasp them. But failing a win- 
ter, a week with the gods made Herminia 
happy. She carried away but a confused phan- 
tasmagoria, it is true, of the soaring tower of 
the Palazzo Vecchio, pointing straight with its 
slender shaft to heaven ; of the swelling dome and 
huge ribs of the cathedral, seen vast from the 
terrace in front of San Miniato; of the endless 
Madonnas and the deathless saints niched in 
golden tabernacles at the Uffizi and the Pitti; of 
the tender grace of Fra Angelico at San Marco ; 
of the infinite wealth and astounding variety 
of Donatello's marble in the spacious courts of 
the cool Bargello. But her window at the 
hotel looked straight as it could look down the 
humming Calzaioli to the pierced and encrusted 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 10$ 

front of Giotto's campanile, with the cupola of 
San Lorenzo in the middle distance, and the 
fagade of Fiesole standing out deep-blue against 
the dull red glare of evening in the back- 
ground. If that were not enough to sate and 
enchant Herminia, she would indeed have 
been difficult. And with Alan by her side, 
every joy was doubled. 

She had never before known what it was to 
have her lover continuously with her. And 
his aid in those long corridors, where bambinos 
smiled down at her with childish lips, helped 
her wondrously to understand in so short a time 
what they sought to convey to her. Alan was 
steeped in Italy ; he knew and entered into the 
spirit of Tuscan art ; and now for the first time 
Herminia found herself face to face with a 
thoroughly new subject in which Alan could be 
her teacher from the very beginning, as most 
men are teachers to the women who depend 
upon them. This sense of support and restful- 
ness and clinging was fresh and delightful to 
her. It is a woman's ancestral part to look up 
to the man; she is happiest in doing it, and 
must long remain so; and Herminia was not 
sorry to find herself in this so much a woman. 
She thought it delicious to roam through the 
long halls of some great gallery with Alan, and 
let him point out to her the pictures he loved 



I06 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

best, explain their peculiar merits, and show 
the subtle relation in which they stood to 
the pictures that went before them and the 
pictures that came after them, as well as to the 
other work of the same master or his contempo- 
raries. It was even no small joy to her to find 
that he knew so much more about art and its 
message than she did; that she could look up 
to his judgment, confide in his opinion, see the 
truth of his criticism, profit much by his in- 
struction. So well did she use those seven 
short days, indeed, that she came to Florence 
with Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, 
mere names; and she went away from it feel- 
ing that she had made them real friends and 
possessions for a life-time. 

So the hours whirled fast in those enchanted 
halls, and Herminia's soul was enriched by 
new tastes and new interests. O towers of 
fretted stone! O jasper and porphyry! Her 
very state of health made her more susceptible 
than usual to fresh impressions, and drew Alan 
at the same time every day into closer union 
with her. For was not the young life now 
quickening within her half his and half hers, 
and did it not seem to make the father by reflex 
nearer and* dearer to her.'* Surely the child 
that was nurtured, unborn, on those marble 
colonnades and those placid Saint Catherines 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 107 

must draw in with each pulse of its antenatal 
nutriment some tincture of beauty, of freedom, 
of culture! So Herminia thought to herself as 
she lay awake at night and looked out of the 
window from the curtains of her bed at the 
boundless dome and the tall campanile gleam- 
ing white in the moonlight. So we have each 
of us thought — especially the mothers in Israel 
among us — about the unborn babe that hastens 
along to its birth with such a radiant halo of 
the possible future ever gilding and glorifying 
its unseen forehead. 



L. 



I08 THE WOM.\N WHO DID. 



X. 



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

And how full Alan had been of Perugia 
beforehand ! He loved every stone of the town, 
every shadow of the hillsides, he told Herminia 
at Florence; and Herminia started on her way 
accordingly well prepared to fall quite as madly 
in love with the Umbrian capital as Alan him- 
self had done. 

The railway journey, indeed, seemed ex- 
tremely pretty. What a march of sweet pic- 
tures ! They mounted with creaking wheels the 
slow ascent up the picturesque glen where the 
Arno runs deep, to the white towers of Arezzo; 
then Cortona throned in state on its lonely 
hill-top> and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls; 
next the low bank, the lucid green water, the 
olive-clad slopes of reedy Thrasymene; last of 
all, the sere hills and city-capped heights of 
their goal, Perugia. 



i 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. IO9 

For its name's sake alone, Herminia Was pre- 
pared to admire the antique Umbrian capital. 
And Alan loved it so much, and was so deter- 
mined she ought to love it too, that she was 
ready to be pleased with everything in it. 
Until she arrived there — and then, oh, poor 
heart, what a grievous disappointment ! It was 
late April weather when they reached the sta- 
tion at the foot of that high hill where Augusta 
Perusia sits lording it on her throne over the 
wedded vstlleys 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 yet beheld them. Herminia 
glanced up at 'the long white road, thick in 
deep gray powder, that led by endless zigzags 
along the dreary slope to the long white town 
on the shadeless hill-top. At first sight alone, 
Perugia was a startling disillusion to Herminia. 
She didn *t yet know how bitterly she was doomed 
hereafter to hate every dreary dirty street in it. 
But she knew at the first blush that the Perugia 
she had imagined and pictured to herself didn't 
really exist and had never existed. 

She had figured in her own mind a beautiful 
breezy town, high set on a peaked hill, ia fresh 
and mossy country. She had envisaged the 
mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods, 



no THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

and strewn with huge boulders under whose 
umbrageous shelter bloomed waving masses of 
the pretty pale blue Apennine anemones she 
saw sold in big bunches at the street corners 
in Florence. She had imagined, in short, that 
Umbria was a wilder Italian Wales, as fresh, 
as green, as sweet-scented, as fountain-fed. And 
she knew pretty well whence she had derived 
that strange and utterly false conception. She 
had fancied Perugia as one of those mountain 
villages described by Macaulay,the sort of hill- 
top 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 before her.^ Dry and shadeless 
hill-sides, tilled with obtrusive tilth to their 
topmost summit; ploughed fields and hoary 
olive-groves silvering to the wind, in intermin- 
able terraces; long suburbs, unlovely in their 
gaunt, bare squalor, stretching like huge arms 
of some colossal cuttlefish over the spurs and 
shoulders of that desecrated mountain. No 
woods, no moss, no coolness, no greenery; all 
nature toned down to one monotonous grayness. 
And this dreary desert was indeed the place 
where her baby must be born, the baby pre- 
destined to regenerate humanity! 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. Ill 

Oh, why did they ever leave that enchanted 
Florence ! 

Meanwhile Alan had got together the lug- 
gage, and engaged a ramshackle Perugian cab; 
for the public vehicles of Perugia are per- 
haps, as a class, the most precarious and inco- 
herent known to science. However, the luggage 
was bundled on to the top by Our Lady's grace, 
without dissolution of continuity; the lean- 
limbed horses were induced by explosive vol- 
leys of sound Tuscan oaths to make a feeble and 
spasmodic effort; and bit by bit the sad little 
cavalcade began slowly to ascend the inter- 
minable hill that rises by long loops to the 
platform of the Prefettura. 

That drive was the gloomiest Herminia had 
ever yet taken. Was it the natural fastidious- 
ness of her condition, she wondered, or was it 
really the dirt and foul smells of the place that 
made her sicken at first sight of the wind-swept 
purlieus.^ Perhaps a little of both; for in dusty 
weather Perugia is the most endless town to 
get out of in Italy; and its capacity for the 
production of unpleasant odors is unequalled 
no doubt from the Alps to Calabria. As 
they reached the bare white platform at the 
entry to the upper town, where Pope Paul's 
grim fortress once frowned to overawe the auda- 
cious souls of the liberty-loving Umbrians, she 



112 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

turned mute eyes to Alan for sympathy. And 
then for the first time the terrible truth broke 
over her that Alan was n't in the least disap- 
pointed or disgusted; he knew it all before; he 
was accustomed to it and liked it! As for 
Alan, he misinterpreted her glance, indeed, 
and answered with that sort of proprietary 
pride we all of us assume towards a place we 
love, and are showing off to a newcomer : " Yes, 
I thought you'd like this view, dearest; isn't 
it wonderful, wonderful? That's Assisi over 
yonder, that strange white town that clings by 
its eyelashes to the sloping hill-side; and those 
are the snowclad heights of the Gran Sasso 
beyond; and that's Montefalco to the extreme 
right, where the sunset gleam just catches the 
hill-top." 

His words struck dumb horror into Her- 
minia's soul. Poor child, how she shrank at 
it ! It was clear, then, instead of being shocked 
and disgusted, Alan positively admired this 
human Sahara. With an effort she gulped 
down her tears and her sighs, and pretended 
to look with interest in the directions he 
pointed. She could see nothing in it all but 
dry hill-sides, crowned with still drier towns; 
unimagined stretches of sultry suburb ; devour- 
ing wastes of rubbish and foul immemorial 
kitchen-middens. And the very fact that for 



\ 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. II3 

Alan's sake she couldn't bear to say so — see- 
ing how pleased and proud he was of Perugia, 
as if it had been built from his own design — 
made the bitterness of her disappointment more 
difficult to endure. She would have given any- 
thing at that moment for 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 in Italy. Next morn- 
ing, they were to go hunting for apartments 
in the town, where Alan knew of a suite that 
would exactly suit them. After dinner, in the 
twilight, filled with his artistic joy at being 
back in Perugia, his beloved Perugia, he took 
Herminia out for a stroll, with a light wrap 
round her head, on the terrace of the Prefettura. 
The air blew fresh and cool now with a certain 
mountain sharpness; for, as Alan assured her 
with pride, they stood seventeen hundred feet 
above the level of the Mediterranean. The 
moon had risen; the sunset glow had not yet 
died off the slopes of the Assisi hill-sides. It 
streamed through the perforated belfry of San 
Domenico ; it steeped in rose-color the slender 
and turreted shaft of San Pietro, "Perugia's 
Pennon," the Arrowhead of Umbria. It gilded 
the gaunt houses that jut out upon the spine 
of the Borgo hill into the valley of the Tiber. 

8 



114 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

Beyond, rose shadowy Apennines, on whose 
aerial flanks towns and villages shone out clear 
in the mellow moonlight. Far away on their 
peaks faint specks of twinkling fire marked 
indistinguishable sites of high hill-top castles. 

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

Herminia could only gasp out in a half reluc- 
tant way, "It's a beautiful view, Alan. Beau- 
tiful; beautiful; beautiful!" 

But she felt conscious to herself it owed its 
beauty in the main to the fact that the twilight 
obscured so much of it. To-morrow morning, 
the bare hills would stand out once more in all 
their pristine bareness ; the white roads would 
shine forth as white and dusty as ever; the 
obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselves 
at every turn upon eye and nostril. She hated 
the place, to say the truth; it was a terror to 
her to think she had to stop so long in it. 

Most famous towns, in fact, need to be twice 
seen: the first time briefly to face the inev- 
itable disappointment to our expectations; the 
second time, at leisure, to reconstruct and ap- 
praise the surviving reality. Imagination so 
easily beggars performance. Rome, Cairo, the 
Nile, are obvious examples; the grand excep- 
tions are Venice and Florence, — in a lesser 



i 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. II5 

degree, Bruges, Munich, Pisa. As for Umbria, 
'tis a poor thing; our own Devon snaps her 
fingers at it. 

Moreover, to say the truth, Herminia was 
too fresh to Italy to appreciate the smaller or 
second-rate towns at their real value. Even 
northerners love Florence and Venice at first 
sight; those take their hearts by storm; but 
Perugia, Siena, Orvieto, are an acquired taste, 
like olives and caviare, and it takes time to 
acquire it. Alan had not made due allowance 
for this psychological truth of the northern 
natures. A Celt in essence, thoroughly Italian- 
ate himself, and with a deep love for the pic- 
turesque, which often makes men insensible to 
dirt and discomfort, he expected to Italianize 
Herminia too rapidly. Herminia, on the other 
hand, belonged more strictly to the intellectual 
and somewhat inartistic English type. The pic- 
turesque alone did not suffice for her. Clean- 
liness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul 
than the quaintest street corners, the oddest 
old archways; she pined in Perugia for a green 
English hillside. 

The time, too, was unfortunate, after no rain 
for weeks; for rainlessness, besides doubling 
the native stock of dust, brings out to the full 
the ancestral Etruscan odors of Perugia. So, 
when next morning Herminia found herself 



Il6 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

installed in a dingy flat, in a morose palazzo, 
in the main street of the city, she was glad 
that Alan insisted on going out alone to make 
needful purchases of groceries and provisions, 
because it^ gave her a chance of flinging herself 
on her bed in a perfect agony of distress and 
disappointment, and having a good cry, all 
alone, at the aspect of the home where she 
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 air 
polluted by the vices of centuries ! 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



XI. 



Somewhat later in the day, they went out for a 
slroll through the town together. To Herminia's 
great relief, Alan never even noticed she 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 list- 
lessly, with a glance to right and left, as they 
passed beneath the sombre Tuscan gate of their 
palazzo. 

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

And so it was, Herminia herself was fain to 
admit, in a pure painter's sense that didn't 
at all attract her. Lines grouped themselves 
against the sky in infinite diversity. Which- 
ever way they turned quaint old walls met their 
eyes, and tumble-down churches, and moulder- 
ing towers, and mediaeval palazzi with carved 
doorways or rich loggias. But whichever way 
they turned dusty roads too confronted them. 




THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb, unwhole- 
some airs, sickening sights and sounds and per- 
fumes. Narrow streets swept, darkling, under 
pointed archways, that framed distant vistas of 
spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solid 
blue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness of that 
sapphire firmament repelled Herminia. They 
passed beneath the triumphal arch of Augustus 
with its Etruscan mason-work, its Roman deco- 
rations, and round the antique walls, aglow with 
tufted gillyflowers, to the bare Piazza d* Armi. 
A cattle fair was going on there; and Alan 
pointed with pleasure to the curious fact that 
the oxen were all cream-colored, — the famous 
white steers of Clitumnus. Herminia knew her 
Virgil as well as Alan himself, and murmured 
half aloud the sonorous hexameter, "Romanos 
ad templa deum duxere triumphos." But some- 
how, the knowledge that these were indeed the 
milk-white bullocks of Clitumnus failed amid 
so much dust to arouse her enthusiasm. She 
would have been better pleased just then with 
a yellow English primrose. 

They clambered down the terraced ravines 
sometimes, a day or two later, to arid banks 
by a dry torrent's bed where Italian primroses 
really grew, interspersed with tall grape -hya- 
cinths, and scented violets, and glossy cleft 
leaves of winter aconite. But even the prim- 



i 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 19 

roses were not the same thing to Herminia as 
those she used to gather on the dewy slopes 
of the Redlands; they were so dry and dust- 
grimed, and the path by the torrent's side was 
so distasteful and unsavory. Bare white boughs 
of twisted fig-trees depressed her. Besides, 
these hills were steep, and Herminia felt the 
climbing. Nothing in city or suburbs attracted 
her soul. Etruscan Volumnii, each lolling in 
white travertine on the sculptured lid of his 
own sarcophagus urn, and all duly ranged in 
the twilight of their tomb at their spectral ban- 
quet, stirred her heart but feebly. St. Francis, 
Santa Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy. 
But as for Alan, he revelled all day long in his 
native element. He sketched every morning, 
among the huddled, strangled lanes; sketched 
churches and monasteries, and portals of pa- 
lazzi; sketched mountains clear-cut in that 
pellucid air; till Herminia wondered how he 
could sit so long in the broiling sun or keen 
wind on those bare hillsides, or on broken brick 
parapets in those noisome byways. But your 
born sketcher is oblivious of all on earth save his 
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, she knew not why. Alan 



I 
1 20 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

could n*t rouse her to enthusiasm over his 
beloved Buonfigli. Those naTve flaxen-haired 
angels, with sweetly parted lips, and baskets of 
red roses in their delicate hands, own sisters 
though they were to the girlish Lippis she had 
so admired at Florence, moved her heart but 
faintly. Try as she might to like them, she 
responded to nothing Perugian in any way. 

At the end of a week or two, however, Alan 
began to complain of constant headache. He 
was looking very well, but grew uneasy and 
restless. Herminia advised him to give up 
sketching for a while, those small streets were 
so close; and he promised to yield to her wishes 
in the matter. Yet he grew worse next day, 
so that Herminia, much alarmed, called in an 
Italian doctor. Perugia boasted no English 
one. The Italian felt his pulse, and listened to 
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," he said after a pause. "A 
very bad type. It has been assuming such a 
form this winter at Florence." 

He spoke the plain truth. Twenty-one days 
before in his bedroom at the hotel in Florence, 
Alan had drunk a single glass of water from the 



. -i 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 121 

polluted springs that supply in part the Tuscan 
metropolis. For twentj-one days those victo- 
rious microbes had brooded in silence in his poi- 
soned arteries. At the end of that time, they 
swarmed and declared themselves. He was ill 
with an aggravated form of the most deadly 
disease that still stalks unchecked through 
unsanitated Europe. 

Herminia's alarm was painful. Alan grew 
rapidly worse. In two days he was so ill that 
she thought it her duty to telegraph at once to 
Dr. Merrick, in London : "Alan's life in danger. 
Serious attack 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 to Alan : " Am on my way out 
by through train to attend you. But as a mat- 
ter of duty, marry the girl at once, and legiti- 
matize your child while the chance remains to 
you." 

It was kindly meant in its way. It was a 
message of love, of forgiveness, of generosity, 
such as Herminia would hardly have expected 
from so stem a man as Alan had always repre- 
sented his father to be to her. But at moments 
of unexpected danger angry feelings between 
father and son are often forgotten, and blood 
unexpectedly proves itself thicker than water. 



122 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

Yet even so Herminia couldn't bear to show 
the telegram to Alan. She feared lest in this 
extremity, his mind weakened by disease, he 
might wish to take his father's advice, and 
prove untrue to their common principles. In 
that case, woman that she was, she hardly knew 
how she could resist what might be only too 
probably his dying wishes. Still, she nerved 
herself for this trial of faith, and went through 
with it bravely. Alan, though sinking, was still 
conscious at moments; in one such interval, 
with an effort to be calm, she showed him his 
. father's telegram. Tears rose into his eyes. 
"I didn't expect him to come," he said. 
"This is all very good of him." Then, after a 
moment, he added, "Would you wish me in this 
extremity, Hermy, to do as he advises?" 

Herminia bent over him with fierce tears on 
her eyelids. "O Alan darling," she cried, 
"you mustn't die! You mustn't leave me* 
What could I do without you ? oh, my darling, 
my darling! But don't think of me now. 
Don't think of the dear baby. I couldn't bear 
to disturb you even by showing you the tele- 
gram. For your sake, Alan, I '11 be calm, — 
I '11 be calm. But oh, not for worlds, — not for 
worlds, — even so, would I turn my back on the 
principles we would both risk our lives for! " 

Alan smiled a faint smile. "Hermy," he 



i 



THE WOMAN WHQ DID. 1 23 

said slowly, "I love you all the more for it. 
You *re as brave as a lion. Oh, how much I 
have learned from you ! " 

All that night and next day Herminia 
watched by his bedside. Now and again he 
was conscious. But for the most part he lay 
still, in a comatose condition, with eyes half 
closed, the whites showing through the lids, 
neither moving nor speaking. All the time he 
grew worse steadily. As she sat by his bed- 
side, Herminia began to realize the utter loneli- 
ness of her position. That Alan might die was 
the one element in the situation she had never 
even dreamt of. No wife could love her hus- 
band with more perfect devotion than Herminia 
loved Alan. She hung upon every breath with 
unspeakable suspense and unutterable affection. 
But the Italian doctor held out 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 straight from the station 
to the dingy flat in the morose palazzo. At the 
door of his son's room, Herminia met him, 
clad from head to foot in white, as she had sat 
by the bedside. Tears blinded her eyes; her 
face was wan; her mien terribly haggard. 

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



124 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

" 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 of profound emotion. 
"He did justice to his child.? — he repaired his 
evil ? " 

"He did not," Herminia answered, in a 
scarcely audible voice. "He was 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 to prevaricate. "But I advised 
him to stand firm; and he abode by my 
decision." 

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






THE WOMAN WHO DID. 125 



XII. 

No position in life is more terrible to face than 
that of the widowed mother left alone in the 
world with her unborn baby. When the child 
is her first one, — when, besides the natural 
horror and agony of the situation, she has also 
to confront the unknown dangers of that new 
and dreaded experience, — her plight is still 
more pitiable. But when the widowed mother 
is one who has never been a wife, — when in addi- 
tion to all these pangs of bereavement and fear, 
she has further to face the contempt and hos- 
tility of a sneering world, as Herminia had to 
face it, — then, indeed, her lot becomes well- 
nigh insupportable; it is almost more than hu- 
man nature can bear up against. So Herminia 
found it. She might have died of grief and 
loneliness then and there, had it not been for the 
sudden and unexpected rousing of her spirit of 
opposition by Dr. Merrick's words. That cruel 
speech gave her the will and the power to live. 
It saved her from madness. She drew herself 
up at once with an injured woman's pride, and. 



126 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

facing her dead Alan's father 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 them myself, 
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 by re- 
fusing you access to them; but if you remain 
here, you must treat me at least with the re- 
spect that belongs to my great sorrow, and 
with the courtesy due to an English lady," 

Her words half cowed him. He subsided at 
once. In silence he stepped over to his dead 
son's bedside. Mechanically, almost uncon- 
sciously, Herminia went on with the needful prep- 
arations for Alan's funeral. Her grief was so in- 
tense that she bore up as if stunned ; she did what 
was expected of her without thinking or feeling 
it. Dr. Merrick stopped on at Perugia till his 
son was buried. He was frigidly polite mean- 
while to Herminia. Deeply as he differed from 
her, the dignity and pride with Which she had 
answered his first insult impressed him with a 
certain sense of respect for her character, and 
made him feel at least he could not be rude 
to her with impunity. He remained at the 
hotel, and superintended the arrangements for 
his son's funeral. As soon as that was over, 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 12/ 

and Herminia had seen the coffin lowered into 
the grave of all her hopes, save one, she re- 
turned to her rooms alone, — more utterly alone 
than she had ever imagined any human being 
could feel in a cityful of fellow-creatures. 

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

Yet, lonely as she was, she determined from 
the first moment no course was left open for 
her save to remain at Perugia. She couldn't 
go away so soon from the spot where Alan was 
laid, — from all that remained to her now of 
Alan. Except his unborn baby, — the baby 
that was half his, half hers, — the baby predes- 
tined to regenerate humanity. Oh, how she 
longed to fondle it! Every arrangement had 
been made in Perugia for the baby's advent; 
she would stand by those arrangements still, in 
her shuttered room, partly because she could n't 
tear herself away from Alan's grave; partly 
because she had no heart left to make the 
necessary arrangements elsewhere; but partly 
also because she wished Alan's baby to be born 
near Alan's side, where she could present it 
after birth at its father's last resting-place. It 
was a fanciful wish, she knew, based upon 



128 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

ideas she had long since discarded; but these 
ancestral sentiments echo long in our hearts; 
they die hard with us all, and most hard with 
women. 

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

So she stopped and waited ; waited in tremu- 
lous fear, half longing for death, half eager not 
to leave that sacred baby an orphan. It would 
be Alan's Ijaby, and might grow in time to be 
the world's true savior. For, now that Alan 
was dead, no hope on earth seemed too great to 
cherish for Alan's child within her. 

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

The day after the funeral. Dr. Merrick called 
in for the last time at her lodgings. He brought 
in his hand a legal-looking paper, which he had 
found in searching among Alan's effects, for 
he had carried them off to his hotel, leaving 
not even a memento of her ill-starred love to 
Herminia. "This may interest you,*' he said 
dryly. "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 her favor, leaving absolutely 
everything of which he died possessed "to my 
beloved friend, Herminia Barton." 



-4 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. I29 

Herminia had hardly the means to keep her- 
self alive till her baby was born ; but in those 
first fierce hours of ineffable bereavement what 
question of money could interest her in any 
way? She stared at it, stupefied. It only 
pleased her to think Alan had not forgotten her. 
"The sordid moneyed class of England will 
haggle over bequests and settlements and dow- 
ries on their bridal eve, or by the coffins of 
their dead. Herminia had no such ignoble 
possibilities. How could he speak of it in her 
presence at a moment like this.^ How obtrude 
such themes on her august sorrow ? 

"This was drawn up,'* Dr. Merrick went on 
in his austere voice, "the very day before my 
late son left London. But, of course, you will 
have observed it was never executed.*' 

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

"That makes it, I need hardly say, of no 
legal value," the father went on, with frigid 
calm. " I bring it round merely to show you 
that 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 am sorry it should be so; I could 
have wished it otherwise. However, I need hot 
remind you" — he picked his phrases carefully 

9 



I30 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

with icy precision — "that under circumstances 
like these neither you nor your child have any 
claim whatsoever upon my son's estate. Nor 
have I any right over it. Still " — he paused 
for a second, and that incisive mouth strove to 
grow gentle, while Herminia hot with shame, 
confronted him helplessly — ** I sympathize 
with your position, and do not forget it was 
Alan who brought you here. Therefore, as 
an act of courtesy to a lady in whom he was 
personally interested . . . if a slight gift of fifty 
pounds would be of immediate service to you 
in your present situation, why, I think, with 
the approbation of his brothers and sisters, who 
of course inherit — ** 

Herminia turned upon him like a wounded 
creature. She thanked the blind caprice which 
governs the universe that it gave her strength 
at that moment to bear up under his insult. 
With one angry hand she waved dead Alan's 
father inexorably to the door. "Go," she said 
simply. " How dare you ? how dare you ? Leave 
my rooms this instant." 

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



I 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 131 

Herminia turned upon him with tl^e just 
wrath of a great nature outraged. " Take them 
up!" she cried fiercely. "Don't pollute my 
table ! " Then, as often happens to all of us in 
moments of deep emotion, 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 noise- 
lessly from the room, murmuring as he went 
some inarticulate words to the effect that he 
had only desired to serve her. As soon as he 
was gone, Herminia's nerve gave way. She 
flung herself into a chair, and sobbed long and 
violently. 

It was no time for her, of course, to think 
about money. Sore pressed as she was, she 
had just enough left to see her safely through 
her confinement. Alan had given her a few 
pounds for housekeeping when they first got 
into the rooms, and those she kept ; they were 
hers; she had not the slightest impulse to 
restore them to his family. All he left was 
hers too, by natural justice; and she knew it. 
He had drawn up his will, attestation clause 
and all, with even the very date inserted in 
pencil, the day before they quitted London 
together; but finding no friends at the club to 



132 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

witness it, he had put off executing it; and so 
had left Herminia entirely to her own resources. 
In the delirium of his fever, the subject never 
occurred to him. But no doubt existed as to 
the nature of his last wishes; and if Herminia 
herself had been placed in a similar position 
to that of the Merrick family, she would have 
scorned to take so mean an advantage of the 
mere legal omission. ^ 

By this time, of course, the story of her fate 
had got across to England, and was being read 
and retold by each man or woman after his or 
her own fashion. The papers mentioned it, as 
seen through the optic lens of ^the society jour- 
nalist, with what strange refraction. Most of 
them descried in poor Herminia's tragedy noth- 
ing but material for a smile, a sneer, or an 
innuendo. The Dean himself wrote to her, a 
piteous, paternal note, which bowed her down 
more than ever in her abyss of sorrow. He 
wrote as a dean must, — gray hairs brought 
down with sorrow to the grave; infinite mercy 
of Heaven; still room for repentance; but oh, 
to keep away from her pure young sisters 1 Her- 
minia answered with dignity, but with profound 
emotion. She knew her father too well not to 
sympathize greatly with his natural view of so 
fatal an episode. 

So she stopped on alone for her dark hour 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. I33 

in Perugia. She stopped on, untended by any 
save unknown Italians whose tongue she hardly 
spoke, and uncheered by a friendly voice at the 
deepest moment of trouble in a woman's his- 
tory. Often for hours together she sat alone 
in the cathedral, gazing up at a certain mild- 
featured Madonna, enshrined above an altar. 
The unwedded widow seemed to gain some com- 
fort from the pitying face of the maiden mother. 
Every day, while still she could, she walked 
out along the shadeless suburban road to Alan's 
grave in the parched and crowded cemetery. 
Women trudging along with crammed creels on 
their backs turned round to stare at her. When 
she could no longer walk, she sat at her window 
towards San Luca and gazed at it. There lay 
the only friend she possessed in Perugia, per- 
haps in the universe. 

The dreaded day arrived at last, and her 
strong constitution enabled Herminia to live 
through it. Her baby was born, a beautiful 
little girl, soft, delicate, wonderful, with Alan's 
blue eyes, and its mother's complexion. Those 
rosy feet saved Herminia. As she clasped 
them in her hands — tiny feet, tender feet — 
she felt she had now something left to live 
for, — her baby, Alan's baby, the baby with a 
future, the baby that was destined to regenerate 
humanity. 



134 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

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 any joyous name to dead Alan's 
child. Dolores she called it, at Alan's grave. 
In sorrow had she borne it; its true name was 
Dolores. 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 35 



XIII. 



It was a changed London to which Herminia 
returned. She was homeless, penniless, friend- 
less. Above all she was d^classh. The world 
that had known her now knew her no more. 
Women who had smothered her with their 
Judas kisses passed her by in their victorias 
with a stony stare. Even men pretended to be 
looking the other way, or crossed the street to 
avoid the necessity for recognizing her. " So 
awkward to be mixed up with such a scandal! " 
She hardly knew as yet herself how much her 
world was changed indeed; for had she not 
come back to it, the mother of an illegitimate 
daughter? But she began to suspect it the very 
first day 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; 
her next to find a livelihood. Even the first 
involved no small relapse from the purity of 
her principles. After long hours of vain hunt- 
ing, she found at last she could only get lodg- 



136 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

ings for herself and Alan's child by telling a 
virtual lie, against which her soul revolted. 
She was forced to describe herself as Mrs. 
Barton; she must allow her landlady to sup- 
pose she was really a widow. Woe unto you, 
scribes and hypocrites! in all Christian Lon- 
don Miss Barton and her baby could never 
have found a "respectable" room in which to 
lay their heads. So she yielded to the inev- 
itable, and took two tiny attics in a small 
street oflE the Edgware Road at a moderate 
rental. To live alone in a cottage as of yore 
would have been impossible now she had a 
baby of her own to tend, besides earning her 
livelihood; she fell back regretfully on the 
lesser evil of lodgings. 

To earn her livelihood was a hard task, though 
Herminia's indomitable energy rode down all 
obstacles. Teaching, of course, was now quite 
out of the question; no English parent could 
intrust the education of his daughters to the 
hands of a woman who has dared and suffered 
much, for conscience* sake, in the cause of 
freedom for herself and her sisters. But even 
before Herminia went away to Perugia, she had 
acquired some small journalistic connection; 
and now, in her hour of need, she found not 
a few of the journalistic leaders by no means 
unwilling to sympathize and fraternize with 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 37 

her. To be sure, they did n't ask the free wo- 
man to their homes, nor invite her to meet their 
own women: — even an enlightened journalist 
must draw a line somewhere in the matter of 
society; but they understood and appreciated 
the sincerity of her motives, and did what they 
could to find employment and salary for her. 
Herminia was an honest and conscientious 
worker; she knew much about many things; 
and nature had gifted her with the instinctive 
power of writing clearly and unaffectedly the 
English language. So she got on with editors. 
Who could resist, indeed, the pathetic charm of 
that girlish figure, simply clad in unobtrusive 
black, and sanctified in every feature of the 
shrinking face by the beauty of sorrow ? Not the 
men who stand at the head of the one English 
profession which more than all others has es- 
caped the leprous taint of that national moral 
blight that calls itself "respectability." 

In a slow and tentative way, then, Herminia 
crept back into unrecognized recognition. It 
was all she needed. Companionship she liked; 
she hated society. That mart was odious to 
her where women barter their bodies for a title, 
a carriage, a place at the head of some rich 
man's table. Bohemia sufficed her. Her ter- 
rible widowhood, too, was rendered less terrible 
to her by the care of her little one. Babbling 



138 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

lips, pattering feet, made heaven in her attic. 
Every good woman is by nature a mother, and 
finds best in maternity her social and moral 
salvation. . She shall be saved in child-bearing. 
Herminia was far removed indeed from that blat- 
ant and decadent sect of " advanced women '* who 
talk as though motherhood were a disgrace and 
a burden, instead of being, as it is, the full 
realization of woman's faculties, the natural 
outlet for woman's wealth of emotion. She 
knew that to 'be a mother is the best privilege 
of her sex, a privilege of which unholy man- 
made institutions now conspire to deprive half 
the finest and noblest women in our civilized com- 
munities. Widowed as she was, she still pitied 
the unhappy beings doomed to the cramped life 
and dwarfed heart of the old maid ; pitied them as 
sincerely as she despised those unhealthy souls 
who would make of celibacy, wedded or un- 
wedded, a sort of anti-natural religion for women. 
Alan's death, however, had left Herminia's ship 
rudderless. Her mission had failed. That she 
acknowledged herself. She lived now for 
Dolores. The child to whom she had given 
the noble birthright of liberty was destined 
from her cradle to the apostolate of women. 
Alone of her sex, she would start in life eman- 
cipated. While others must say, "With a great 
sum obtained I this freedom," Dolores could 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 39 

answer with Paul, " But I was free born. " That 
was no mean heritage. 

Gradually Herminia got work to her mind; 
work enough to support her in the modest way 
that sufficed her small wants for herself and her 
baby. In London, given time enough, you can 
live down anything, perhaps even the unspeak- 
able sin of having struck a righteous blow in 
the 'interest of women. And day by day, as 
months and years went on, Herminia felt she 
was living down the disgrace of having obeyed 
an enlightened conscience. She even found 
friends. Dear old Miss Smith-Waters used to 
creep round by night, like Nicodemus — respect- 
ability would not have allowed her to perform 
that Christian act in open daylight, — and sit 
for an hour or two with her dear misguided 
Herminia. Miss Smith-Waters prayed nightly 
for Herminia's "conversion," yet not without 
an uncomfortable suspicion, after all, that Her- 
minia had very little indeed to be "converted" 
from. Other people also got to know her by 
degrees; an editor's wife; a kind literary host- 
ess; some socialistic ladies who liked to be 
"advanced;" a friendly family or two of the 
Bohemian literary or artistic pattern. Among 
them Herminia learned to be as happy in time 
as she could ever again be, now she had lost her 
Alan. She was Mrs. Barton to them all ; that 



I40 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

lie she found it practically impossible to fight 
against. Even the Bohemians refused to let 
their children ask after Miss Barton's baby. 

So wrapt in vile falsehoods and conventions 
are we. So far have we travelled from the 
pristine realities of truth and purity. We lie 
to our children — in the interests of morality. 

After a time, in the intervals between doing 
her journalistic work and nursing Alan's baby, 
Herminia found leisure to write a novel. It 
was seriously meant, of course, but still it was 
a novel. That is every woman's native idea of 
literature. It reflects the relatively larger part 
which the social life plays in the existence of 
women. If a man tells you he wants to write a 
book, nine times out of ten he means a treatise 
or argument on some subject that interests 
him. Even the men who take in the end to 
writing novels have generally begun with other 
aims and other aspirations, and have only fallen 
back upon the art of fiction in the last resort 
as a means of livelihood. But when a woman 
tells you she wants to write a book, nine times 
out of ten she means she wants to write a novel. 
For that task nature has most often endowed 
her richly. Her quicker intuitions, her keener 
interest in social life, her deeper insight into 
the passing play of emotions and of motives, 
enable her to paint well the complex interrela- 



/ 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. I4I 

tions of every-day existence. 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 pessi- 
mistic, of course. Blank pessimism is the one 
creed possible for all save fools. To hold any 
other is to curl yourself 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 optimist folds 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." The pessimist 
knows well self-deception like that is either a 
fraud or a blind, and recognizing the seething 
mass of misery at his doors gives what he can, 
— his pity, or, where possible, his faint aid, in 
redressing the crying inequalities and injustices 
of man or nature. 

All honest art is therefore of necessity pes- 
simistic. Hemiinia's romance was something- 
more than that. It was the despairing heart- 
cry of a soul in revolt. It embodied the experi- 
ences and beliefs and sentiments of a martyred 



142 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

woman. It enclosed a lofty ethical purpose. 
She wrote it with fiery energy, for her baby*s 
sake, on waste scraps of paper, at stray moments 
snatched from endless other engagements. And 
as soon as it was finished, she sent it in fear 
and trembling to a publisher. 

She had chosen her man well. He was a 
thinker himself, and he sympathized with 
thinkers. Though doubtful as to the venture, 
he took all the risk himself with that gener- 
osity one so often sees in the best-abused of 
professions. In three or four weeks* time "A 
Woman's World '* came out, and Herminia 
waited in breathless anxiety for the verdict of 
the reviewers. 

For nearly a month she waited in vain. 
Then, one Friday, as she was returning by 
underground railway from the Strand to Edge- 
ware Road, with Dolores in her arms, her eye 
fell as she passed upon the display-bill of the 
"Spectator.** Sixpence was a great deal of 
money to Herminia; but bang it went reck- 
lessly when she saw among the 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 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. I43 

all favorable. How could Herminia expect it 
in such a quarter ? But the " Spectator " is at 
least conspicuously fair, though it remains in 
other ways an interesting and ivy-clad mediaeval 
relic. "Let us begin by admitting," said the 
Spectatorial scribe, "that Miss Montague's 
book " (she had published it under a pseu- 
donym) "is a work of genius. Much as we 
dislike its whole tone, and still more its con- 
clusions, the gleam of pure genius shines forth 
undeniable on every page of it. Whoever takes 
it up .must read on against his will till he has 
finished the last line of this terrible tragedy; a 
hateful fascination seems to hold and compel 
him. Its very purity makes it dangerous. The 
book is mistaken; the book is poisonous; the 
book is morbid; the book is calculated to do 
irremediable mischief; but in spite of all that, 
the book is a book of undeniable and sadly mis- 
placed genius. " 

If he had said no more, Herminia would have 
been amply satisfied. To be called morbid by 
the " Spectator " is a sufficient proof that you 
have hit at least the right tack in morals. And 
to be accused of genius as well was indeed a 
triumph. No wonder Herminia went home to 
her lonely attic that night justifiably elated. 
She fancied after this her book must make a 
hit. It might be blamed and reviled, but at 



144 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

any rate it was now safe from the ignominy of 
oblivion. 

Alas, how little she knew of the mysteries of 
the book-market! As little as all the rest of 
us. Day after day, from that afternoon forth, 
she watched in vain for succeeding notices. 
Not a single other paper in England reviewed 
her. At the libraries, her romance was never 
so much as asked for. And the reason for 
these phenomena is not far to seek by those 
who know the ways of the British public. For 
her novel was earnestly and sincerely written ; 
it breathed a moral air, therefore it was voted 
dull ; therefore nobody cared for it. The " Spec- 
tator" had noticed it because of its manifest 
earnestness and sincerity ; for though the " Spec- 
tator" is always on the side of the lie and the 
wrong, it is earnest and sincere, and has a gen- 
uine sympathy for earnestness and sincerity, 
even on the side of truth and righteousness. 
Nobody else even looked at it. People said to 
themselves, "This book seems to be a book with 
a teaching not thoroughly banal, like the novels- 
with-a-purpose after which we flock; so we'll 
give it a wide berth." 

And they shunned it accordingly. 

That was the end of Herminia Barton's lit- 
erary aspirations. She had given the people of 
her best, and the people rejected it. Now she 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 45 

gave them of her most mediocre; the nearest 
to their own level of thought and feeling to 
which her hand could reduce itself. And the 
people accepted it. The rest of her life was 
hack-work; by that, she could at least earn a 
living for Dolores. Her "Antigone, for the 
Use of Ladies' Schools " still holds its own at 
Girton and Somerville. 



10 



146 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



XIV. 

I DO not propose to dwell at any length upon 
the next ten or twelve years of Herminia Bar- 
ton's life. An episode or two must suffice; and 
those few told briefly. 

She saw nothing of her family. Relations 
had long been strained between them ; now they 
were ruptured. To the rest of the Bartons, she 
was even as one dead; the sister and daughter's 
name was never pronounced among them. But 
once, when little Dolores was about five years 
old, Herminia happened to pass a church door 
in Marylebone, where a red-lettered placard 
announced in bold type that the Very Reverend 
the Dean of Dunwich would preach there on 
Sunday. It flashed across her mind that this 
was Sunday morning. An overpowering desire 
to look on her father's face once more — she 
had never seen her mother's — impelled Her- 
minia to enter those unwonted portals. The 
Dean was in the pulpit. He looked stately and 
dignified in his long white hair, a noticeable 
man, tall and erect to the last, like a storm- 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 47 

beaten pine ; in spite of his threescore years and 
ten, his clear-cut face shone thoughtful, and 
striking, and earnest as ever. . He was preach- 
ing from the text, "I press toward the mark 
for the prize of the high calling." And he 
preached, as he always did, eloquently. His 
river of speech flowed high between banks out 
of sight of the multitude. There was such 
perfect sincerity, such moral elevation in all 
he said, that Herminia felt acutely, as she had 
often felt before, the close likeness of fibre 
which united her to him, in spite of extreme 
superficial differences of belief and action. 
She felt it so much that when the sermon was 
over she waited at the vestry door for her 
father to emerge. She couldn't let him go 
away without making at least an effort to speak 
with him. 

When the Dean came out, a gentle smile still 
playing upon his intellectual face, — for he waar 
one of the few parsons who manage in their old 
age to look neither sordid nor inane, — he saw 
standing by the vestry door a woman in a plain 
black dress, like a widow of the people. She 
held by the hand a curly-haired little girl of 
singularly calm and innocent expression. The 
woman's dark hair waved gracefully on her high 
forehead, and caught his attention. Her eyes 
were subtly sweet, her mouth full of pathos. 



148 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

She pressed forward to speak to him ; the Dean, 
all benignity, bent his head to listen. 

"Father!" H,erminia cried, looking up at 
him. 

The Dean started back. The woman who 
thus addressed him was barely twenty-eight, 
she might well have been forty; grief and hard 
life had made her old before her time. Her 
face was haggard. Beautiful as she still was, 
it was the beauty of a broken heart, of a Mater 
Dolorosa, not the roundfaced beauty of the 
fresh young girl who had gone forth rejoicing 
some ten years earlier from the Deanery at 
Dunwich to the lecture-rooms at Girton. For 
a moment the Dean stared hard at her. Then 
with a burst of recognition he uttered aghast 
the one word " Herminia! " 

"Father," Herminia answered, in a tremu- 
lous voice, " I have fought a good fight ; I have 
pressed toward the mark for the prize of a high 
calling. And when I heard you preach, I felt 
just this once, let come what come might, I 
must step forth to tell you so." 

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

"Father," Herminia made answer, lingering 
lovingly on the word, " I have nothing to repent 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. I49 

of. I have striven hard to do well, and have 
earned scant praise for it. But I come to ask 
to-day for one grasp of your hand, one word of 
your blessing. Father, father, kiss me ! '* 

The old man drew himself up to his full 
height, with his silvery hair round his face. 
Tears started to his eyes; his voice faltered. 
But he repressed himself sternly, "No, no, 
my child,*' he answered. "My poor old heart 
bleeds for you. But not till you come with full 
proofs of penitence in your hands can I ever 
receive you. I have prayed for you without 
ceasing. God grant you may repent. Till 
then, I command you, keep far away from me, 
and from your untainted sisters." 

The child felt her mother's hand tremble 
quivering in her own, as she 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 to Dolly 
in real life by this time; years bring these 
mitigations of our 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 a stifled sob, " That was 
your grandpa, Dolly; that was my father, my 
father." 



I50 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

The child put no more questions just then as 
is the wont of children ; but she treasured up 
the incident for long in her heart, wondering 
much to herself why, if her grandpa was so 
grand an old gentleman, she and her mamma 
should have to live by themselves in such 
scrubby little lodgings. Also, why her grand- 
pa, who looked so kind, 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 
have risen to be a bishop in his time, if it 
had n't been for that unfortunate episode about 
his daughter and young Merrick. Herminia 
was only once mentioned in his will; and even 
then merely to implore the divine forgiveness 
for her. She wept over that sadly. She did n't 
want the girls' money, she was better able to 
take care of herself than Elsie and Ermyntrude; 
but it cut her to the quick that her father 
should have quitted the world at last without 
one word of reconciliation. 

However, she went on working placidly at her 
hack-work, and living for little Dolly. Her 
one wish now was to make Dolly press toward 
the mark for the prize of the high calling she 
herself by mere accident had missed so nar- 
rowly. .Her own life was done; Alan's death 



A 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 151 

had made her task impossible; but if Dolly 
could fill her place for the sake of humanity, 
she would not regret it. Enough for her to 
have martyred herself ; she asked no mercenary 
palm and crown of martyrdom. 

And she was happy in her life; as far as a 
certain tranquil sense of duty done could make 
her, she was passively happy. Her kind of 
journalism was so commonplace and so anony- 
mous that she was spared that worst insult of 
seeing her hack-work publicly criticised as 
though it afforded some adequate reflection of 
the mind that produced it, instead of being 
merely an index of taste in the minds of those 
for whose use it was intended. So she lived for 
years, a machine for the production of articles 
and reviews; and a devoted mother to little 
developing Dolly. 

On Dolly the hopes of half the world now 
centred 



152 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



XV. 



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

One day the child who was to reform the 
world was returning from some errand on which 
her mother had sent her, when her attention 
was attracted by a very fine carriage, stopping 
at a door not far from their lodgings. Now 
Dolly had always a particular weakness for 
everything "grand; " and so grand a turn-out as 
this one was rare in their neighborhood. She 
paused and stared hard at it. "Whose is it, 
Mrs. Biggs ? " she asked awe-struck of the 
friendly charwoman, who happened to pass at 
the moment, — the charwoman who frequently 
came in to do a day's cleaning at her mother's 
lodging-house. Mrs. Biggs knew it well; 
"It's Sir Anthony Merrick's," she answered 
in that peculiarly hushed voice with which 
the English poor always utter the names of the 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 53 

titled classes. And so in fact it was; for the 
famous gout doctor had lately been knighted 
for his eminent services in saving a royal duke 
from the worst effects of his own self-indul- 
gence. Dolly put one fat finger to her lip, 
and elevated her eyebrows, and looked grave 
at once. Sir Anthony Merrick ! What a very 
grand gentleman he must be indeed, and how 
nice it must seem to be able to drive in so dis- 
tinguished a vehicle with a liveried footman. 

As she paused and looked, lost in enjoyment 
of that beatific vision, Sir Anthony himself 
emerged from the porch. Dolly took a good 
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 oiight to 
look; and, so thinking, she glanced up at him, 
and with a flash of her white teeth, smiled her 
childish approval. The austere old gentleman, 
unwonted ly softened by that cherub face, — for 
indeed she was as winsome as a baby angel 
of Raphael's, — stooped down and patted the 
bright curly head that turned up to him so 
trustfully. " What 's your name, little woman ? " 
he asked, with a sudden wave of gentleness. 

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



154 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

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

But the coachman observed to the footman, 
as they drove on together to 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 ran home, clutching it tight, 
and burst in upon Herminia with the startling 
news that Sir Anthony Merrick, a very grand 



THE WOMkN WHO DID. 1 55 

gentleman in a very fine carriage, had given a • 
gold piece to her. 

Gold pieces were rare in the calm little attic, 
but Herminia caught her child up with a cry 
of terror; and that very same evening, she 
changed the tainted sovereign with Dolly for 
another one, and -sent Sir 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 of slavery must be kept from 
all contagion of man's gold and man's bribery. 
Yet Dolly never forgot the grand gentleman's 
name, though she 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 home that day full of re- 
lenting thoughts about that girl Dolores. Her 
golden hair had sunk deep into his heart. She 
was Alan's own child, after all; she had Alan's 
blue eyes ; and in a world where your daughters 
go off and marry men you don't like, while your 
sons turn out badly, and don't marry at all to 
vex you, it 's something to have some fresh 
young life of your blood to break in upon your 
chilly old age and cheer you. So the great 
ioctor called a few days later at Herminia's 
odgings, and having first ascertained that Her- 



156 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

minia herself was out, had five minutes* conver- 
sation alone with her landlady. 

There were times, no doubt, when Mrs. Bar- 
ton was ill.? The landlady with the caution 
of her class, admitted that might be so. And 
times no doubt when Mrs. Barton was for the 
moment in arrears with her rent? The land- 
lady, good loyal soul, demurred to that sugges- 
tion ; she knit her brows and hesitated. Sir 
Anthony hastened to set her mind at rest. His 
intentions were most friendly. He wished to 
keep a watch, — a quiet, well-meaning, unsus- 
pected watch, — over Mrs. Barton's necessities^ 
He desired, in point of fact, if need were, to 
relieve them. Mrs. Barton was distantly con- 
nected with relations of his own ; and his notion 
was that without seeming to help her in obtru- 
sive ways, he would like to make sure Mrs. 
Barton got into no serious difficulties. Would 
the landlady be so good — a half sovereign 
glided into that subservient palm — as to let 
Sir Anthony know if she ever had reason to 
suspect a very serious strain was being put on 
Mrs. Barton's resources.? 

The landlady, dropping the modern apology for 
a courtesy, promised with effusion under pres- 
sure of hard cash, to accede to Sir Anthony's 
benevolent wishes. The more so as she 'd do 
anything to serve dear Mrs. Barton, who was 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 57 

always in everything a perfect lady, most in- 
dependent, in fact; one of the kind as wouldn't 
be beholden to anybody for a farthing. 

Some months passed away before the land- 
lady had cause to report to Sir Anthony. But 
during the worst depths of the next London 
winter, when gray fog gathered thick in the 
purlieus of Marylebone, and shivering gusts 
groaned at the street corners, poor little Dolly 
caught whooping-cough badly. On top of the 
whooping-cough came an attack of bronchitis; 
and on top of the bronchitis a serious throat 
trouble. Herminia sat up night after night, 
nursing her child, and neglecting the work on 
which both depended for subsistence. Week 
by week things grew worse and worse ; and Sir 
Anthony, 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 one string to her bow after 
another broke down in journalism. Her place 
as the weekly lady's-letter writer to an illus- 
trated paper passed on to a substitute; blank 
poverty stared her in the face, inevitable. When 
it came to pawning the type-writer, as the land- 
lady reported. Sir Anthony smiled a grim smile 
to himself. The moment for action had now 
arrived. He would put on pressure to get away 



158 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

poor Alan's illegitimate child from that dreadful 
woman. 

Next day he called. Dolly was dangerously 
ill, — so ill that Herminia could n*t find it in her 
heart to dismiss the great doctor from her door 
without letting him see her. And Sir Anthony 
saw her. The child recognized him at once 
and rallied, and smiled at him. She stretched 
her little arms. She must surely get well if a - 
gentleman who drove in so fine a carriage, and 
scattered sovereigns like ha'pennies, came in to 
prescribe for her. Sir Anthony was flattered 
at her friendly reception. Those thin small 
arms touched the grandfather's heart. "She 
will recover," he said; "but she needs good 
treatment, delicacies, refinements." Then he 
slipped out of the room, and spoke seriously to 
Herminia. "Let her come to me," he urged. 
" I '11 adopt her, and give her her father's name. 
It will be better for herself; better for her 
future. She shall be treated as my grand- 
daughter, well -taught, well-kept.; and you may 
see her every six months for a fortnight's visiL 
If you consent, I will allow you a hundred a 
year for yourself. Let bygones be bygones. 
For the child's sake, say yes! She needs so 
much that you can never give her ! " 

Poor Herminia was sore tried. As for the 
hundred a year, she could n't dream of accept- 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 59 

ing it; but like a flash it went through her 
brain how many advantages Dolly could enjoy 
in that wealthy household that the hard-work- 
ing journalist could not possibly afford her. 
She thought of the unpaid bills, the empty 
cupboard, the wolf at the door, the blank out- 
look for the future. For a second, she half 
hesitated. "Come, come!" Sir Anthony said; 
"for the child's own sake; you won't be so 
selfish as to stand in her way, will you? " 

Those words roused Herminia to a true sense 
of her duty. "Sir Anthony Merrick," she said 
holding her breath, "that child is my child, and 
my dear dead Alan's. I owe it to Alan, — I 
owe it to her, —to bring her up in the way that 
Alan would approve of. I brought her into the 
world ; and my duty is to do what I can to dis- 
charge the responsibilities I then undertook to 
her. I must train her up to be a useful citizen. 
Not for thousands would I resign the delight 
and honor of teaching my child to those who 
would teach her what Alan and I believed to 
be pernicious ; who would teach her to despise 
her mother's life, and to reject the holy memory 
of her father. As I said to you before, that day 
at Perugia, so I say to you now, * Thy money 
perish with thee. ' You need never again come 
here to bribe me. " 

"Is that final.?" Sir Anthony asked. And 



l6o THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

Herminia answered with a bow, "Yes, final; 
quite final/' 

Sir Anthony bent his head and left. Her- 
minia stood face to face with abject poverty. 
Spurred by want, by indignation, by terror, by a 
sense of the absolute necessity for action, she 
carried her writing materials then and there into 
Dolly's sick-room, and sitting by her child's 
cot, she began to write, she hardly knew what, 
as the words themselves came to her. In a 
fever of excitement she wrote and wrote and 
wrote. She wrote as one writes in the silence 
of midnight. It was late before she finished. 
When her manuscript was complete, she slipped 
out and posted it to a weekly paper. It appeared 
that same Saturday, and was the beginning of 
Herminia's most valuable connection. 

But even after she had posted it the dis- 
tracted mother could not pause or rest. Dolly 
tossed and turned in her sleep, and Herminia 
sat watching her. She pined for sympathy. 
Vague ancestral yearnings, gathering head with- 
in her, made her long to pray, — if only there 
had been anybody or anything to pray to. She 
clasped her bloodless hands in an agony of 
solitude. Oh, for a friend to comfort ! At last 
her overwrought feelings found vent in verse. 
She seized a pencil from her desk, and sitting 



^ 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. l6l 

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. 



II 



l62 THE WOMAN WHO DID, 



XVI. 

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

He was a younger man by many years than 
poor Alan had been; about Herminia's own 
age; a brilliant economi'st with a future before 
him. He aimed at the Cabinet. When first 
he met Herminia he was charmed at one glance 
by her chastened beauty, her breadth and depth 
of soul, her transparent sincerity of purpose 
and action. Those wistful eyes captured him. 
Before many days passed he had fallen in love 
with her. But he knew her history; and, tak- 
ing it for granted she must still be immersed in 
regret for Alan's loss, he hardly even reckoned 
the chances of her caring for him. 

*T is a common case. Have you ever noticed 
that if you meet a woman, famous for her con- 



^ 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 63 

nection with some absorbing grief, some his- 
toric tragedy, you are half appalled at first sight 
to find that at times she can laugh, and make 
merry, and look gay with the rest of us. Her 
callous glee shocks you. You mentally expect 
her to be forever engaged in the tearful con- 
templation of her own tragic fate; wrapt up in 
those she has lost, like the mourners in a 
Pieti. Whenever you have thought of her, you 
have connected her in your mind with that 
one fact in her history, which perhaps may 
have happened a great many years ago. But 
to you, it is as yesterday. You forget that 
since then many things have occurred to her. 
She has lived her life; she haS learned to smile; 
human nature itself cannot feed for years on the 
continuous comtemplation of its own deepest 
sorrows. It even jars you to find that the widow 
of a patriotic martyr, a murdered missionary, 
has her moments of enjoyment, and must wither 
away without them. 

So, just at first, Harvey Kynaston was afraid 
to let Herminia see how sincerely he admired 
her. He thought of her rather as one whose 
life is spent, who can bring to the banquet but 
the cold dead ashes of a past existence. Grad- 
ually, however, as he saw more and more of 
her, it began to strike him that Herminia was 
still in all essentials a woman. His own 



V 



1 64 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

throbbing heart told him so as he sat and 
talked with her. He thrilled at her approach. 
Bit by bit the idea 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 her unwedded widowhood. 
Some of them, after the fashion of men, having 
heard garbled versions of her tragic story, and 
seeking to gain some base advantage for them- 
selves from their knowledge of her past, strove 
to assail her crudely. Them, with unerring 
womanly instinct, she early discerned, and 
with unerring feminine tact, undeceived and 
humbled. Others, genuinely attracted by her 
beauty and her patience, paid real court to 
her heart; but all these fell far short of her 
ideal standard. With Harvey Kynaston it was 
different. 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 and elsewhere; till at last it became 
a habit with them to spend their Sunday mornings 
on some breezy wold in the country together. 
Herminia was still as free as ever from any 
shrinking terror as to what "people might 
say;" as of old, she lived her life for herself 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 165 

and her conscience, not for the opinion of a 
blind and superstitious majority. On one such 
August morning, they had taken the train from 
London to Haslemere, with Dolly of course by 
their side, and then had strolled up Hind Head 
by the beautiful footpath which mounts at first 
through a chestnut copse, and then between 
heather-clad hills to the summit. At the lone- 
liest turn of the track, where two purple glens 
divide, Harvey Kynaston seated himself on the 
soft bed of ling; Herminia sank by his side; 
and Dolly, after awhile, not understanding their 
conversation, wandered off by herself a little 
way afield in search of harebells and spotted 
orchises. Dolly found her mother's friends 
were apt to bore her ; she preferred the society 
of the landlady's daughters. 

It was a delicious day. Hard by, a slow- 
worm sunned himself on the basking sand. 
Blue dragon-flies flashed on gauze wings in the 
hollows. Harvey Kynaston looked on Her- 
minia* s face and saw that she was fair. With 
an effort he made up his mind to speak at last. 
In plain and simple words he asked her rever- 
ently the same question that Alan had asked 
her so long ago on the Holmwood. 

Herminia' s throat flushed a rosy red, and an 
unwonted sense of pleasure stole over that hard- 
worked frame as she listened to his words; for 



1 66 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

indeed she was fond of him. But she answered 
him at once without a moment's hesitation. 
"Harvey, I *m glad you ask me, for I like and 
admire you. But I feel sure beforehand my 
answer must be no. For I think what you mean 
is to ask, will I marry you.^ '* 

The man gazed at her hard. He spoke low 
and deferentially. "Yes, Herminia," he re- 
plied. "I do mean, will you marry me.? I 
know, of course, how you feel about this matter; 
I know what you have sacrificed, how deeply 
you have suffered, for the sake of your prin- 
ciples. And that *s just why I plead with you 
now to ignore them. You have given proof 
long ago of your devotion to the right. You 
may surely fall back this second time upon the 
easier way of ordinary humanity. In theory, 
Herminia, I accept your point of view; I approve 
the equal liberty of men and women, politically, 
socially, personally, ethically. But in practice, 
I don't want to bring unnecessary trouble on 
the head of a woman I love; and to live 
together otherwise than as the law directs does 
bring unnecessary trouble, as you know too 
profoundly. That is the only reason why I ask 
you to marry me. And Herminia, Herminia," 
he leant forward appealingly, "for the love's 
sake I bear you, I hope you will consent to it." 

His voice was low and tender. Herminia, 




THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 6/ 

sick at heart with that long fierce struggle 
against overwhelming odds, could almost have 
said yes to hipi. Her own nature prompted 
her; she was very, very fond of him. But she 
paused for a second. Then she answered him 
gravely. 

"Harvey," she said, looking deep into his 
honest brown eyes, "as we grow middle-aged, 
and find how impossible it must ever be to 
achieve any good in a world like this, how sad 
a fate it is to be born a civilized being in a 
barbaric community, I 'm afraid moral impulse 
half dies down within us. The passionate aim 
grows cold ; the ardent glow fades and flickers 
into apathy. I *m ashamed to tell 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 a proposal to me, 
if you had urged me to be false to my dearest 
principles, to sin against the light, to deny the 
truth, I would have flashed forth a no upon you 
without one moment's hesitation. And now, in 
my disillusioned middle age what do I feel? 
Do you know, I alipost feel tempted to give 
way to this Martinmas summer of love, to stul- 
tify my past by unsaying and undoing every- 
thing. For I love you, Harvey. If I were to 
give way now, as George Eliot gave way, as 
almost every woman who once tried to live a 



k 



1 68 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

free life for her sisters' sake, has given way in 
the end, I should counteract any little good my 
example has ever done or may ever do in the 
world ; and Harvey, strange as it sounds, I feel 
more than half inclined to do it. But I will 
not, I will xiol\ and I'll tell you why. It's 
not so much principle that prevents me now. I 
admit that freely. The torpor of middle age 
is creeping over my conscience. It 's simple 
regard for personal consistency, and for Dolly's 
position. How can I go back upon the faith 
for which I have martyred myself.? How can I 
say to Dolly, * I would n't marry your father in 
my youth, for honor's sake; but I have con- 
sented in middle life to sell my sisters' cause 
for a man I love, and for the consideration of 
society; to rehabilitate myself too late with a 
world I despise by becoming one man's slave, 
as I swore I never would be.* No, no, dear 
Harvey; I can't do that. Some sense of per- 
sonal continuity restrains me still. It is the 
Nemesis of our youth; we can't go back in our 
later life on the holier and purer ideals 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 
I lived with Dolly's father." 



'jM^^AiM 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 169 

The man hesitated a moment. Then he began 
to plead hard for reconsideration. But Her- 
minia's mind was made up. She couldn't belie 
her past; she couldn't be false to the principles 
for whose sake she had staked and lost every- 
thing. "No, no," she said firmly, over and 
over again. " You must take me my own way, 
or you must go without me. " 

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

"It need make no difference," Herminia an- 
swered, with a light touch of her hand. " Har- 
vey, I have far too few friends in the world 
willingly to give up one of them. Come again 
and go down with Dolly and me to Hind Head 
as usual next Sunday." 

"Thank you," the man answered. "Her- 
minia, I wish it could have been otherwise. 
But since I must never have you, I can promise 
you one thing; I will never marry any other 
woman. " 

Herminia started at the words. "Oh, no," 
she cried quickly. " How can you speak like 
that? How can you say anything so wrong, so 



I/O THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

untrue, so foolish? To be celibate is a very 
great misfortune even for a woman ; for a man 
it is impossible, it is cruel, it is wicked. I 
endure it myself, for my child's sake, and be- 
cause I find it hard to discover the help meet 
for me ; or because, when discovered, he refuses 
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 wrong under a 
guise of respectability. I should be unhappy 
if I thought any 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 and more loathsome 
slavery. " 

And from that day forth they were Icyal 
friends, no more, one to the other. 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 171 



XVII. 

And yet our Herminia was a woman after all. 
Some three years later, when Harvey Kynaston 
came to visit her one day, and told her he was 
really going to be married, — what sudden thrill 
was this that passed through and through her. 
Her heart stood still. She was aware that she 
regretted the comparative loss of a very near 
and dear acquaintance. 

She knew she was quite wrong. It was the 
leaven of slavery. But these monopolist in- 
stincts, which have wrought more harm in the 
world we live in than fire or sword or pesti- 
lence or tempest, hardly die at all as yet in a 
few good men, and die, fighting hard for life, 
even in the noblest women. 

She reasoned with herself against so hateful 
a feeling. Though she knew the truth, she 
found it hard to follow. No man indeed is 
truly civilized till he can say in all sincerity 
to every woman of all the women he loves, to 
every woman of all the women who love him. 



172 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

"Give me what you can of your love and of 
yourself; but never strive for my sake to deny 
any love, to strangle any impulse that pants 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 have ceased to desire; don't do injus- 
tice to your own prospective children by giving 
them a father whom you no longer respect, or 
admire, or yearn for. Guard your chastity well. 
Be mine as much as you will, as long as you 
will, to such extent as you will, but before all 
things be your own ; embrace and follow every 
instinct of pure love that nature, our mother, 
has imparted within you. " No woman, in turn, 
is truly civilized till she can say to every man 
of all the men she loves, of all the men who 
love her, " Give me what you can of your love, 
and of yourself; but don't think I am so vile, 
and so selfish, and so poor as to desire to 
monopolize you. Respect me enough never to 
give me your body without giving me your 
heart ; never to make me the mother of child- 
ren whom you desire not and love not." When 
men and women can say that alike, the world 
.will be civilized. Until they can say it truly, 
the world will be as now a jarring battlefield 
for the monopolist instincts. 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 73 

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

Patriotism is the one of these lowest vices 
which most often masquerades in false garb as 
a virtue. But what after all is patriotism.? 
" My country, right or wrong, and just because 
it is my country ! " 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 other people, and let the 
taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support 
them." At other times it means pure pride of 
race, and pure lust of conquest; *^my country 
against other countries; my army and navy 
against other fighters; my right to annex un- 
occupied territory against the equal right of 
all other peoples; my power to oppress all 
weaker nationalities, all inferior races." It 
never vcitzxis or can mean anything good or true. 
For if a cause be just, like Ireland's, or once 
Italy's, then 't is a good man's duty to espouse 



174 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

it with warmth, be it his own or another's. 
And if a cause be bad, then 't is a good man's 
duty to oppose it, tooth and nail, irrespective 
of your patriotism. True, a good man will 
feel more sensitively anxious that strict justice 
should be done by the particular community of 
which chance has made him a component mem- 
ber than by any others; but then, people who 
feel acutely this joint responsibility of all the 
citizens to uphold the moral right are not 
praised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. 
To urge that our own country should strive 
with all its might to be better, higher, purer, 
nobler, more generous than other countries, 
— the only kind of patriotism worth a moment's 
thought in a righteous man's eyes, is accounted 
by most men both wicked and foolish. 

Then comes the monopolist instinct of prop- 
erty. That, on the face of it, is a baser and 
more sordid one. For patriotism at least can 
lay claim to some sort of delusive expansive- 
ness beyond mere individual interest; whereas 
property stops short at the narrowest limits of 
personality. It is no longer "Us against the 
world ! " but ** Me against my fellow-citizens ! " 
It is the last word of the intercivic war in its 
most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the 
fair face of our common country with its anti- 
social notice-boards, " Trespassers will be pros- 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. I/S 

ecuted." It says in effect, "This is my land. 
As I believe, God made it; but I have acquired 
it, and tabooed it to myself, for my own enjoy- 
ment. The grass on the wold grows green; 
but only for me. The mountains rise glorious 
in the morning sun; no foot of man, save mine 
and my gillies* shall tread them. The water- 
falls leap white from the ledge in the glen; 
avaunt there, non -possessors; your eye shall 
never see them. For you the muddy street; 
for me, miles of upland. All this is my own. 
And I choose to monopolize it.'* 

Or is it the capitalist.^ "I will add field to 
field," he cries aloud, despite his own Scripture; 
"I will join railway to railway. I will juggle 
into mv own hands all the instruments for the 
production of wealth that my cunning can lay 
hold of; and I will use them for my own purposes 
against producer and consumer alike with impar- 
tial egoism. Corn and coal shall lie in the hol- 
low of my hand. I will enrich myself bv making 
dear by craft the necessaries of life; the poor 
shall lack, that I may roll down fair streets in 
needless luxury. Let them starve, and feed 
me!*' That temper, too, humanity must out- 
live. And those who are incapable of outliving 
it of themselves must be taught by stern les- 
sons, as in the splendid uprising of the spirit of 
man in France, that their race has outstripped 
them. 



176 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

Next comes the monopoly of human life, the 
hideous wrong erf slavery. That, thank good- 
ness, is now gone. 'Twas the vilest of them 
all —the nakedest assertion of the monopolist 
platform: — "You live, not for yourself, but 
wholly and solely for me. I disregard your 
claims to your own body and soul, and use you 
as my chattel." That worst form has died. 
It withered away before the moral indignation 
even of existing humanity. We have the satis- 
faction of seeing one dragon slain, of knowing 
that one monopolist instinct at least is now 
fairly bred out of us. 

Last, and hardest of all to eradicate in our 
midst, comes the monopoly of the human heart, 
which is known as marriage. Based upon the 
primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, 
stunning her by repeated strokes of the club 
or spear, and dragging her off by the 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 by some strange 
caprice to be regarded as of positively divine 
origin. The Man says now to himself, "This 
woman is mine. Law and the Church have 
bestowed her on me. Mine for better, for 
worse; mine, drunk or sober. If she ventures 
to have a heart or a will of her own, woe betide 
her! I have tabooed her for life: let any other 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 7/ 

man touch her, let her so much as cast eyes on 
any other man to admire or desire him — and, 
knife, dagger, or law-court, they shall both of 
them answer for it." There you have in all its 
native deformity another monopolist instinct — 
the deepest-seated of all, the grimmest, the 
most vindictive. "She is not yours," says the 
moral philosopher of the new dispensation; 
"she is her own; release her! The Turk hales 
his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and 
casts her quick into the eddying Bosphorus. 
The Christian Englishman, with more linger- 
ing torture, sets spies on her life, drags what 
he thinks her shame before a prying court, and 
divorces her with contumely. All this is mo- 
nopoly, and essentially slavery. Mankind must 
outlive it on its way up to civilization." 

And then the Woman, thus taught by her 
lords, has begun to retort in 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 never achieve. 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. 

12 



4 



578 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

All this Herminia knew well. All these things 
she turned over in her mind by herself on the 
evening of the day when Harvey Kynaston came 
to tell her of his approaching marriage. Why, 
then, did she feel it to some extent a disap- 
pointment.^ Why so flat at his happiness? 
Partly, she said to herself, because it is diffi- 
cult to live down in a single generation the jeal- 
ousies and distrusts engendered in our hearts by 
so many ages of harem life. But more still, 
she honestly believed, because it is hard to be 
a free soul in an enslaved community. No unit 
can wholly sever itself from the social organism 
of which it is a corpuscle. If all the world 
were like herself, her lot would have been dif- 
ferent. Affection would have been free; her 
yearnings for sympathy would have been filled 
to the full by Harvey Kynaston or some other. 
As it was, she had but that one little fraction 
of a man friend to solace her; to resign him 
altogether to another woman, leaving herself 
bankrupt of love, was indeed a bitter trial to 
her. 

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



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 79 



XVIII. 

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

Yet in some ways Herminia had reason to be 
dissatisfied with her daughter's development. 
Day by day she watched for signs of the ex- 
pected apostolate. Was Dolores pressing for- 
ward to the mark for the prize of her high 
calling? Her mother half doubted it. Slowly 
and regretfully, as the growing girl approached 
the years when she might be expected to think 
for herself, Herminia began to perceive that 
the child of so many hopes, of so many aspi- 
rations, the child pre-destined to regenerate 
humanity, was thinking for herself — in a retro- 
grade direction. Incredible as it seemed to 
Herminia, in the daughter of such a father and 
such a mother, Dolores' ideas — nay, worse her 
ideals — were essentially commonplace. Not 
that she had much opportunity of imbibing 
commonplace opinions from any outside source; 
she redeveloped them from within by a pure 



l8o THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

effort of atavism. She had reverted to lower 
types. She had thrown back to the 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 to persist in offspring than the deeper- 
seated and better-established peculiarities of 
the family, the clan, the race, or the species. 
They are idiosyncratic. Indeed, when we re- 
member how greatly the mental and moral 
faculties differ from brother to brother, the 
product of the same two parental factors, can 
we wonder that they differ much more from 
father to son, the product of one like factor 
alone, diluted by the addition of a relatively 
unknown quality, the maternal influence ? How- 
ever this may be, at any rate, Dolores early 
began to strike out for herself all the most 
ordinary and stereotyped opinions of British 
respectability. It seemed as if they sprang up 
in her by unmitigated reversion. She had 
never heard in the society of her mother's lodg- 
ings any but the freest and most rational ideas; 
yet she herself seemed to hark back, of internal 
congruity, to the lower andvulgarer moral plane 
of her remoter ancestry. She showed her indi- 
viduality only by evolving for herself all the 
threadbare platitudes of ordinary convention. 




THE WOMAN WHO DID. l8l 

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

From a very early age, indeed, this false note 
in Dolly had begun to make itself heard. 
While she was yet quite a child, Herminia 
noticed with a certain tender but shrinking 
regret that Dolly seemed to attach undue im- 
portance to the mere upholsteries and equi- 
pages of life, — to rank, wealth, title, servants, 
carriages, jewelry. At first, to be sure, Her- 
minia hoped this might prove but the passing 
foolishness of childhood: as Dolly grew up, 
however, it became clearer each day that the 
defect was in the grain — that Dolly's whole 
mind was incurably and congenitally aristo- 
cratic or snobbish. She had that mean admira- 
tion for birth, position, adventitious advantages, 



1 82 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

which is the mark of the beast in the essentially 
aristocratic or snobbish nature. She admired 
people because they were rich, because they 
were high-placed, because they were courted, 
because they were respected; not because they 
were good, 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 perceive with still profounder sorrow 
that Dolly had no spontaneous care or regard 
for righteousness. Right and wrong meant to 
her only what was usual and the opposite. She 
seemed incapable of considering the intrinsic 
nature of any act in itself apart from the praise 
or blame meted out to it by society. In short, 
she was sunk in the same ineffable slough of 
moral darkness as the ordinary inhabitant of 
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 
whose education she had spent so much pains, 
the child whose success in the deep things 
of life was to atone for her own failure, the 
child who was born to be the apostle of free- 
dom to her sisters in darkness, had turned out 
in the most earnest essentials of character a 
complete disappointment, and had ruined the 
last hope that bound her to existence. 



\ 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



Bitterer trials remained. Herminia hj 
through life to a great extent with the id\.f .. 
consciously present to her mind that she must 
answer to Dolly for every act and every feeling. 
She had done all she did with a deep sense of 
responsibility. Now it loomed by degrees upon 
her aching heart that Dolly's verdict would in 
almost every case be a hostile one. The daugh- 
ter was growing old enough to question and 
criticise her mother's proceedings; she was 
beginning to understand that some mysterious 
difference marked off her own uncertain posi- 
tion in life from the solid position of the 
children who surrounded her — the children 
born under those special circumstances which 
alone the man-made law chooses to stamp with 
the seal of its recognition. Dolly's curiosity 
was shyly aroused as to her dead father's 
family. Herminia had done her best to pre- 
pare betimes for this inevitable result by set- 
ting before her child, as soon as she could 
understand it, the true moral doctrine as to 
the duties of parenthood. But Dolly's own 
development rendered all such steps futile. 
There is no more silly and persistent error 
than the belief of parents that they can influ- 
ence to any appreciable extent the moral ideas 
and impulses of their children. These things 
have their springs in the bases of character: 



\ 



/■ 



184 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

they are the flower of individuality; and they 
cannot be altered or affected after birth by the 
foolishness of preaching. Train up a child in 
the way he should go, and when he is old, you 
will find soon enough he will choose his own 
course for himself and depart from it. 

Already when Dolly was a toddling little 
mite and met her mother's father m the church 
in Marylebone, it had struck her as odd that 
while they themselves were so poor and ill-clad, 
her grandpapa should be such a grand old gentle- 
man of such a dignified aspect. As she grew 
older and older, and began- to understand a 
little more the world she lived in, she won- 
dered yet more profoundly how it could happen, 
if her grandpapa was indeed the Very Rev- 
erend, the Dean of Dunwich, that her mamma 
should be an outcast from her father's church, 
and scarcely well seen in the best carriage com- 
pany. She had learnt that deans are rather 
grand people — almost as much so as admirals; 
that they wear shovel-hats to distinguish them 
from the common ruck of rectors; that they 
lived in fine houses in a cathedral close; and 
that they drive in a victoria with a coachman 
in livery. So much essential knowledge of 
the church of Christ she had gained for herself 
by personal observation; for facts like these 
were what interested Dolly. She could n't 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 185 

understand, then, why she and her mother 
should live precariously in a very small attic; 
should never be visited by her mother's brothers, 
one of whom she knew to be a Prebendary of 
Old Sarum, while the other she saw gazetted as 
a Colonel of Artillery; and should be totally 
ignored by her mother's sister, Ermyntrude, 
who lolled in a landau down the sunny side of 
Bond Street. 

At first, indeed, it only occurred to Dolly that 
her mother's extreme and advanced opinions had 
induced a social breach between herself and the 
orthodox members of her family. Even that 
Dolly resented ; why should mamma hold ideas 
of her own which shut her daughter out from 
the worldly advantages enjoyed to the full by 
the rest of her kindred? Dolly had no partic- 
ular religious ideas; the subject didn't interest 
her; and besides, she thought the New Testa- 
ment talked about rich and poor in much the 
same unpractical nebulous way that mamma 
herself did — in fact, she regarded it with some 
veiled contempt as a rather sentimental radical 
publication. But, she considered, for all that, 
that it was probably true enough as far as the 
facts and the theology went ; and she could n't 
understand why a person like mamma should 
cut herself off contumaciously from the rest of 
the world by presuming to disbelieve a body of 



1 86 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

doctrine which so many rich and well-gaitered 
bishops held worthy of credence. All stylish 
society accepted the tenets of the Church of 
England. But in time it began to occur to 
her that there might be some deeper and, as 
she herself would have said, more disgraceful 
reason for her mother's alienation from so 
respectable a family. For to Dolly, that was 
disgraceful which the world held to be so. 
Things in themselves, apart from the world's 
word, had for her no existence. Step by step, 
as she grew up to blushing womanhood, it 
began to strike her with surprise that her grand- 
father's name had been, like her own, Barton. 
"Did you marry your cousin, mamma .^" she 
asked Herminia one day quite suddenly. 

And Herminia, flushing scarlet at the unex- 
pected question, the first with which Dolly had 
yet ventured to approach that dangerous quick- 
sand, replied with a deadly thrill, "No, my dar- 
ling. Why do you ask me.^ " 

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

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

Dolly accepted the tone as closing the dis- 
cussion for the present; but the episode only 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 87 

strengthened her underlying sense of a mystery 
somewhere in the matter to unravel. 

In time, Herminia sent her child to' a day- 
school. Though she had always taught Dolly 
herself as well as she was able, she felt it a 
matter of duty, as her daughter grew up, to give 
her something more than the stray ends of time 
in a busy journalist's moments of leisure. At 
the school, where Dolly was received without 
question, on Miss Smith-Water's recommenda- 
tion, she found herself thrown much into the 
society of other girls, drawn for the most part 
from the narrowly 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 encouraged to the utmost. 
But she noticed at times with a shy shrinking 
that some few of the girls had heard vague 
rumors about her mother as a most equivocal 
person, who didn't accept all the current super- 
stitions, and were curious to ask her questions 
as to her family and antecedents. Crimson 
with shame, Dolly parried such enquiries as 
best she could; but she longed all the more 
herself to pierce this dim mystery. Was it a 
runaway match ? — with the groom, perhaps, or 
the footman ? Only the natural shamefacedness 
of a budding girl in prying into her mother's 



1 88 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

most domestic secrets prevented Dolores from 
asking Herminia some day point-blank all about 
it. 

But she was gradually becoming aware that 
some strange atmosphere of doubt surrounded 
her birth and her mother's history. It filled 
her with sensitive fears and self-conscious hes- 
itations. 

And if the truth must be told, Dolly never 
really returned her mother's profound aflfec- 
tion. It is often so. The love which parents 
lavish upon their children, the children repay, 
not to parents themselves, but to the next 
generation. Only when we become fathers 
or mothers in our turn do we learn what our 
fathers and mothers have done for us. Thus 
it was with Dolly. When once the first period 
of childish dependence was over, she regarded 
Herminia with a smouldering distrust and a 
secret dislike that concealed itself^ beneath a 
mask of unfelt caresses. In her heart of hearts, 
she owed her mother a grudge for not having 
put her in a position in life where she could 
drive in a carriage with a snarling pug and a 
clipped French poodle, like Aunt Ermyntrude's 
children. She grew up, smarting under a sullen 
sense of injustice, all the deeper because she 
was compelled to stifle it in the profoundest 
recesses of her own heart. 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 89 



XIX. 

When Dolly was seventeen, a pink wild rose 
just unrolling its petals, a very great event 
occurred in her history. She received an invi- 
tation to go and stop with some friends in the 
country. 

The poor child's life had been in a sense so 
uneventful that the bare prospect of this visit 
filled her soul beforehand with tremulous antic- 
ipation. To be sure, Dolly Barton had always 
lived in the midmost centre of the Movement 
in London; she had known authors, artists, 
socialists, the cream of our race; she had been 
brought up in close intercourse with the men 
and women who are engaged in revolutionizing 
and remodelling humanity. But this very fact 
that she had always lived in the Thick of Things 
made a change to the Thin of Things only by so 
much the more delicious and enchanting. Not 
that Dolores had not seen a great deal, too, of 
the country. Poor as they were, her mother 
had taken her to cheap little seaside nooks for 
a week or two of each summer; she had made 



I90 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

pilgrimages almost every Sunday in spring or 
autumn to Leith Hill or Mapledurham ; she 
had even strained her scanty resources to the 
utmost to afford Dolly an occasional outing in 
the Ardennes or in Normandy. But what gave 
supreme importance to this coming visit was 
the special fact that Dolly was now for the first 
time in her life to find herself " in society. " 

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



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 191 

The preparations for that visit cost Dolly 
some weeks of thought and effort. The occa- 
sion demanded it. She Was afraid she had no 
frocks good enough for such a grand house as 
the Compsons'. "Grand" was indeed a fav- 
orite epithet of Dolly's; she applied it impar- 
tially to everything which had to do, as she 
conceived, with the life of the propertied and 
privileged classes. It was a word at once of 
cherished and revered meaning — the shibboleth 
of her religion. It implied to her mind some- 
thing remote and unapproachable, yet to be 
earnestly striven after with all the forces at her 
disposal. Even Herminia herself stretched a 
point in favor of an occasion which she could 
plainly see Dolly regarded as so important ; she 
managed to indulge her darling in a couple of 
dainty new afternoon dresses, which touched for 
her soul the very utmost verge of allowable lux- 
ury. The materials were oriental ; the cut was 
the dressmaker's — not home-built, as usual. 
Dolly looked so brave in them, with her rich 
chestnut hair and her creamy complexion, — a 
touch, Herminia thought, of her Italian birth- 
place, — that the mother's fiill heart leapt up to 
look at her. It almost made Herminia wish she 
was rich — and anti-social, like the rich people 
— in order that she might be able to do ample 
justice to the exquisite grace of Dolly's unfold- 



192 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

ing figure. Tall, lissome, supple, clear of limb 
and light of footstep, she was indeed a girl any 
mother might have been proud of. 

On the day she left London, Herminia 
thought to herself she had never seen her child 
look so absolutely lovely. The unwonted union 
of blue eyes with that olive-gray skin gave a 
tinge of wayward shyness to her girlish beauty. 
The golden locks had ripened to nut-brown, but 
still caught stray gleams of nestling sunlight. 
'T was with a foreboding regret that Herminia 
kissed Dolly on both peach-bloom cheeks at 
parting. She almost fancied her child must be 
slipping from her motherly grasp when she 
went off so blithely to visit these unknown 
friends, away down in Dorsetshire. Yet Dolly 
had so few amusements of the sort young girls 
require that Herminia was overjoyed this 
opportunity should have come to her. She 
reproached herself not a little in her sensitive 
heart for even feeling sad at Dolly's joyous 
departure. Yet to Dolly it was a delight 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 Dolly had imagined it. There 
was a man-servant in a white tie to wait at 
table, and the family dressed every evening for 
dinner. Yet, much to her surprise, Dolly found 




THE WOMAN WHO DID. 1 93 

from the first the grandeur did not in the least 
incommode her. On the contrary, she enjoyed 
it. She felt forthwith she was to the manner 
born. This was clearly the life she was intended 
by nature to live, and might actually have been 
living — she, the granddaughter of so grand a 
man as the late Dean of Dunwich — had it 
not been for poor Mamma's ridiculous fancies. 
Mamma was so faddy ! Before Dolly had spent 
three whole days at the rectory, she talked just 
as the Compsons did; she picked up by pure 
instinct the territorial slan^ of the county 
families. One would have thought, to hear 
her discourse, she had dressed for dinner every 
night of her life, and passed her days in th* 
society of the beneficed clergy. 

But even that did not exhaust the charm of 
Upcombe for Dolly. For the first time in her 
life, she saw'something of men, — real men, with 
horses and dogs and guns, — men who went out 
partridge shooting in the season and rode to 
hounds across country, not the pale abstractions 
of cultured humanity who attended the Fabian 
Society meetings or wrote things called articles 
in the London papers. Her mother's friends 
wore soft felt hats and limp woollen collars; 
these real men were richly clad in tweed suits 
and fine linen. Dolly was charmed with them 
all, but especially with one handsome and manly 

13 



194 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

young fellow named Walter Brydges, the step- 
son and ward of a neighboring parson. "How 
you talked with him at tennis to-day! " Winnie 
Compson said to her friend, as they sat on the 
edge of Dolly's bed one evening. "He seemed 
quite taken with you." 

A pink spot of pleasure glowed on Dolly's 
round cheek to think that a real young man, in 
good society, whom she met at so grand a house 
as 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," Winnie answered with a nod. 
"Mr. Hawkshaw *s the vicar there till Mamma's 
nephew 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 only child. He 's very 
well off. You might do worse, dear. He 's 
considered quite a catch down in this part of 
the country." 

"How old is he.^" Dolly asked, innocently 
enough, standing up by the bedside in her 
dainty white nightgown. But Winnie caught 
at her meaning with the preternatural sharpness 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 195 

of the girl brought up in immediate contact with 
the landed interest. "Oh, he's of age," she 
answered quickly, with a knowing nod. " He *s 
come into the property ; he has nobody on earth 
but himself to consult about his domestic 
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; Walter Brydges had all the glamour 
of a landed estate, and an Oxford education. 
He was a young Greek god in a Norfolk shoot- 
ing-jacket. Moreover, he was a really good and 
pleasant young fellow. What wonder, there- 
fore, if before a week was out, Dolly was very 
really and seriously in love with him? And 
what wonder if Walter Brydges in turn, caught 
by that maiden glance, was in love with Dolly .^ 
He had every excuse, for she was lithe, and 
beautiful, and a joyous companion; besides 
being, as the lady's maid justly remarked, a 
perfect lady. 

One day, after Dolly had been a fortnight at 
Upcombe, the Compsons gave a picnic in the 
wild Combe undercliff. *Tis a broken wall of 
chalk, tumbled picturesquely about in huge 
shattered masses, and deliciously overgrown 
with ferns and blackthorn and golden clusters 



196 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

of close-creeping rock-rose. Mazy paths thread 
tangled labyrinths of fallen rock, or wind round 
tall clumps of holly-bush and bramble. They 
lighted their fire under the lee of one such 
buttress of broken cliff, whose summit was fes- 
tooned with long sprays of clematis, or "old 
man's beard," as the common west-country 
name expressively phrases it. Thistledown 
hovered on the basking air. There they sat 
and drank their tea, couched on beds of fern 
or propped firm against the rock; and when 
tea was over, they wandered off, two and two, 
ostensibly for nothing, but really for the true 
business of the picnic — to afford the young 
men and maidens of the group some chance of 
enjoying, unspied, one another's society. 

Dolly and Walter Brydges strolled off by 
themselves toward the rocky shore. There 
Walter showed her where a brook bubbled 
clear from the fountain-head ; by its brink, blue 
veronicas grew, and tall yellow loosestrife, and 
tasselled purple heads of great English eupatory. 
Bending down to the stream he picked a little 
bunch of forget-me-nots, and handed them to 
her. Dolly pretended unconsciously to pull the 
dainty blossoms to pieces, as she sat on the 
clay bank hard by and talked with him. " Is 
that how you treat my poor flowers ? " Walter 
asked, looking askance at her. 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. I97 

Dolly glanced down, and drew back suddenly. 
"Oh, poor little things!" she cried, with a 
quick droop of her long lashes. " I was n'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 could have done, 
it. " 

She looked so sweet and pure in her budding 
innocence, like a half-blown water-lily, that the 
young man, already more than two-thirds in 
love, was instantly captivated. "Because they 
were forget-me-nots, or because they were mine^ 
Miss Barton?" he asked softly, all timorous- 
ness. 

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

The blush showed sweet on that translucent 
skin. Walter turned to her with a sudden 
impulse. " And what are you going to do with 
them now?'' he enquired, holding his breath for 
joy and half-suppressed eagerness. 

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

" Yes, that will do," the young man answered, 



198 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

bending forward and seizing her soft fingers in 
his own. "That will do very well. And, Miss 
Barton — Dolores — I take it as a sign you 
don't wholly dislike me.** 

"I like you very much,** Dolly answered in a 
low voice, pulling a rock-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 mighty 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 of inner joy. The sun 
flashed in her chestnut hair. The triumph of 
that moment was to her inexpressible. 

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



THE WOMAN WHO DID. I99 



XX. 

From that day forth it was understood at 
Upcombe that Dolly Barton was informally 
engaged to Walter Brydges. Their betrothal 
would be announced in the " Morning Post *' — 
"We learn that a marriage has been arranged," 
and so forth — as soon as the chosen bride had 
returned to town, and communicated the great 
news in person to her mother. For reasons of 
her own, Dolly preferred this delay; she did n't 
wish to write on the subject to Herminia. 
Would mamma go and spoil it all? she won- 
dered. It would be just like her. 

The remaining week of her stay at the rec- 
tory was a golden dream of delight to Dolly. 
Beyond even the natural ecstasy of first love, 
the natural triumph of a brilliant engagement, 
what visions of untold splendor danced hourly, 
day and night, before her dazzled eyes ! What 
masques of magnificence! county balls, garden 
parties! It was heaven to Dolly. She was 
going to be grander than her grandest day- 
dream. 



20O THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

Walter took her across one afternoon to Combe 
Mary, and introduced her in due form to his 
mother and his step-father, who found the pink- 
and-white girl "so very young," but saw no 
other grave fault in her. He even escorted her 
over the ancestral home of the masters of Combe 
Mary, in which they were both to live, and 
which the young squire had left vacant of set 
purpose till he found a wife to his mind to fill 
it. 'T was the ideal crystallized. Rooks cawed 
from the high elms ; ivy clambered to the gables ; 
the tower of the village church closed the vista 
through the avenue. The cup of Dolly's happi- 
ness was full to the brim. She was to dwell in 
a manor-house with livery servants of her own, 
and to dress for dinner every night of her 
existence. 

On the very last evening of her stay in Dorset- 
shire, Walter came round to see her. Mrs. 
Compson and the girls managed to keep dis- 
creetly out of the young people's way; the rec- 
tor was in his study preparing his Sunday 
sermon, which arduous intellectual effort was 
supposed to engage his close attention for five 
hours or so weekly. Not a mouse interrupted. 
So Dolly and her lover had the field to them- 
selves from eight to ten in the rectory drawing- 
room. 

From the first moment of Walter's entry, 



-THE WOMAN WHO DID. 201 

Dolly was dimly aware, womanlike, of some- 
thing amiss, something altered in his manner. 
Not, indeed, that her lover was less affectionate 
or less tender than usual, — if anything he 
seemed rather more so; but his talk was embar- 
rassed, pre-occupied, spasmodic. He spoke by 
fits and starts, and seemed to hold back some- 
thing. Dolly taxed him with it at last. Walter 
tried to put it off upon her approaching depart- 
ure. But he was an honest young man, and so 
bad an actor that Dolly, with her keen feminine 
intuitions, at once detected him. " It 's more 
than that," she said, all regret, leaning forward 
with a quick-gathering moisture in her eye, for 
she really loved him. "It's more than that, 
^Walter. You *ve heard something somewhere 
that you don't want to tell me." 

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

Dolly drew back like one stung; her heart 
beat fast. " What have you heard ? " she cried 
trembling ; " Walter, Walter, I love you ! You 
must keep nothing back. Tell me fww what it 
is. I can bear to hear it. " 

The young man hesitated. " Only something 
my step-father heard from a friend last night," 
he replied, floundering deeper and deeper. 



202 THE WOMAN WHO DID.- 

"Nothing at all about you, darling. Only — 
well — about your family." 

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

"Something that makes you sorry you prom- 
ised to marry me ? '* she cried aloud in her 
despair. Heaven faded before her eyes. What 
evil trick could mamma have played her.? 

As she stood there that moment — proud, 
crimson, breathless — Walter Brydges would 
have married her if her father had been a tinker 
and her mother a gipsy girl. He drew her tow- 
ard 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 cruel blow 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 your sweet feet tread on. Nothing on 
earth could make me anything but grateful and 
thankful for the gift of your love you 're gracious 
enough 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," she cried, shrink- 
ing. "I don't know what it is. I don't know 
what it means. But till I *ve gone home to 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 203 

London and asked about it from mother, — oh, 
Walter, we two are no longer engaged. You 
are free from your promise." 

She said it proudly ; she said it bravely. She 
said it with womanly grace and dignity. Some- 
thing of Herminia shone out in her that moment. 
No man should ever take her — to the grandest 
home — unless he took her at her full worth, 
pleased and proud to win her. 

Walter soothed and coaxed; but Dolores 
stood firm. Like a rock in the sea, no assault 
could move her. As things stood at present, 
she cried, they were no longer engaged. After 
she had seen her mother 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 rushed from his presence up to 
her own dark bed-room. 



204 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



XXI. 

Next morning early, Dolly left Combe Neville 
on her way to London. When she reached the 
station, Walter was on the platform with a 
bunch of white roses. He handed them to her 
deferentially as she took her seat in the third- 
class carriage ; and so sobered was Dolly by this 
great misfortune that she forgot even to feel a 
passing pang of shame that Walter should see 
her travel in that humble fashion. "Remem- 
ber," he whispered in her ear, as the train 
steamed out, "we are still engaged; I hold you 
to your promise. '* 

And Dolly, blushing maidenly shame and dis- 
tress, shook her head decisively. "Not now," 
she answered. "I must wait till I know the 
truth. It has always been kept from me. And 
now I wz// know it." 

She had not slept that night. All the way 
up to London, she kept turning her doubt over. 
The more she thought of it, the deeper it galled 
her. Her wrath waxed bitter against Herminia 
for thij^ evil turn she had wrought. The 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 205 

smouldering anger of years blazed forth at 
last. Had she blighted her daughter's life, and 
spoiled so fair a future by obstinate adherence 
to those preposterous ideas of hers? 

Never in her life had Dolly loved her mother. 
At best, she had felt towards her that contempt- 
uous toleration which inferior minds often ex- 
tend to higher ones. And now — why, she 
hated her. 

In London, as it happened, th^t very morn- 
ing, Herminia, walking across Regent's Park, 
had fallen in with Harvey Kynaston, and their 
talk had turned upon this self-same problem. 

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

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

"But it might be so bad for her," Harvey 
Kynaston went on. And then he proceeded to 
bring up in detail casuistic objections on the 
score of a young girl's modesty; all of which 
fell flat on Herminia's more honest and consis- 
tent temperament. 

"I believe in the truth," she said simply; 
"and I 'm never afraid of it. I don't think a 
lie, or even a suppression, can ever be good in 



206 THE V/OMAN WHO DID. 

the end for any one. The Truth shall make you 
Free. That one principle in life can guide one 
through everything." 

In the evening, when Dolly came home, her 
mother ran out proudly and affectionately to kiss 
her. But Dolly drew back her face with a gest- 
ure of displeasure, nay, almost of shrinking. 
" Not now, mother ! " she cried. " I have some- 
thing to ask you about Till I know 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 heard it." 

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

Herminia's cheek blanched, and her pale lips 
quivered as she nerved herself to answer; but 
she answered bravely, "No, darling, I was not. 
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 been sacrificed to 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 20^ 

you and your principles ! " Then she turned 
on her madly once more. "And who was my 
father? " she burst out in her agony. 

Herminia never paused. She must tell her 
the truth. "Your father's name was Alan 
Merrick," she answered, steadying herself with 
one hand on the table. "He died at Perugia 
before you were born there. He was a son of 
Sir Anthony Merrick, the great doctor in 
Harley Street." 

The worst was out. Dolly stood still and 
gasped. Hot horror flooded her burning cheeks. 
Illegitimate ! illegitimate ! Dishonored from her 
birth! A mark for every cruel tongue to aim 
at! Born in shame and disgrace! And then, 
to think what she might have been, but for her 
mother's madness! The granddaughter of two 
such great men in their way as the Dean of 
Dunwich and Sir Anthony Merrick. 

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

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



208 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

Herminia gazed at her, appalled. It was a 
natural tragedy. There was no way out of it. 
She could n'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's manifest shame 
and horror. 

"Dolly, Dolly," the agonized mother cried, 
flinging herself upon her child's mercy, as it 
were; "Don't be hard on me; don't be hard on 
me! My darling, how could I ever guess you 
would look at it like this ? How could I ever 
guess my daughter and his would see things 
for herself in so different a light from the light 
we saw them 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, you 
should have put me on an equality with other 
people." 

"Dolly," Herminia moaned, wringing her 
hands in her despair, "my child, my darling, 
how I have loved you ! how I have watched over 
you ! 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. Egual with other 
people ! Why, I thought I was giving you the 
noblest heritage living woman ever yet gave the 
child of her bosom. I thought you would be 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 209 

proud of it, as I myself would have been proud. 
I thought you 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 first free-born woman ever 
begotten in England ? 'T was a blessing I meant 
to give you, and you have made a curse of 
it." 

" You have made a curse of it! ** Dolores an- 
swered, rising and glaring at her. " You have 
blighted my life for me. A good man and true 
was going to make me his wife. After this, 
how can I dare to palm myself off upon him ? " 

She swept from the room. Though broken 
with sorrow, her step was resolute. Herminia 
followed her to her bed-room. There Dolly sat 
long on the edge of the bed, crying silently, 
silently, and rocking herself up and down like 
one mad with agony. At last, in one fierce 
burst, she relieved her burdened soul by pour- 
ing out to her mother the whole tale of her 
meeting with Walter Brydges. Though she 
hated her, she must tell her. Herminia lis- 
tened with deep shame. It brought the color 
back into her own pale cheek to think any man 
should deem he was performing an act of chival- 
rous self-devotion in marrying Herminia Barton's 
unlawful daughter. Alan Merrick's child ! The 

14 



2IO THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

child of SO many hopes! The baby that was 
born to regenerate humanity! 

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

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

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

She worded her telegram briefly but proudly : 



u 



My mother has told me all. I understand your 
feeling. Our arrangement 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. I hold you to your promise. 
All tenderest messages. Letter follows." 

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

When she rose to go to bed, Herminia, very 
wistful, held out her white face to be kissed as 
usual. She held it out tentatively. Worlds 
trembled in the balance ; but Dolly drew herself 
back with a look of oflFended dignity. " Never ! " 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 211 

she answered in a firm voice. "Never again 
while I live. You are not fit to receive a pure 
girl's kisses." 

And two women lay awake all that ensuing 
night sobbing low on their pillows in the Mary- 
lebone lodging-house. 



212 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



XXII. 

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

"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 was close on eighty now, but 
still to this day he received his patients from ten 
to one, and closed his shrivelled hand with a 
clutch on their guineas. For whom, nobody 
knew. Lady Merrick was long dead. His 
daughters were well married, and he had quar- 
relled with their husbands. Of his two younger 
sons, one had gone into the Fusiliers and been 
speared at Suakim; the other had broken his 
neck on a hunting-field in Warwickshire. The 
old man lived alone, and hugged his money- 
bags. They were the one thing left for which 
he seemed to retain any human affection. 

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



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 213 

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

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

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

"And what can I do for you, young lady.^" 
he asked in his best professional manner. 

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

The old man bowed once more, a most defer- 
ential bow. Strange to say, 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 blue eyes in her shamefaced 
embarrassment. "And this morning . . . I *ve 
come to implore your protection." 



214 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

"That •s prompt," the old man replied, with a 
curious smile, half suspicious, half satisfied. 
" From whom, my little one ? " And his hand 
caressed her shoulder. 

"From my mother," Dolly answered, blushing 
still deeper crimson. "From the mother who 
put this injustice upon me. From the mother 
who, by her own confession, might have given me 
an honorable birthright, 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 has n't dinged 
them into you ! " 

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

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

"That's well, my child," he answered. 
"That's well — for a beginning." 

Then Dolly, emboldened by his kindness, — for 
in a moment, somehow, she had taken her grand- 
father's heart by assault, — began to tell him how 
it had all come about ; how she had received an 
offer from a most excellent young man at Combe 
Mary in Dorsetshire, — very well connected, the 
squire of his parish; how she had accepted him 
with joy; how she loved him dearly; how this 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 215 

shadow intervened ; how thereupon, for the first 
time, she had asked for and learned the horrid 
truth about her parentage ; how she was stunned 
and appalled by it; how she could never again 
live under one roof with such a woman; and 
how she came to him for advice, for encourage- 
ment, for assistance. She flung herself on his 
mercy. Every word she spoke impressed Sir 
Anthony. This was no mere acting; the girl 
really meant it. Brought up in those hateful sur- 
roundings, innate purity of mind had preserved 
her innocent heart from the contagion of example. 
She spokelike a sensible, modest, healthy English 
maiden. She was indeed a granddaughter any 
man might be proud of. *T was clear as the 
sun in the London sky to Sir Anthony that she 
recoiled with horror from her mother's position. 
He sympathized with her and pitied her. 
Dolores, all blushes, lifted her eyelids and 
looked at him. Her grandfather drew her tow- 
ards him with a smile of real tenderness, and, 
unbending as none had seen him unbend before 
since Alan's death, told her all the sad history 
as he himself envisaged it. Dolores listened 
and shuddered. The old man was vanquished. 
He would have taken her once to himself, he 
said, if Herminia had permitted it; he would 
take her to himself now, if Dolores would come 
to him. 



2l6 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

As for Dolly, she lay sobbing and crying in 
Sir Anthony's arms, as though she had always 
known him. After all, he was her grandfather. 
Nearer to her in heart and soul than her mother. 
And the butler could hardly conceal his surprise 
and amazement when three minutes later Sir 
Anthony rang the bell, and being discovered 
alone with a strange young lady in tears, made 
the unprecedented announcement that he would 
see no patients at all that morning, and was at 
home to nobody. 

But before Dolly left her new-found relation's 
house, it was all arranged between them. She 
was to come there at once as his adopted daugh- 
ter; was to take and use the name of Merrick; 
was to see nothing more of that wicked woman, 
her mother; and was to be married in due time 
from Sir Anthony's house, and under Sir 
Anthony's auspices, to Walter Brydges. 

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



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 2\^ 



XXIII. 

When she returned from Sir Anthony's to her 
mother's lodgings, she found Herminia, very 
"pale, in the sitting-room, waiting for her. Her 
eyes were fixed on a cherished autotype of a 
Pinturicchio at Perugia, — Alan's favorite pict- 
ure. Out of her penury she had bought it. It 
represented the Madonna bending in worship 
over her divine child, and bore the inscription : 
"Quem genuit adoravit. " Herminia loved that 
grdup. To her it was no mere emblem of a 
dying creed, but a type of the eternal religion 
of maternity. The Mother adoring the Child! 
'T was herself and Dolly. 

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

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



2l8 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

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



n 



met 

16 



?»» 



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

Herminia rose and faced her. Her white lips 
grew livid. She had counted on every element 
of her martyrdom, — save one ; and this, the 
blackest and fiercest of all, had never even oc- 
curred 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 was right 
and what wrong, you would indeed rise up and 
call me blessed. And now, — oh, Dolly, this 
last blow is too terrible. It will kill me, my 
darling. I can't go on out-living it." 

" You will," Dolly answered. " You 're strong 
enough and wiry enough to outlive anything. 
. . . But I wrote to Walter from Sir Anthony's 
this morning, and told him I would wait for 
him if I waited forever. For, of course, while 
you live, I could n't think of marrying him. I 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 219 

could n't think of burdening an honest man with 
such a mother-in-law as you are ! *' 

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



220 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 



XXIV. 

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

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

" My Darling Daughter, — By the time you read 
these words, I shall be no longer in the way, to inter- 
fere with your perfect freedom of action. I had but 
one task left in life — to make you happy. Now I find 
I only stand in the way of that object, no reason re- 
mains why I should endure any longer the misfortune 
of living. 

" My child, my child, you must see, when you come 
to think it over at leisure, that all I ever did was done, 
up to my lights, to serve and bless you. I thought, by 
giving you the father and the birth I did, I was giving 
you the best any mother on earth had ever yet given 
her dearest daughter. I believe it still ; but I see I 
should never succeed in making you feel it. Accept 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 221 

this reparation. For all the wrong I may have done, 
all the mistakes I may have made, I sincerely and ear- 
nestly implore your forgiveness. I could not have had 
it while I lived ; I beseech and pray you to grant me 
dead what you would never have been able to grant me 
living. 

" My darling, I thought you would grow up to feel as 
I did ; I thought you would thank me for leading you 
to see such things as the 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 in your 
recollections when I can no longer defend myself. 

" I set out in life with the earnest determination to 
be a martyr to the cause of truth and righteousness, as 
I myself understood them. But I didn't foresee this 
last pang of martyrdom. No soul .can tell beforehand 
to what particular cross the blind chances of the uni- 
verse will finally nail it. But I am ready to be offered, 
and the time of my departure is close at hand. I have 
fought a good fight ; I have finished my course ; I have 
kept the faith I started in life with. Nothing now re- 
mains for me but the crown of martyrdom. My dar- 
ling, it is indeed a very bitter cup to me that you should 
wish me dead ; but 't is a small thing to die, above all 
for the sake of those we love. I die for you gladly, 
knowing that by doing so I can easily relieve my o^^ti 
dear little girl of one trouble in life, and make her 
course lie henceforth through smoother waters. Be 
happy ! be happy ! Good-by, my Dolly ! Your 
mother's love go forever through life with you I 



222 THE WOMAN WHO DID. 

" Burn this blurred note the moment you have read 

it. I inclose a more formal one, giving reasons for my 

act on other grounds, to be put in, if need be, at the 

coroner's inquest. Good-night, my heart's darling. 

Your truly devoted and affectionate 

Mother. 

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

When she had finished that note, and folded 
it reverently with kisses and tears, she wrote 
the second one in a firm hand for the formal 
evidence. Then she put on a fresh white dress, 
as pure as her own soul, like the one she had 
worn on the night of her self-made bridal with 
Alan Merrick. In her bosom she fastened two 
innocent white roses from Walter Brydges's 
bouquet, arranging them with studious care very 
daintily before her mirror. She was always a 
woman. "Perhaps," she thought to herself, 
"for her lover's sake, my Dolly will kiss them. 
When she finds them lying on her dead mother's 
breast, my Dolly may kiss them." Then she 
cried a few minutes very softly 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 a small glass-stoppered phial, 



THE WOMAN WHO DID. 223 

that a scientific friend had given her long ago 
for use in case of extreme emergency. It con- 
tained prussic acid. She poured the contents 
into a glass and drank it off. Then she lay 
upon her bed and waited for the only friend she 
had left in the world, with hands folded on her 
breast, like some saint 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 her mother* 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. 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 



DISCORDS. 

21 Volume of S^torie^. 
By GEORGE EGERTON, author of " Keynotes." 

AMERICAN COPYRIGHT EDITION. 

i6mo. Clotb. Price t $1.00. 



George Egerton's new volume entitled " Discords," a collection of short stories, 
is more talked about, just now, than any other fiction of the day. The collection is 
really stories for story-writers. They are precisely the quality which literary folk will 
wrangle over. Harold Frederic cables from London to the ** New York Times " that 
the book is making a profound impression there. It is published on both sides, the 
Roberts House bringing it out in Boston. George Egerton, like George Eliot and 
George Sand, is a woman's nom de plume. The extraordinary frankness with which 
life in general is discussed m these stories not unnaturally arrests attention.— 
Lilian Whiting. 

The English woman, known as yet only by the name of George Egerton, who 
made something of a stir in the world by a volume of strong stories called " Keynotes," 
has brought out a new book under the rather uncomfortable title of '* Discords.** 
These stories show us pessimism run wild ; the gloomy things that can happen to a 
human being are so dwelt upon as to leave the impression that in the author's own 
world there is no light. The relations of the sexes are treated of in bitter irony, which 
develops into actual horror as the pages pass. But in all this there is a rugged 
grandeur of style, a keen analysis of motive, aT\d a deepness of pathos that stamp 
George Elgerton as one of the greatest women writers of the day. '* Discords " has 
been called a volume of stories ; it is a misnomer, for the book contains merely varying 
episodes in lives of men and women, with no plot, no beginning nor ending. — Boston 
Traveller. 

This is a new volume of psychological stories from the pen and brains of George 
Egerton, the author of " Keynotes." Evidently the titles of the author's books are 
selected according to musical principles. The first story in the book is *' A Psych»w 
logical Moment at Three Periods." It is all strength rather than sentiment. The 
story of the child, of the girl, and of the woman is told, and told by one to whom the 
mysteries of the life of each are familiarly known. In their very truth, as the writer 
has so subtly analyzed her triple characters, they sadden one to think that such things 
must be ; yet as they are real, they are bound to be disclosed by somebody and in due 
time. The author betrays remarkable penetrative skill and perception, and dissects 
the human heart with a power from whose demonstration the sensitive nature may 
instinctively shrink even while fascinated with the narration and hypnotized by the 
treatment exhibited. — Courier. 



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THE GREAT GOD PAN AND THE 

INMOST LIGHT. 

BY ARTHUR MACHEN. 

KEYNOTES SERIES. 

i6mo. Cloth. Price, $i.oo. 



A couple of tales by Arthur Machen, presumably an Englislunan, pafalolied 
xttheticaily in this country by Roberts Brothers. They are horror — fflifi te 
homir being of the vague p-^ychologic kind and dependent, in eadi case, upon a !»*■ 
of science who tries to effect a change in individual personality by an operation iipoa 
the brain cells. The iniplied lesson is that it is dangerous and unwise to tf f^ IB 
probe the mystery separating mind and matter. These sketches are extremely ttifflg 
and we guarantee the " shivers '* to anyone who reads them. — Hartford ComnuA 

For two stories of the most marvelous and improbable character, yet told wiA 
wondurful realism and naturalness, the palm for this time will have to be awarded to 
Arthur M.ichen, for " The Great Gud Pan and the Inmost Light,** two stories jut 
published in one book They are fitting companions to the famous stories by £4gw 
Allan Poe both in matter and style. **The Great God Pan" is founded upon an 
experiment made upon a girl by which she was enabled for a moment to see the god 
Pan, but with most disastrous results, the most wonderful of which is revealed at the 
end of the story, and which solution the reader will eagerly seek to reach. From the 
first mystery or tragedy follow in rapid succession. " The Inmost Light*' is equally 
as remarkable for its imaginative power and perfect air of probability. Anything in 
the legitimate line of psychology utterly pales before these stories of such plausilulity. 
Boston Home yournal. 

Precisely who the great god Pan of Mr. Machen's first tale is, we did not quite 
discover when we read it, or, discovering, we have forgotten ; but our impression is 
that under the idea of that primitive great deity he impersonated, or meant to im- 
personate, the evil influences that attach to woman, the fatality oi feminine beauty, 
which, like the countenance of the great god Pan, is deadly to all who behold it 
His heroine is a beautiful woman, who ruins the souls and bodies of those over whom 
she casts her spells, being as good as a Suicide Club, if we may say so, to those who 
love her ; and to whom she is Death. Something like this, if not this exactly, is, we 
take it, the interpretation of Mr. Machen*s uncanny parable, which is too obscure 
to justify itself as an imaginative creation and too morbid to be the production of a 
healthy mind. The kind of writing which it illustrates is a bad one, and this is one 
of the worst of the kind. It is not terrible, but horrible. — R. H. S, m Afaiiamd 
Express. 

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A CHILD OF THE AGE. 

a WobeL 

BY FRANCIS ADAMS 

(KEYNOTES SERIES.) 

With titlepage by Aubrey Beardsley. i6mo. Cloth. 
Price, $i.oo. 

This story by Francis Adams was originally published under the title of 
" Leicester, an Autobiography," in 1884, when the author was only twenty-two years 
of age. That would make him thirty-two years old now, if he were still living. He 
was but eighteen years old when it was first drafted by him. Sometime after publica- 
tion, he revised the work, and in its present form it is now published again, practi- 
cally a posthumous production. We can with truthfulness characterize it as a tale of 
fresh originality, deep spiritual meaning, and exceptional power. It fairiy buds, 
blossoms, and fruits with suggestions that search the human spirit through. No 
similar production has come from the hand of any author in our time. That Francis 
Adams would have carved out a remarkable career for himself had he continued to 
live, this little volume, all compact with significant suggestion, attests on many a 
page. It exalts, inspires, comforts, and strengthens all together. It instructs by 
suggestion, spiritualizes the thought by its elevating and purifying narrative, and 
feeds the hungering spirit with food it is only too ready to accept and assimilate. 
Those who read its pages with an eager curiosity the first time will be pretty sure 
to return to them for a second slower and more meditative perusal. The book is 
assuredly the promise and potency of great things unattained in the too brief life- 
time of its gifted author. We heartily commend it as a book not only of remarkable 
power, but as the product of a human spirit whose merely intellectual gifts were but 
a fractional part of his inclusive spiritual endowments. — Boston Courier. 

But it is a remarkable work— as a pathological study almost unsurpassed. It 
produces the impression of a photograph from life, so vividly realistic is the treatment. 
To this result the author's style, with its fidelity of microscopic detail, doubtless 
contributes. — Evening Traveller. 

This story by Francis Adams is one to read slowly, and then to read a second 
time. It is powerfully written, full of strong suggestion, unlike, in fact, anything we 
have recently read. What he would have done in the way of literary creation, had he 
lived, is, of course, only a matter of conjecture. What he did we have before us in 
this remarkable book. — Boston Advertiser. 



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THE KEYNOTE SERIES. 



KEYNOTES. A Volume of Stories. By George Egerton. 

With titlepage by Aubrey Beardsley. l6mo. Cloth. Price, 
$1.00. 

THE DANCING FAUN. A Novel. By Florence Farr. 
With titlepage by Aubrey Beardsley. American copyright 
edition. l6mo? Cloth. Price, $1.00. 

POOR FOLK. A Novel. Translated from the Russian of 

Fedor Dostoievsky. By Lena Milman. With a decorative 
titlepage and a critical introduction by George Moore. 
l6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 

A CHILD OF THE AGE. A Novel. By Francis Adams. 
With titlepage by Aubrey Beardsley. i6mo. Cloth. Price, 

$1.00. 

THE GREAT GOD PAN AND THE INMOST 
LIGHT. By Arthur Machen. l6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 

DISC0RD5. A Volume of Stories. By George Egerton. 
l6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 

PRINCE ZALESKI. By M. P. Shiel. i6mo. Cloth. 
Price, $1.00. 

THE WOMAN WHO DID. By Grant Allen. i6mo. 
Cloth. Price, $1.00. 



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THE DANCING FAUN. ^^ 



■ * ■ . 



By FLORENCE FARR. 

IVitb Title-page and Cover Design by Aubrey Beardsley. 
16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 



We welcome the light and merry pen of Miss Fan* as one of the deftest that 
has been wielded in the style of to-day. She has written the cleverest and the 
most cynical sensation story of the season. — Liverpool Daily Post. 

Slight as it is, the story is, in its way, strong. — Literary World. 

Full of bright paradox, and paradox which is no mere topsy*turvy play upon 
words, but the product of serious thinking upon life. One of the cleverest ol 
recent novels. — Star. 

It is full of epigrammatic effects, and it has a certain thread of pathos calcn- 
lated to win our spmpathy. — Queen. 

The story is subtle and psychological after the fashion of modern psychology ; 
it is undeniably clever and smartly written. — Gentlewoman. 

No one can deny its freshness and wit. Indeed there are things in it here and 
there which John Oliver Hobbes herself might have signed without loss of repu- 
tation. — Woman. 

There is a lurid power in the very unreality of the story. One does not quite 
understand how Lady Geraldine worked herself up to shooting her lover ; but 
when she has done it, the description of what passes through her mind is 
magnificent. — Atheneeum. 

Written by an obviously clever woman. — Black and White, 

Miss Farr has talent. "The Dancing Faun " contains writing that is distinc- 
tively good. Doubtless it is only a prelude to something much stronger.— 
A cadenty. 

As a work of art, the book has the merit of brevity and smart writing, while 
the dinouement is skilfully prepared, and comes as a surprise If the book had 
been intended as a satire on the *' new woman " sort of literature, it would have 
been most brilliant ; but assuming it to be written in earnest, we can heartily 
praise the form of its construction without agreeing with the sentiments expressed. 
St. yames^s Gazette. 

Shows considerable power and aptitude. — Saturday Review. 

Miss Farr is a clever writer whose apprenticeship at playwriting can easily be 
detected in the epigrammatic conversations with which this book is filled, and 
whose characters expound a philosophy of life which strongly recalls Oscar 
Wilde's later interpretations. . . . The theme of the tale is heredity developed 
in a most unpleasant manner. The leading idea that daughters inherit the father's 
qualities, good or evil, while sons resemble their mother, is well sustained- ■— 
Home Journal. 

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A STRANOE CAREER. 



LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF 
JOHN GLADWYN JEBB. 

BY HIS WIDOW. 

With an Introduction by H. Rider Haggard, ^nd a por- 
trait of Mr. Jebb. i2mo, cloth'. Price, $1.25. 



A remarkable romance of modern life. — Daily Chronicle, 

Exciting to a degree. — Black and White. 

Full of breathless interest. — Times. 

Reads like fiction. — Daily Graphic, 

Pages which will hold their readers fast to the very end. — Graphic. 

A better told and more marvellous narrative of a real life was never put 
into the covers of a small octavo volume. — To-Day. 

As fascinating as any romance. . . . The book is of the most entranc- 
ing interest. — St. Jameses Budget, 

Those who love stories of adventure will find a volume to their taste in 
the " Life and Adventures of John Gladwyn Jebb," just published, and to 
which an introduction is furnished by Rider Haggard. The latter says 
that rarely, if ever, in this nineteenth century, has a man lived so strange 
and varied an existence as did Mr. Jebb. From the time that he came to 
manhood he was a wanderer ; and how he survived the many perils of his 
daily life is certainly a mystery. . . . The strange and remarkable adven- 
tures of which we have an account in this volume were in Guatemala, Brazil, 
in our own far West with the Indians on the plains, in mining camps in 
Colorado and California, in Texas, in Cuba and Mexico, where occurred 
the search for Montezuma's, or rather Guatemoc's treasure, to which Mr. 
Haggard believes that Mr. Jebb held the key, but which through his death 
is now forever lost. The story is one of thrilling interest from beginning 
to end, the story of a born adventurer, unselfish, sanguine, romantic, of a 
man too mystical and poetic in his nature for this prosaic nineteenth cen- 
tury, but who, as a crusader or a knight errant, would have won distinguished 
success. The volume is a notable addition to the literature of adventure. 
— Boston Advertiser. 



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POOR FOLK. 

Translated from the Russian of Fedor Dostoievsky, by 
Lena Milman, with decorative titlepage and a criti- 
cal introduction by George Moore. American 
Copyright edition. 

16mo. Cloth. $1,00. 



A capable critic writes : *' One of the most beautiful, touching stories I have 
read. The character of the old clerk is a masterpiece, a kind of Russian Charles 
Lamb. He reminds me, too, of Anatole France's * Sylvestre Bonnard,' but it 
is a more poignant, moving figure- How wonderfully, too, the sad little strokes 
of humor are blended into the pathos in his characterization, and how fascinating 
all the naive self-revelations of his poverty become, — all his many ups and downs 
and hopes and fears. His unsuccessful visit to the money-lender, his despair at the 
office, unexpectedly ending in a sudden burst of good fortune, the final despair- 
ing cry of his love for Varvara, — these hold one breathless One can hardly 
read them without tears. . . . But there is no need to say all that could be said 
about the book. It is enough to say that it is over powerful and beautiful." 

We are glad to welcome a good translation of the Russian Dostoievsky's 
story " Poor Folk," Englished by Lena Milman. It is a tale of unrequited love, 
conducted in the form of letters written between a poor clerk and his girl cousm 
whom he devotedly loves, and who finally leaves him to marry a man not admir- 
able in character who, the reader feels, will not make her happy. The pathos of 
the book centres in the clerk, Makar's, unselfish affection and his heart-break at 
being left lonesome by his charming kinswoman whose epistles have been his one 
solace. In the conductment of the story, realistic sketches of middle class Rus- 
sian life are given, heightening the effect of the denoument. George Moore writes 
a sparkling introduction to the book. — Hartford Courant. 

Dostoievsky is a great artist. " Poor Folk " is a great novel. — Boston 
Advertiser. 

It is a most beautiful and touching story, and will linger in the mind long 
after the book is closed. The pathos is blended with touching bits of humor, 
that are even pathetic in themselves. — Boston Times. 

Notwithstanding that "Poor Folk" is told in that most exasperating and 
entirely unreal style — by letters— it is complete in sequence, and the interest 
does not flag as the various phases in the sordid life of the two characters are 
developed. The theme is intensely pathetic and truly human, while its treat* 
ment is exceedingly artistic. The translator, Lena Milman, seems to have well 
preserved the spirit of the original — Cambridge Tribune. 



ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers, 

BOSTON, MASS. 



KEYNOTES. 

2i l^olume of ^toxite^ 

By George Egerton. With titlepage by Aubreip 
Beardsley. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $i.oo. 



Not since " The Story of an African Farm" was written has any woman de- 
livered herself of so strong, so forcible a book. — Queen- 

Knotty questions in sex problems are dealt with in these brief sketches. They 
are treated boldly, fearlessly, perhaps we may say forcefully, with a deep plunge 
into the realities of life. The colors are laid in masses on the canvas, while 
passions, temperaments, and sudden, subtle analyses take form under the quick, 
sharp stroke. Though they contain a vein of coarseness and touch slightly upon 
tabooed subjects, they evidence power and thought — Public Opinion, 

Indeed, we do not hesitate to say that " Keynotes" is the strongest volume 
of short stories that the year has produced. Further, we would wager a good 
deal, were it necessary, that George Egerton is a nom-de-plume, and of a woman, 
too. Why is it that so many women hide beneath a man^s name when they enter 
the field of authorship? And in this case it seems doubly foolish, the work is so 
intensely strong. . . . 

The chief characters of these stories are women, and women drawn as only a 
woman can draw word-pictures of her own sex. The subtlety .of analysis is 
wonderful, direct in its effectiveness, unerring in its truth, and stirring in its reveal- 
ing power. Truly, no one but a woman could thus throw the light of revelation 
upon her own sex. Man does not understand woman as does the author of 
" Keynotes." 

The vitality of the stories, too, is remarkable. Life, very real life, is pictured ; 
life full of joys and sorrows, happinesses and heartbreaks, courage and self-sacrifice ; 
of self-abnegation, of struggle, of victory. The characters are intense, yet not 
overdrawn ; the experiences are dramatic, in one sense or another, and yet are 
never hyper-emotional. And all is told with a power of concentration that is 
simply astonishing. A sentence does duty for a chapter, a paragraph for a picture 
of years of experience. 

Indeed, for vigor, originality, forcefulness of expression, and completeness of 
character presentation,. '* Keynotes" surpasses any recent volume of short fiction 
that we can recall. — TimeSf Boston. 

It brings a new quality and a striking new force into the literature of the 
hour. — The Speaker. 

The mind that conceived " Keynotes " is so strong and original that one will 
look with deep interest for the successors of this first bbok, at once powerful and 
appeal ingly feminine. — Irish Independent. 



Sold by all booksellers. Mailed^ post-paid^ on receipt 
^f price by the Publishers^ 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston, Mass. 



ROBERT LODIS STEVENSON'S WORKS. 



TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES. 

With a Frontispiece Illustration by Walter Crane. (Paper 
cover, 50 cents.) i6mo. jj^i.oo. 

Mr. Stevenson's journey in the C^vennes gage.^ He was deplorably ignorant, neither 

is a bright and amusing book for summer knowing how to pack his load nor drive his 

reading. The author set out alone, on donkey; and his early experience forms a 

foot, for a twelve days' journey over the ridiculous record of disaster. — Providence 

mountains, with a donkey to carry his lug- Journal. 

AN INLAND VOYAGE. i6mo. $1.00. 

Unlike Captain Macgregor, of " Rob that furnishes some of the pleasantest pas- 
Roy " fame, Mr. Stevenson does not make sa^es of the book. ... In a modest and 
canoeing itself his main theme, but de- quiet way, Mr. Stevenson's book is one of 
lights in charming bits of description that, the very best of the year for summer read- 
in their close attention to picturesque ing. Ihe volume has a very neat desien 
detail, remind one of the work of a skilled for the cover, with a fanciful picture of the 
"genre" painter. Nor does he hesitate, "Arethusa" and "Cigarette," the canoes 
from time to time, to diverge altogether of the author and his companion. — Good 
from his immediate subject, and to indulge Literature. 
in a strain of gently humorous reflection 

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS. With a Frontispiece 
by Walter Crane. i6mo. ;|ii.oo. 

Mr. Stevenson is an invalid, and in graphic style and keen observation of the 

search of health he went to Mount Saint author. He has the power of describing 

Helena, in Californiai and hi^h up ia its places and characters with such vividness 

sides took possession of a mmer's cabin that you seem to have made personal 

fast falling to ruin, — one of the few rem- acquamtance with both . . . Mr. Steven- 

nants of the abandoned mining village of son's racy narrative brings many phases of 

Silverado. There, with his wife and a life upon the western coast before one uith 

single servant, considerable time was spent, striking power and captivating grace. — 

The interest of the book centred in the New York World. 

TREASURE ISLAND. A Story of Pirates and the Spanish 

Main. With 28 Illustrations. i2mo. (Paper covers, 50 cents.) 
$1.25. Cheaper edition. i6mo. $1.00. 

At a time when the books of Mayne details the stirring adventures of an Eng- 
Reid, Ballantyne, and Kingston are taking lish crew in their search for the immense 
their places on the shelves to which well- treasure secreted by a pirate captain, and 
thumbed volumes are relegated, it will be it certainly has not a dull page in it- Yet 
with especial delight that boy readers wel- the author has contrived to keep the sym* 
come a new writer in the literature of ad- pathy on the side of virtue and honestj*, 
venture. In "Treasure Island," Robert and throw upon the pirates that odium and 
Louis Stevenson takes a new departure, detestation which their nefarious courses 
and writes one of the jolliest, most read- deserve ; and the book is one heartily to 
able, wide-awake tales of sea life that have be commended to any sturdy, wholesome 
set the blood tingling in the veins of the lad who is fond of the smell of the brine 
boys of at least the present generation. ^ It and the tang of sailor speech in his read- 
is decidedly of the exciting order of stories, ing. — Boston Courier. 
yet not of the unhealthily sensational. It 

PRINCE OTTO. A Romance. i6mo. ;?i.oo. 

Whatever Mr. Stevenson writes is sure is so charming in every page this author 

to be interesting and even absorbing ; and has published, and so unhackneyed that 

to this ** Prince Otto" is no exception. It one knows not what to expect from any 

is a graceful and unusual romance, full of one paragraph to the next. — Boston 

surprises, full of that individuality which Courier. 

Sold everywhere. Postpaid by Publishers^ 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



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