and purely, the man any one of you would willingly have seen offering himself in lawful marriage to your own daughters.  If I would, I might go the beaten way you prescribe, and marry him legally.  But of my own free will I disdain that degradation; I choose rather to be free.  No fear of your scorn, no dread of your bigotry, no shrinking at your cruelty, shall prevent me from following the thorny path I know to be the right one.  I seek no temporal end.  I will not prove false to the future of my kind in order to protect myself from your hateful indignities.  I know on what vile foundations your temple of wedlock is based and built, what pitiable victims languish and die in its sickening vaults; and I will not consent to enter it.  Here, of my own free will, I take my stand for the right, and refuse your sanctions!  No woman that I know of has ever yet done that.  Other women have fallen, as men choose to put it in their odious dialect; no other has voluntarily risen as I propose to do.’” She paused a moment for breath.  “Now you know how I feel,” she continued, looking straight into his eyes.  “Say no more at present; it is wisest so.  But go home and think it out, and talk it over with me tomorrow.”

IV.

That night Alan slept little.  Even at dinner his hostess, Mrs. Waterton, noticed his preoccupation; and, on the pretext of a headache, he retired early to his own bedroom.  His mind was full of Herminia and these strange ideas of hers; how could he listen with a becoming show of interest to Ethel Waterton’s aspirations on the grand piano after a gipsy life,—­oh, a gipsy life for her!—­ when in point of fact she was a most insipid blonde from the cover of a chocolate box?  So he went to bed betimes, and there lay long awake, deep wondering to himself how to act about Herminia.

He was really in love with her.  That much he acknowledged frankly.  More profoundly in love than he had ever conceived it possible he could find himself with any one.  Hitherto, he had “considered” this girl or that, mostly on his mother’s or sister’s recommendation; and after observing her critically for a day or two, as he might have observed a horse or any other intended purchase, he had come to the conclusion “she wouldn’t do,” and had ceased to entertain her.  But with Herminia, he was in love.  The potent god had come upon him.  That imperious inner monitor which cries aloud to a man, “You must have this girl, because you can’t do without her; you must strive to make her happy, because her happiness is more to you now ten thousand fold than your own,” that imperious inner monitor had spoken out at last in no uncertain tone to Alan Merrick.  He knew for the first time what it is to be in love; in love with a true and beautiful woman, not with his own future convenience and comfort.  The keen fresh sense it quickened within him raised him for the moment some levels above himself.  For Herminia’s sake, he felt, he could do or dare anything.