If he had said no more, Herminia would have been amply satisfied.  To be called morbid by the “Spectator” is a sufficient proof that you have hit at least the right tack in morals.  And to be accused of genius as well was indeed a triumph.  No wonder Herminia went home to her lonely attic that night justifiably elated.  She fancied after this her book must make a hit.  It might be blamed and reviled, but at any rate it was now safe from the ignominy of oblivion.

Alas, how little she knew of the mysteries of the book-market!  As little as all the rest of us.  Day after day, from that afternoon forth, she watched in vain for succeeding notices.  Not a single other paper in England reviewed her.  At the libraries, her romance was never so much as asked for.  And the reason for these phenomena is not far to seek by those who know the ways of the British public.  For her novel was earnestly and sincerely written; it breathed a moral air, therefore it was voted dull; therefore nobody cared for it.  The “Spectator” had noticed it because of its manifest earnestness and sincerity; for though the “Spectator” is always on the side of the lie and the wrong, it is earnest and sincere, and has a genuine sympathy for earnestness and sincerity, even on the side of truth and righteousness.  Nobody else even looked at it.  People said to themselves, “This book seems to be a book with a teaching not thoroughly banal, like the novels-with-a-purpose after which we flock; so we’ll give it a wide berth.”

And they shunned it accordingly.

That was the end of Herminia Barton’s literary aspirations.  She had given the people of her best, and the people rejected it.  Now she gave them of her most mediocre; the nearest to their own level of thought and feeling to which her hand could reduce itself.  And the people accepted it.  The rest of her life was hack-work; by that, she could at least earn a living for Dolores.  Her “Antigone, for the Use of Ladies’ Schools” still holds its own at Girton and Somerville.

XIV.

I do not propose to dwell at any length upon the next ten or twelve years of Herminia Barton’s life.  An episode or two must suffice; and those few told briefly.

She saw nothing of her family.  Relations had long been strained between them; now they were ruptured.  To the rest of the Bartons, she was even as one dead; the sister and daughter’s name was never pronounced among them.  But once, when little Dolores was about five years old, Herminia happened to pass a church door in Marylebone, where a red-lettered placard announced in bold type that the Very Reverend the Dean of Dunwich would preach there on Sunday.  It flashed across her mind that this was Sunday morning.  An overpowering desire to look on her father’s face once more—­she had never seen her mother’s—­impelled Herminia to enter those unwonted portals.  The Dean was in the pulpit.  He looked stately and