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.




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