Gradually Herminia got work to her mind; work enough to support her in the modest way that sufficed her small wants for herself and her baby.  In London, given time enough, you can live down anything, perhaps even the unspeakable sin of having struck a righteous blow in the interest of women.  And day by day, as months and years went on, Herminia felt she was living down the disgrace of having obeyed an enlightened conscience.  She even found friends.  Dear old Miss Smith-Waters used to creep round by night, like Nicodemus—­ respectability would not have allowed her to perform that Christian act in open daylight,—­and sit for an hour or two with her dear misguided Herminia.  Miss Smith-Waters prayed nightly for Herminia’s “conversion,” yet not without an uncomfortable suspicion, after all, that Herminia had very little indeed to be “converted” from.  Other people also got to know her by degrees; an editor’s wife; a kind literary hostess; some socialistic ladies who liked to be “advanced;” a friendly family or two of the Bohemian literary or artistic pattern.  Among them Herminia learned to be as happy in time as she could ever again be, now she had lost her Alan.  She was Mrs. Barton to them all; that lie she found it practically impossible to fight against.  Even the Bohemians refused to let their children ask after Miss Barton’s baby.

So wrapt in vile falsehoods and conventions are we.  So far have we travelled from the pristine realities of truth and purity.  We lie to our children—­in the interests of morality.

After a time, in the intervals between doing her journalistic work and nursing Alan’s baby, Herminia found leisure to write a novel.  It was seriously meant, of course, but still it was a novel.  That is every woman’s native idea of literature.  It reflects the relatively larger part which the social life plays in the existence of women.  If a man tells you he wants to write a book, nine times out of ten he means a treatise or argument on some subject that interests him.  Even the men who take in the end to writing novels have generally begun with other aims and other aspirations, and have only fallen back upon the art of fiction in the last resort as a means of livelihood.  But when a woman tells you she wants to write a book, nine times out of ten she means she wants to write a novel.  For that task nature has most often endowed her richly.  Her quicker intuitions, her keener interest in social life, her deeper insight into the passing play of emotions and of motives, enable her to paint well the complex interrelations of every-day existence.  So Herminia, like the rest, wrote her own pet novel.