 CHAPTER XIII It was a changed London to which Herminia returned. She was homeless, penniless, friendless. Above all, she was de classe. The world that had known her now knew her no more. Men 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 recognising 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 hunting, she found at last she could only get lodgings 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 suppose she was really a widow. Woe unto you, scribes and hypocrites! In all Christian London, Mrs Barton and her baby could never have found a respectable room in which to lay their heads. So she yielded to the inevitable, and took two tiny attics in a small street off the edge where rode 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 her many as indomitable energy rode down all obstacles. Teaching, of course, was now quite out of the question. Though English parent could entrust the education of his daughters to the hand of a woman who has dared and suffered much, for conscience's sake, in the cause of freedom for herself and her sisters. But even before her manyer 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 sympathise and fraternise with her. To be sure they didn't ask the free woman 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 escaped the leprous taint of that national moral blight that calls itself respectability. In a slow and tentative way, then, Herminia crept back into unrecognised 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. Herminia sufficed her. Her terrible widowhood, too, was rendered less terrible to her by the care of her little one. Babbling 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 childbearing. Herminia was far removed indeed from that blatant 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 realisation 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 civilised communities. As she was, she still pitted the unhappy beings doomed to the cramped life and dwarfed heart of the old maid. Pitted them as sincerely as she despised those unhealthy souls who would make of celibacy, wedded or unwedded, a sort of anti-natural religion for women. Alan's death, however, had left her Minniers' 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 emancipated. While others must say, with a great sum obtained I this freedom, Dolores could answer with Paul, but I was free-born. That was no mean heritage. Gradually her Minnier 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 unspeakable sin of having struck a righteous blow in the interest of women. And day by day, as months and years went on, her Minnier 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, respectability would not have allowed her to perform that Christian act in open daylight, and sit for an hour or two with her dear misguided Minnier. Miss Smith Waters prayed nightly for her Minniers' conversion, yet not without an uncomfortable suspicion, after all, that her Minnier had very little indeed to be converted from. Other people also got to know her by degrees, an editor's wife, a kind literary hostess, some socialistic ladies who liked to be advanced, a friendly family or two of the Bohemian literary or artistic pattern. Among them her Minnier learned to be as happy in time as she could ever again be, now she had lost her alum. She was Mrs Barton to them all, that lie she found it practically impossible to fight against. Even the Bohemians refused to let their children ask after Miss Barton's baby. So wrapped 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, her Minnier found pleasure 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 interrelations of everyday existence. So her Minnier, like the rest, wrote her own pet novel. By the time her baby was eighteen months old she had finished it. It was blankly pessimistic, of course. Blank pessimism is the one creed possible for all safe 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 lines, 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 pessimistic. Herminia's romance was something more than that. It was the despairing heart cry of a soul in revolt. It embodied the experiences and beliefs and sentiments of a martyred 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 generosity 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 Edgware 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 recklessly 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 all favourable. 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 medieval relic. "'Let us begin by admitting,' said the spectatorial scribe, that Miss Montague's book, she had published it under a pseudonym, is a work of genius. Much as we dislike its whole tone, and still more its conclusions, 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 misplaced genius. If he had said no more, Herminia would have been amply satisfied. To be called morbid by the spectator is a sufficient proof that you have hid 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 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 spectator had noticed it because of its manifest earnestness and sincerity. Although the spectator is always on the side of the lie and the wrong, it is earnest and sincere, and has a genuine 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 her many abartened literary aspirations. She had given the people of her best, and the people rejected it. Now she 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 antigony for the use of ladies' schools still holds its own at Gerton and Somerville. CHAPTER 14 I do not propose to dwell at any lengths upon the next ten or twelve years of her many abartened'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 abartened's 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, her mignia happened to pass a church door in Marilybone, where a red-lettered placard was pronounced in bold type, that the very reverence 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 mignia 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-beaten pine. In spite of his three-score years and ten, his clear-cut face shone thoughtful and striking and earnest as ever. He was preaching 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 her mignia 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 was 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. She pressed forward to speak to him. The Dean, all benignity, bent his head to listen. Father! her mignia 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. Youth 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 mate or dolerosa, not the round-faced beauty of the fresh young girl who had gone forth rejoicing some ten years earlier from the Deenery at Dunwich to the lecture-rooms at Gerton. For a moment the Dean stared hard at her. Then with a burst of recognition he uttered aghast the one word, Her mignia! Father! her mignia answered in a tremulous 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! her mignia made answer, lingering lovingly on the word. I have nothing to repent 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 her mignia 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. Let us bring these mitigations of our first fierce outbursts. Who is that grand old gentleman? The child asked in an awestruck voice. And her mignia, clasping her daughter to her breast, answered with a stifled sob. That was your grandpa, Dolly. That was my father. My father. The child put no more questions just then, as is the won't 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 mama should have to live by themselves in such scrubby little lodgings. Also why her grandpa, 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 hadn't been for that unfortunate episode about his daughter and young Merrick. Her was only once mentioned in his will, and even then merely to implore the divine forgiveness for her. She wept over that, sadly. She didn't want the girl's money. She was better able to take care of herself than Elsie and Irmintude. 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 narrowly. Her own life was done. Alan's death 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 anonymous 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. 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 turnout as this one was rare in their neighbourhood. She paused and stared hard at it. "'Who's is it, Mrs. Beaks?' she asked, awestruck 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. Beaks knew it well. "'It's a Antony Merricks,' she answered, in that peculiarly hushed voice with which the English poor always uttered the names of the 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-indulgence. Dolly put one fat finger to her lip, and elevated her eyebrows, and looked grave at once. "'Sir Antony Merrick, what a very grand gentleman he must be indeed, and how nice it must seem to be able to drive in so distinguished a vehicle with a liveried footman!' As she paused and looked, lost in enjoyment of that beatific vision, Sir Antony 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 trajans on an aureus. Dolly thought that was just how so grand a gentleman ought to look, and so thinking she glanced up at him, and with a flash of her white teeth smiled her childish approval. The austere old gentleman unwontedly softened by that cherub face, for indeed she was as winsome as a baby angel of rafales, 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. "'Delores Barton!' Sir Antony 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 patience. "'You may take your oath on it, Mr. Wells. That little and there was Mr. Allen'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 gentleman in a very fine carriage, had given a gold piece to her. Old 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 eons 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 relenting 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 doctor called a few days later at Herminia's lodgings, and having first ascertained that Herminia herself was out, had five minutes' conversation alone with her landlady. There were times, no doubt, when Mrs Barton 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 landlady, good, loyal soul, dimmered to that suggestion. 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, unsuspected watch, over Mrs Barton's necessities. She desired, in point of fact, if need were, to relieve them. Mrs Barton was distantly connected with relations of his own, and his notion was that, without seeming to help her in obtrusive 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 a fusion under pressure of hard cash to exceed to Sir Anthony's benevolent wishes. The more so as she'd do anything to serve dear Mrs Barton, who was always in everything a perfect lady, most independent, in fact, one of the kinders wouldn't be beholden to anybody for a farthing. Some months passed away before the landlady had cause to report to Sir Anthony, but during the worst depths of the next London winter, when grey fog gathered thick in the perlews of Marleybone, 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 Dolly 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 illustrated paper passed on to a substitute. Blank poverty stared her in the face, inevitable. When it came to pawning the typewriter, as the landlady reported, Sir Anthony smiled a grim smile to himself. The moment for action had now arrived. He would put on pressure to get away poor Alan's illegitimate child from that dreadful woman. Next day he called. Dolly was dangerously ill. So ill that Herminia couldn'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 hapenies 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'll 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 granddaughter, well taught, well kept, and you may see her every six months for a fortnight's visit. 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 couldn't dream of accepting it. But like a flash it went through her brain how many advantages Dolly could enjoy in that wealthy household that the hard-working journalist could not possibly afford her. She thought of the unpaid bills, the empty cupboard, the wolf at the door, the blank outlook 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 discharge 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 honour 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 Herminia answered with a bow. Yes, final, quite final. Sir Anthony bent his head and left. Herminia 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 distracted mother could not pause or rest. Dolly tossed and turned in her sleep, and Herminia sat watching her. She pined for sympathy. Her vague ancestral yearnings, gathering head within 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 overraught feelings found vent in verse. She seized a pencil from her desk, and sitting by Dolly's side, wrote down her heartfelt 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. CHAPTER 16 A change came at last when Dolly was ten years old. Among the men of whom her many a saw most in these later days were the little group of advanced London socialists who called themselves the Fabians, and among her Fabian friends one of the most active, the most eager, the most individual, was Harvey Kiniston. He was a younger man by many years than poor Alan had been, about her many a's own age. A brilliant economist 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 depths 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 taking 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. It is a common case. Have you ever noticed that if you meet a woman famous for her connection with some absorbing grief, some historic 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 contemplation of her own tragic fate, wrapped up in those she has lost, like the mourners in a pietà. 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 contemplation 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 Kineston was afraid to let her many a 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. Gradually, however, as he saw more and more of her, it began to strike him that her many a was still in all essentials a woman. His own 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 one. She set to work in earnest, to woo and win her. As for her many a, 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 themselves 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 Kiniston 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 world in the country together. The menu 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 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 Hazelmere 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 loneliest turn of the track where two purple glens divide, Harvey Kiniston seated himself on the soft bed of Ling. Herminia sank by his side, and Dolly, after a while, not understanding their conversation, ended off by herself a little way afield in search of hair-bells 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 Gore's wings in the hollows. Harvey Kiniston looked on Herminia'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 reverently the same question that Alan had asked her so long ago on the home-wood. 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 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 replied, 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 principles. 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 Siri, 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 Lord 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 lent forward appealingly. For the love's sake I bear you, I hope you will consent to it. His voice was low and tender. Herminia, sick at heart with that long, fierce struggle against overwhelming odds, could almost have said yes to him. 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 almost feel tempted to give way to this martinous summer of love, to stultify my past by unsame and undoing everything. For I love you, Harvey. If I were to give way now, as George Elliot gave way, as almost every woman who once tried to live a free life for her sister's 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 not, 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 wouldn't marry your father in my youth for honours' sake, but I have consented in middle life to sell my sister's 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? Oh, no, dear Harvey, I can't do that. Some sense of personal 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 Kiniston 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. The man hesitated a moment. Then he began to plead hard for reconsideration. But herminia'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 everything. No, no, she said firmly, over and over again. You must take me my own way, or you must go without me. And Harvey Kiniston couldn'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 answered, with a light touch of her hand. Harvey, 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 Hindhead, as usual, next Sunday. Thank you," the man answered. Herminia, 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 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 because 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 loyal friends, no more, one to the other. End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 of The Woman Who Did This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Ruth Golding. The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen Chapter 17 And yet our herminia was a woman after all. Some three years later, when Harvey Kinneson 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 instincts, which have wrought more harm in the world we live in than fire or sword or pestilence or tempest, hardly die at all as yet in a few good men, and die fighting 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, 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 injustice 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 children 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. 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 calabans. We must begin to be human. Patriotism is one of the 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. And 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 unoccupied territory against the equal right of all other peoples. My power to oppress all weaker nationalities, all inferior races. It never means or can mean anything good or true. For if a cause be just like Ireland's or one's Italy's, then it is a good man's duty to espouse it with warmth, be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad, then it is a good man's duty to oppose it to sent 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 member 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. The 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 sought in a righteous man's eyes, is accounted by most men both wicked and foolish. Then comes the monopolist instinct of property. That on the face of it is a baser and more sordid one. While patriotism at least can lay claim to some sort of delusive expansiveness 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 inter-civic war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fair face of our common country with its antisocial notice-boards, trespassers will be prosecuted. 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 enjoyment. The grass on the world 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 waterfalls leap white from the ledge in the glen, avant their 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 monopolise 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 my 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 impartial egoism. Man and coal shall lie in the hollow of my hand. I will enrich myself by 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 outlive. And those who are incapable about living it of themselves must be taught by stern lessons, as in the splendid uprising of the spirit of man in France, that their race has outstripped them. Next comes the monopoly of human life, the hideous wrong of slavery. That thank goodness is now gone. To us 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 satisfaction 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 heart 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 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 grimest, the most vindictive. She is not yours, says the moral philosopher of the new dispensation. She is her own, release her. The Turk hails his offending slave, sews her up in a sack and casts her quick into the eddying Bosphorus. The Christian Englishman, with more lingering torture, sets spies on her life, drags what he thinks her shame before a prying court, and divorces her with contumely. All this is monopoly and essentially slavery. Mankind must outlive it on its way up to civilisation. And then the woman, thus taught by her lords, has begun to retort in these latter days by endeavouring 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. Then shall henceforth be the equals of men, not by levelling down, but by levelling up, not by fettering the man, but by elevating, emancipating, unshackling the woman. All this Herminia knew well. All these things she turned over in her mind by herself, on the evening of the day when Harvey Kiniston came to tell her of his approaching marriage. Why, then, did she feel it to some extent a disappointment? Why so flat at his happiness? Partly she said to herself, because it is difficult to live down in a single generation the jealousies 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 different. Affection would have been free. Her yearnings for sympathy would have been filled to the full by Harvey Kiniston 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 dollies, she never let Harvey Kiniston or his wife suspect it. As long as she lived, she was a true and earnest friend at all times to both of them. Meanwhile Dolores was growing up to woman's estate, and she was growing into a tall, a graceful and exquisitely beautiful woman. Yet in some ways her many a had reason to be dissatisfied with her daughter's development. Day by day she watched for signs of the expected apostolate. Was Dolores pressing forward 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, her many a began to perceive that the child of so many hopes, of so many aspirations, the child predestined to regenerate humanity was thinking for herself in a retrograde direction. As well as it seemed to her Minia, in the daughter of such a father and such a mother, Dolores's 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 effort of atavism. She had reverted to lower types. She had thrown back to the Philistine. Heredity of mental and moral qualities is of precarious matter. These things lie, as it were, on the topmost plain 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 remember 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. However 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 lodgings any but the freest and most rational ideas, yet she herself seemed to hark back of internal congruity to the lower and vulgarer moral plain of her remota ancestry. She showed her individuality only by evolving for herself all the threadbare platitudes of ordinary convention. 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 land-blade these 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 Hermione's attic. She accepted the beliefs and opinions of her school fellows because they were natural and congenial to her character. In short, she had what the world calls common sense. She revolted 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, Hermione noticed with a certain tender but shrinking regret that Dolly seemed to attach undue importance to the mere upholsteries and equipages of life, to rank wealth, title, servants, carriages, jewellery. At first to be sure Hermione 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, but Dolly's whole mind was incurably and congenitally aristocratic or snobbish. She had that mean admiration for birth, position, adventitious advantages, 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 Hermione 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 her manyer 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 freedom 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. Bitterer trials remained. Hermione had acted through life to a great extent with the idea ever 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 daughter 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 position 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. Hermione had done her best to prepare, at times, for this inevitable result by setting 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 influence to any appreciable extent the moral ideas and impulses of their children. These things have their springs in the bases of character, 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. Dolly, when Dolly was a toddling little mite and met her mother's father in the church in Marlborough, it had struck her as odd that while they themselves were so poor and ill-clad, her grand-papa should be such a grand old gentleman of such a dignified aspect. As she grew older and older, and began to understand a little more the world she lived in, she wondered yet more profoundly how it could happen if her grand-papa was indeed the very reverend the dean of Dunnidge, that her mama should be an outcast from her father's church and scarcely well seen in the best carriage company. 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 couldn't 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 prebundary of old serum, while the other she saw gazetted as a kernel of artillery, and should be totally ignored by her mother's sister, Irmintrude, who lolled in a land orc 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 Mamar 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 particular religious ideas the subject didn't interest her, and besides she thought the New Testament talked about rich and poor in much the same unpractical nebulous way that Mamar 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 couldn't understand why a person like Mamar should cut herself off consumatiously from the rest of the world by presuming to disbelieve a body of doctrine which so many rich and well-gated 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 grandfather's name had been like her own Barton. Did you marry your cousin, Mamar? She asked Herminia one day quite suddenly. And Herminia, flushing scarlet at the unexpected question, the first with which Dolly had yet ventured to approach that dangerous quicksand, replied with a deadly thrill. No, my darling, why do you ask me? Because, Dolly answered, abashed, I just wanted to know why your name should be Barton, the same as poor grandpa's. Herminia didn'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 discussion for the present, but the episode only 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 recommendation, 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 rumours about her mother as a most equivocal person, who didn't accept all the current superstitions, and were curious to ask her questions as to her family and antecedents. Crimson, with shame, Dolly parried such inquiries 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 shame-facedness of a budding girl in prying into her mother's most domestic secrets prevented Dolores from asking her many a Sunday point blank all about it. But she was gradually becoming aware that some strange atmosphere of doubt surrounded her births and her mother's history. Dolores filled her with sensitive fears and self-conscious hesitations. And if the truth must be told, Dolly never really returned her mother's profound affection. 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 her mania with a smoldering 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, an eclipped French poodle like Aunt Ermin Trude'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. CHAPTER 19 When Dolly was seventeen, a pink, wild rose just unrolling its petals, a very great event occurred in her history. She received an invitation 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 anticipation. 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 revolutionising 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 pilgrimages almost every Sunday in spring or autumn to Leith Hill or Maple Durham. She had even strained her scanty resources to the utmost to afford Dolly an occasional outing in the Ardennes or 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 Marilybone Day School were two West Country girls, private boarders of the headmistresses, who came from the neighbourhood of Coomneville in Dorset. Their name was Compson, and their father was rector of their native village, Upcom. 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 vicant. 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 rectorate 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 honour. The preparations for that visit cost Dolly some weeks of thought and effort. The occasion demanded it. She was afraid she had no frocks good enough for such a grand house as the Compsons. Grand was indeed a favourite epithet of Dolly's. She applied it impartially 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 something remote and unapproachable yet to be earnestly striven after with all the forces at her disposal. Even Herminia herself stretched a point in favour 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 luxury. 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 birthplace, that the mother's full 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 unfolding figure. Tall, lissom, supple, clear of limb and light of footstep, she was indeed a girl any mother might have been proud of. On the days 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-grey 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. It 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, and she went off so blisly to visit these unknown friends away down in Dorseture. 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 Compson's 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 from the first the grandeur did not in the least incomode her. On the contrary, she enjoyed it. She felt forthwith she was to the manna-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 Mama's ridiculous fancies. Mama was so faddy. Before Dolly had spent three whole days at the rectory, she talked just as the Compson's did. She picked up, by pure instinct, the territorial slang 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 the society of the benefist clergy. But even that did not exhaust the charm of Upcom 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 young fellow named Walter Bridges, the stepson and ward of a neighbouring parson. How you talked with him at tennis today! 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 Kilm Mary. Winnie answered with a nod. Mr. Hawkshaw's the vicar there, till Mamar's nephew is ready to take the living, what they call a warming pan. But Walter Bridges is Mrs. Hawkshaw's son by her first husband. Old Mr. Bridges was the squire of Kilm 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 night-gun. And Winnie courted her meaning with the preternatural sharpness 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 Bridges was well off. Walter Bridges was handsome. Walter Bridges had all the glamour of a landed estate and an Oxford education. He was a young Greek god in a Norfolk shooting jacket. Moreover, he was a really good and pleasant young fellow. What wonder, therefore, if before a week was out, Dolly was very rarely and seriously in love with him? And what wonder if Walter Bridges, in turn, caught by that maid and glance, was in love with Dolly? He had every excuse for she was lithe and beautiful and a joyous companion, besides being, as the ladies made justly remarked, a perfect lady. One day, after Dolly had been a fortnight at Upcomb, the Compsons gave a picnic in the wild-coum undercliff. To the broken wall of chalk, tumbled picturesquely about in huge shattered masses, and deliciously overgrown with ferns and blackthorn and golden clusters of close-creeping rock-rows. Macy paths thread tangled labyrinths of fallen rock, or whined round tall clumps of hollybush and bramble. They lighted their fire under the lee of one such buttress of broken cliff, whose summit was festooned with long sprays of clematis, or old man's beard, as the common West Country name expressively phrases it. Thistle down hovered on the basking air. There they sat and drank their tea, couched on beds of fern, or propped fern 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, unspide, one another's society. Dolly and Walter Bridges strolled off by themselves towards the rocky shore. There Walter showed her where a brook bubbled clear from the fountain-head. By its brink blue Veronica's grew, and tall yellow loose strife, and tassled purple heads of great English yuppetry. 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 as scants at her. Dolly glanced down and drew back suddenly. "'Oh, poor little things!' she cried with a quick droop of her long lashes. "'I wasn'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 waterlily, 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 timorousness. "'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 inquired, 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, 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 might, in time,' she answered very slowly. "'Then you will be mine, mine, mine,' Walter cried in an ecstasy. Dolly bent her pretty head in reluctant ascent 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 Bridges 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. CHAPTER XX From that day forth it was understood at Upcombe that Dolly Barton was informally engaged to Walter Bridges. 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 didn't wish to write on the subject to her miniature. Would Mimar go and spoil it all, she wondered. It would be just like her. The remaining week of her stay at the rectory 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 splendour danced hourly day and night before her dazzled eyes. Not masks of magnificence, county balls, garden parties, it was heaven to Dolly. She was going to be grander than her grandest daydream. Walter took her across one afternoon to Coombe Mary, and introduced her in due form to his mother and his stepfather, 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 Coombe 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. It was the ideal crystallised. Rooks cored 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 happiness 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 Dorseture, Walter came round to see her. Mrs. Compson and the girls managed to keep discreetly out of the young people's way. The rector 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 themselves, from eight to ten, in the rectory drawing-room. In the first moment of Walter's entry Dolly was dimly aware, woman-like, of something amiss, something altered in his manner. Not indeed that her lover was less affectionate or less tender than usual, if anything he seemed rather morso, but his talk was embarrassed, preoccupied, spasmodic. He spoke by fits and starts, and seemed to hold back something. Dolly taxed him with it at last. Walter tried to put it off upon her approaching departure, but he was an honest young man, and so bad an actor that Dolly, with her keen feminine intuitions, at once detected him. "'It'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 colour changed at once. He was a man, and therefore but a poor dissembler. "'Well, nothing very much,' he admitted awkwardly. 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 now what it is. I can bear to hear it.'" The young man hesitated. "'Only it's something my stepfather heard from a friend last night,' he replied, floundering deeper and deeper. "'Nothing at all about you, darling. Only, well, about your family.'" Walter'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 promise, to marry me?' She cried aloud in her despair. Heaven faded before her eyes. What evil trick could Mamar have played her? As she stood there that moment, proud, crimson, breathless, Walter Bridges would have married her if her father had been a tinker and her mother a gypsy girl. He drew her toward him tenderly. "'No, darling,' he cried, kissing her, for he was a chivalrous young man, as he understood chivalry, and to him it was indeed a most 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, your 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, shrinking. "'I don't know what it is. I don't know what it means. But till I've gone home to London and asked about it from mother—'Oh, Walter, we too 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. One thing of her manyer 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 fingertips with shame and modesty, she rushed from his presence up to her own dark bedroom. End of Chapter 20