Alan Merrick strode from his father's door that day stung with a

burning sense of wrong and injustice. More than ever before in

his life he realized to himself the abject hollowness of that

conventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system of

morals. If he had continued to "live single" as we hypocritically

phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social

canker of prostitution, on which as basis, like some mediaeval

castle on its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstructure of our

outwardly decent modern society is reared, his father no doubt

would have shrugged his shoulders and blinked his cold eyes, and

commended the wise young man for abstaining from marriage till his

means could permit him to keep a wife of his own class in the way

she was accustomed to. The wretched victims of that vile system

might die unseen and unpitied in some hideous back slum, without

touching one chord of remorse or regret in Dr. Merrick's nature.

He was steeled against their suffering. Or again, if Alan had sold

his virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel

Waterton--had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in a

loveless marriage, his father would not only have gladly

acquiesced, but would have congratulated his son on his luck and

his prudence. Yet, because Alan had chosen rather to form a

blameless union of pure affection with a woman who was in every way

his moral and mental superior, but in despite of the conventional

ban of society, Dr. Merrick had cast him off as an open reprobate.

And why? Simply because that union was unsanctioned by the

exponents of a law they despised, and unblessed by the priests of a

creed they rejected. Alan saw at once it is not the intrinsic

moral value of an act such people think about, but the light in

which it is regarded by a selfish society.

Unchastity, it has been well said, is union without love; and Alan

would have none of it.

He went back to Herminia more than ever convinced of that spotless

woman's moral superiority to every one else he had ever met with.

She sat, a lonely soul, enthroned amid the halo of her own perfect

purity. To Alan, she seemed like one of those early Italian

Madonnas, lost in a glory of light that surrounds and half hides

them. He reverenced her far too much to tell her all that had

happened. How could he wound those sweet ears with his father's

coarse epithets?

They took the club train that afternoon to Paris. There they slept

the night in a fusty hotel near the Gare du Nord, and went on in

the morning by the daylight express to Switzerland. At Lucerne and

Milan they broke the journey once more. Herminia had never yet

gone further afield from England than Paris; and this first glimpse

of a wider world was intensely interesting to her. Who can help

being pleased, indeed, with that wonderful St. Gothard--the crystal

green Reuss shattering itself in white spray into emerald pools by

the side of the railway; Wasen church perched high upon its

solitary hilltop; the Biaschina ravine, the cleft rocks of Faido,

the serpentine twists and turns of the ramping line as it mounts or

descends its spiral zigzags? Dewy Alpine pasture, tossed masses of

land-slip, white narcissus on the banks, snowy peaks in the

background--all alike were fresh visions of delight to Herminia;

and she drank it all in with the pure childish joy of a poetic

nature. It was the Switzerland of her dreams, reinforced and

complemented by unsuspected detail.




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