But when it became known next morning in Bower Lane that the queenly-looking school-mistress who used to go round among “our girls” with tickets for concerts and lectures and that, had disappeared suddenly with the nice-looking young man who used to come a-courting her on Sundays and evenings, the amazement and surprise of respectable Bower Lane was simply unbounded.  “Who would have thought,” the red-faced matrons of the cottages remarked, over their quart of bitter, “the pore thing had it in her!  But there, it’s these demure ones as is always the slyest!” For Bower Lane could only judge that austere soul by its own vulgar standard (as did also Belgravia).  Most low minds, indeed, imagine absolute hypocrisy must be involved in any striving after goodness and abstract right-doing on the part of any who happen to disbelieve in their own blood-thirsty deities, or their own vile woman-degrading and prostituting morality.  In the topsy-turvy philosophy of Bower Lane and of Belgravia, what is usual is right; while any conscious striving to be better and nobler than the mass around one is regarded at once as either insane or criminal.

VIII.

They were bound for Italy; so Alan had decided.  Turning over in his mind the pros and cons of the situation, he had wisely determined that Herminia’s confinement had better take place somewhere else than in England.  The difficulties and inconveniences which block the way in English lodgings would have been well-nigh insufferable; in Italy, people would only know that an English signora and her husband had taken apartments for a month or two in some solemn old palazzo.  To Herminia, indeed, this expatriation at such a moment was in many ways to the last degree distasteful; for her own part, she hated the merest appearance of concealment, and would rather have flaunted the open expression of her supreme moral faith before the eyes of all London.  But Alan pointed out to her the many practical difficulties, amounting almost to impossibilities, which beset such a course; and Herminia, though it was hateful to her thus to yield to the immoral prejudices of a false social system, gave way at last to Alan’s repeated expression of the necessity for prudent and practical action.  She would go with him to Italy, she said, as a proof of her affection and her confidence in his judgment, though she still thought the right thing was to stand by her guns fearlessly, and fight it out to the bitter end undismayed in England.

On the morning of their departure, Alan called to see his father, and explain the situation.  He felt some explanation was by this time necessary.  As yet no one in London knew anything officially as to his relations with Herminia; and for Herminia’s sake, Alan had hitherto kept them perfectly private.  But now, further reticence was both useless and undesirable; he determined to make a clean breast of the whole story to his father.  It was early for a barrister to be leaving town for the Easter vacation; and though Alan had chambers of his own in Lincoln’s Inn, where he lived by himself, he was so often in and out of the house in Harley Street that his absence from London would at once have attracted the parental attention.