that woman brings a loftier reverence to the shrine of man than she has done in any past age, seeing, as she now does, in him the incarnation of the freedom of which she is vaguely conscious and which she is perceptibly acquiring.  So sets the main current that is bearing civilization along; but beneath the great feminine tide there is an undercurrent of hatred and revolt.  This is particularly observable in the leaders of the movement; women who in the tumult of their aspirations, and their passionate yearnings towards the new ideal, and the memory of the abasement their sex have been in the past, and are still being in the present, subjected to, forget the laws of life, and with virulent virtue and protest condemn love—­that is to say, love in the sense of sexual intercourse—­and proclaim a higher mission for woman than to be the mother of men:  and an adjuvant, unless corrected by sanative qualities of a high order, is, of course, found in any physical defect.  But as the corporeal and incorporeal hereditaments of Alice Barton and Lady Cecilia Cullen were examined fully in the beginning of this chapter, it is only necessary to here indicate the order of ideas—­the moral atmosphere of the time—­to understand the efflorescence of the two minds, and to realize how curiously representative they are of this last quarter of the nineteenth century.

And it was necessary to make that survey of psychical cause and effect to appreciate the sentiments that actuated Alice in her relationship with Harding.  She loved him, but more through the imagination than the heart.  She knew he was deceiving her, but to her he meant so much that she had not the force of will to cast him off, and abandoned herself to the intellectual sensualism of his society.  It was this, and nothing more.  What her love might have been it is not necessary to analyze; in the present circumstances, it was completely merged in the knowledge that he was to her, light, freedom, and instruction, and that when he left, darkness and ignorance would again close in upon her.  They had not spoken for some moments.  With a cruelty that was peculiar to him, he waited for her to break the silence.

‘I am sorry you are going away; I am afraid we shall never meet again.’

‘Oh yes, we shall,’ he replied:  ’you’ll get married one of these days and come to live in London.’

‘Why should I go to live in London?’

’There are Frenchmen born in England, Englishmen born in France.  Heine was a Frenchman born in Germany—­and you are a Kensingtonian.  I see nothing Irish in you.  Oh, you are very Kensington, and therefore you will—­I do not know when or how, but assuredly as a stream goes to the river and the river to the sea, you will drift to your native place—­Kensington.  But do you know that I have left the hotel?  There were too many people about to do much work, so I took rooms in Molesworth Street—­there I can write and read undisturbed.  You might come and see me.’