By the time her baby was eighteen months old, she had finished it.  It was blankly pessimistic, of course.  Blank pessimism is the one creed possible for all save fools.  To hold any other is to curl yourself up selfishly in your own easy chair, and say to your soul, “O soul, eat and drink; O soul, make merry.  Carouse thy fill.  Ignore the maimed lives, the stricken heads and seared hearts, the reddened fangs and ravening claws of nature all round thee.”  Pessimism is sympathy.  Optimism is selfishness.  The optimist folds his smug hands on his ample knees, and murmurs contentedly, “The Lord has willed it;” “There must always be rich and poor;” “Nature has, after all, her great law of compensation.”  The pessimist knows well self-deception like that is either a fraud or a blind, and recognizing the seething mass of misery at his doors gives what he can,—­his pity, or, where possible, his faint aid, in redressing the crying inequalities and injustices of man or nature.

All honest art is therefore of necessity pessimistic.  Herminia’s romance was something more than that.  It was the despairing heart-cry of a soul in revolt.  It embodied the experiences and beliefs and sentiments of a martyred woman.  It enclosed a lofty ethical purpose.  She wrote it with fiery energy, for her baby’s sake, on waste scraps of paper, at stray moments snatched from endless other engagements.  And as soon as it was finished, she sent it in fear and trembling to a publisher.

She had chosen her man well.  He was a thinker himself, and he sympathized with thinkers.  Though doubtful as to the venture, he took all the risk himself with that generosity one so often sees in the best-abused of professions.  In three or four weeks’ time “A Woman’s World” came out, and Herminia waited in breathless anxiety for the verdict of the reviewers.

For nearly a month she waited in vain.  Then, one Friday, as she was returning by underground railway from the Strand to Edgeware Road, with Dolores in her arms, her eye fell as she passed upon the display-bill of the “Spectator.”  Sixpence was a great deal of money to Herminia; but bang it went recklessly when she saw among the contents an article headed, “A Very Advanced Woman’s Novel.”  She felt sure it must be hers, and she was not mistaken.  Breathlessly she ran over that first estimate of her work.  It was with no little elation that she laid down the number.

Not that the critique was by any means at all favorable.  How could Herminia expect it in such a quarter?  But the “Spectator” is at least conspicuously fair, though it remains in other ways an interesting and ivy-clad mediaeval relic.  “Let us begin by admitting,” said the Spectatorial scribe, “that Miss Montague’s book” (she had published it under a pseudonym) “is a work of genius.  Much as we dislike its whole tone, and still more its conclusions, the gleam of pure genius shines forth undeniable on every page of it.  Whoever takes it up must read on against his will till he has finished the last line of this terrible tragedy; a hateful fascination seems to hold and compel him.  Its very purity makes it dangerous.  The book is mistaken; the book is poisonous; the book is morbid; the book is calculated to do irremediable mischief; but in spite of all that, the book is a book of undeniable and sadly misplaced genius.”