Then Alan began again and talked all he knew.  He urged, he prayed, he bent forward, he spoke soft and low, he played on her tenderest chords as a loving woman.  Herminia was moved, for her heart went forth to him, and she knew why he tried so hard to save her from her own higher and truer nature.  But she never yielded an inch.  She stood firm to her colors.  She shook her head to the last, and murmured over and over again, “There is only one right way, and no persuasion on earth will ever avail to turn me aside from it.”

The Truth had made her Free, and she was very confident of it.

At last, all other means failing, Alan fell back on the final resort of delay.  He saw much merit in procrastination.  There was no hurry, he said.  They needn’t make up their minds, one way or the other, immediately.  They could take their time to think.  Perhaps, with a week or two to decide in, Herminia might persuade him; or he might persuade her.  Why rush on fate so suddenly?

But at that, to his immense surprise, Herminia demurred.  “No, no,” she said, shaking her head, “that’s not at all what I want.  We must decide to-day one way or the other.  Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation.  I couldn’t let you wait, and slip by degrees into some vague arrangement we hardly contemplated definitely.  To do that would be to sin against my ideas of decorum.  Whatever we do we must do, as the apostle says, decently and in order, with a full sense of the obligations it imposes upon us.  We must say to one another in so many words, ’I am yours; you are mine;’ or we must part forever.  I have told you my whole soul; I have bared my heart before you.  You may take it or leave it; but for my dignity’s sake, I put it to you now, choose one way or the other.”

Alan looked at her hard.  Her face was crimson by this with maidenly shame; but she made no effort to hide or avert it.  For the good of humanity, this question must be settled once for all; and no womanish reserve should make her shrink from settling it.  Happier maidens in ages to come, when society had reconstructed itself on the broad basis of freedom, would never have to go through what she was going through that moment.  They would be spared the quivering shame, the tingling regret, the struggle with which she braced up her maiden modesty to that supreme effort.  But she would go through with it all the same.  For eternal woman’s sake she had long contemplated that day; now it had come at last, she would not weakly draw back from it.

Alan’s eyes were all admiration.  He stood near enough to her level to understand her to the core.  “Herminia,” he cried, bending over her, “you drive me to bay.  You press me very hard.  I feel myself yielding.  I am a man; and when you speak to me like that, I know it.  You enlist on your side all that is virile within me.  Yet how can I accept the terms you offer?  For the very love I bear you, how do you this injustice?  If I loved you less, I might perhaps say yes; because I love you so well, I feel compelled to say no to you.”