“Then you consent?” Herminia cried, all aglow, half nestling to his bosom.

“I consent,” Alan answered, with profound misgivings.  “What else do you leave open to me?”

Herminia made no direct answer; she only laid her head with perfect trust upon the man’s broad shoulder.  “O Alan,” she murmured low, letting her heart have its way, “you are mine, then; you are mine.  You have made me so happy, so supremely happy.”

VI.

Thus, half against his will, Alan Merrick was drawn into this irregular compact.

Next came that more difficult matter, the discussion of ways and means, the more practical details.  Alan hardly knew at first on what precise terms it was Herminia’s wish that they two should pass their lives together.  His ideas were all naturally framed on the old model of marriage; in that matter, Herminia said, he was still in the gall of bitterness, and the bond of iniquity.  He took it for granted that of course they must dwell under one roof with one another.  But that simple ancestral notion, derived from man’s lordship in his own house, was wholly adverse to Herminia’s views of the reasonable and natural.  She had debated these problems at full in her own mind for years, and had arrived at definite and consistent solutions for every knotty point in them.  Why should this friendship differ at all, she asked, in respect of time and place, from any other friendship?  The notion of necessarily keeping house together, the cramping idea of the family tie, belonged entirely to the regime of the manmade patriarchate, where the woman and the children were the slaves and chattels of the lord and master.  In a free society, was it not obvious that each woman would live her own life apart, would preserve her independence, and would receive the visits of the man for whom she cared,—­the father of her children?  Then only could she be free.  Any other method meant the economic and social superiority of the man, and was irreconcilable with the perfect individuality of the woman.

So Herminia reasoned.  She rejected at once, therefore, the idea of any change in her existing mode of life.  To her, the friendship she proposed with Alan Merrick was no social revolution; it was but the due fulfilment of her natural functions.  To make of it an occasion for ostentatious change in her way of living seemed to her as unnatural as is the practice of the barbarians in our midst who use a wedding—­that most sacred and private event in a young girl’s life—­as an opportunity for display of the coarsest and crudest character.  To rivet the attention of friends on bride and bridegroom is to offend against the most delicate susceptibilities of modesty.  From all such hateful practices, Herminia’s pure mind revolted by instinct.  She felt that here at least was the one moment in a woman’s history when she would shrink with timid reserve from every eye save one man’s,—­when publicity of any sort was most odious and horrible.