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
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."