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 outlook 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

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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, Herminia 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

appreciating the conscientious reasons which had led her,

Iphigenia-like, to her self-imposed sacrifice.

But, for all that, she wrote her letter through, delicately,

sweetly, with feminine tact and feminine reticence. She told 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 misguided 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 rudimentary

fragment of such a central vascular organ, fairly cried over the

poor girl's letter with sympathetic shame, and remorse, and

vexation. 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 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 profoundest

conviction of its eternal rightness cannot 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 injustices. 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 mankind 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 freedom 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

somewhat 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."




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