humanity’s she had made up her mind to eschew the accursed thing, and to strike one bold blow for the freedom and unfettered individuality of women.  She knew in what obloquy her action would involve her, she said; but she knew too, that to do right for right’s sake was a duty imposed by nature upon every one of us; and that the clearer we could see ahead, and the farther in front we could look, the more profoundly did that duty shine forth for us.  For her own part, she had never shrunk from doing what she knew to be right for mankind in the end, though she felt sure it must lead her to personal misery.  Yet unless one woman were prepared to lead the way, no freedom was possible.  She had found a man with whom she could spend her life in sympathy and united usefulness; and with him she had elected to spend it in the way pointed out to us by nature.  Acting on his advice, though somewhat against her own judgment, she meant to leave England for the present, only returning again when she could return with the dear life they had both been instrumental in bringing into the world, and to which henceforth her main attention must be directed.  She signed it, “Your ever-grateful and devoted Herminia.”

Poor Miss Smith-Waters laid down that astonishing, that incredible letter in a perfect whirl of amazement and stupefaction.  She didn’t know what to make of it.  It seemed to run counter to all her preconceived ideas of moral action.  That a young girl should venture to think for herself at all about right and wrong was passing strange; that she should arrive at original notions upon those abstruse subjects, which were not the notions of constituted authority and of the universal slave-drivers and obscurantists generally,—­notions full of luminousness upon the real relations and duties of our race,—­was to poor, cramped Miss Smith-Waters well-nigh inconceivable.  That a young girl should prefer freedom to slavery; should deem it more moral to retain her divinely-conferred individuality in spite of the world than to yield it up to a man for life in return for the price of her board and lodging; should refuse to sell her own body for a comfortable home and the shelter of a name,—­these things seemed to Miss Smith-Waters, with her smaller-catechism standards of right and wrong, scarcely short of sheer madness.  Yet Herminia had so endeared herself to the old lady’s soul that on receipt of her letter Miss Smith-Waters went upstairs to her own room with a neuralgic headache, and never again in her life referred to her late second mistress in any other terms than as “my poor dear sweet misguided Herminia.”