Poor Miss Smith-Waters laid down that astonishing, that incredible
letter in a perfect whirl of amazement and stupefaction. She didn'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 venture
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 constituted
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 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 lodging; 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 by its own vulgar
standard (as did also Belgravia). Most low minds, indeed, imagine
absolute 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.