As yet, however, there was no hint or forecast of actual martyrdom.  On the contrary, her life flowed in all the halo of a honeymoon.  It was a honeymoon, too, undisturbed by the petty jars and discomforts of domestic life; she saw Alan too seldom for either ever to lose the keen sense of fresh delight in the other’s presence.  When she met him, she thrilled to the delicate fingertips.  Herminia had planned it so of set purpose.  In her reasoned philosophy of life, she had early decided that ’tis the wear and tear of too close daily intercourse which turns unawares the lover into the husband; and she had determined that in her own converse with the man she loved that cause of disillusion should never intrude itself.  They conserved their romance through all their plighted and united life.  Herminia had afterwards no recollections of Alan to look back upon save ideally happy ones.

So six months wore away.  On the memory of those six months Herminia was to subsist for half a lifetime.  At the end of that time, Alan began to fear that if she did not soon withdraw from the Carlyle Place School, Miss Smith-Waters might begin to ask inconvenient questions.  Herminia, ever true to her principles, was for stopping on till the bitter end, and compelling Miss Smith-Waters to dismiss her from her situation.  But Alan, more worldly wise, foresaw that such a course must inevitably result in needless annoyance and humiliation for Herminia; and Herminia was now beginning to be so far influenced by Alan’s personality that she yielded the point with reluctance to his masculine judgment.  It must be always so.  The man must needs retain for many years to come the personal hegemony he has usurped over the woman; and the woman who once accepts him as lover or as husband must give way in the end, even in matters of principle, to his virile self-assertion.  She would be less a woman, and he less a man, were any other result possible.  Deep down in the very roots of the idea of sex we come on that prime antithesis,—­the male, active and aggressive; the female, sedentary, passive, and receptive.

And even on the broader question, experience shows one it is always so in the world we live in.  No man or woman can go through life in consistent obedience to any high principle,—­not even the willing and deliberate martyrs.  We must bow to circumstances.  Herminia had made up her mind beforehand for the crown of martyrdom, the one possible guerdon this planet can bestow upon really noble and disinterested action.  And she never shrank from any necessary pang, incidental to the prophet’s and martyr’s existence.  Yet even so, in a society almost wholly composed of mean and petty souls, incapable of comprehending or appreciating any exalted moral standpoint, it is practically impossible to live from day to day in accordance with a higher or purer standard.  The martyr who should try so to walk without deviation of any sort, turning neither to the right nor to the left in the smallest particular, must accomplish his martyrdom prematurely on the pettiest side-issues, and would never live at all to assert at the stake the great truth which is the lodestar and goal of his existence.