Only the blinding effect of custom, indeed, could ever have shut good women’s eyes to the shameful indecorousness of wedding ceremonial.  We drag a young girl before the prying gaze of all the world at the very crisis in her life, when natural modesty would most lead her to conceal herself from her dearest acquaintance.  And our women themselves have grown so blunted by use to the hatefulness of the ordeal that many of them face it now with inhuman effrontery.  Familiarity with marriage has almost killed out in the maidens of our race the last lingering relics of native modesty.

Herminia, however, could dispense with all that show.  She had a little cottage of her own, she told Alan,—­a tiny little cottage, in a street near her school-work; she rented it for a small sum, in quite a poor quarter, all inhabited by work-people.  There she lived by herself; for she kept no servants.  There she should continue to live; why need this purely personal compact between them two make any difference in her daily habits?  She would go on with her school-work for the present, as usual.  Oh, no, she certainly didn’t intend to notify the head-mistress of the school or any one else, of her altered position.  It was no alteration of position at all, so far as she was concerned; merely the addition to life of a new and very dear and natural friendship.  Herminia took her own point of view so instinctively indeed,—­lived so wrapped in an ideal world of her own and the future’s,—­that Alan was often quite alarmed in his soul when he thought of the rude awakening that no doubt awaited her.  Yet whenever he hinted it to her with all possible delicacy, she seemed so perfectly prepared for the worst the world could do, so fixed and resolved in her intention of martyrdom, that he had no argument left, and could only sigh over her.

It was not, she explained to him further, that she wished to conceal anything.  The least tinge of concealment was wholly alien to that frank fresh nature.  If her head-mistress asked her a point-blank question, she would not attempt to parry it, but would reply at once with a point blank answer.  Still, her very views on the subject made it impossible for her to volunteer information unasked to any one.  Here was a personal matter of the utmost privacy; a matter which concerned nobody on earth, save herself and Alan; a matter on which it was the grossest impertinence for any one else to make any inquiry or hold any opinion.  They two chose to be friends; and there, so far as the rest of the world was concerned, the whole thing ended.  What else took place between them was wholly a subject for their own consideration.  But if ever circumstances should arise which made it necessary for her to avow to the world that she must soon be a mother, then it was for the world to take the first step, if it would act upon its own hateful and cruel initiative.  She would never deny, but she would never go out of her way to confess.  She stood upon her individuality as a human being.