“Harvey,” she said, looking deep into his honest brown eyes, “as we grow middle-aged, and find how impossible it must ever be to achieve any good in a world like this, how sad a fate it is to be born a civilized being in a barbaric community, I’m afraid moral impulse half dies down within us.  The passionate aim grows cold; the ardent glow fades and flickers into apathy.  I’m ashamed to tell you the truth, it seems such weakness; yet as you ask me this, I think I will tell you.  Once upon a time, if you had made such a proposal to me, if you had urged me to be false to my dearest principles, to sin against the light, to deny the truth, I would have flashed forth a no upon you without one moment’s hesitation.  And now, in my disillusioned middle age what do I feel?  Do you know, I almost feel tempted to give way to this Martinmas summer of love, to stultify my past by unsaying and undoing everything.  For I love you, Harvey.  If I were to give way now, as George Eliot gave way, as almost every woman who once tried to live a free life for her sisters’ sake, has given way in the end, I should counteract any little good my example has ever done or may ever do in the world; and Harvey, strange as it sounds, I feel more than half inclined to do it.  But I will not, I will not; and I’ll tell you why.  It’s not so much principle that prevents me now.  I admit that freely.  The torpor of middle age is creeping over my conscience.  It’s simple regard for personal consistency, and for Dolly’s position.  How can I go back upon the faith for which I have martyred myself?  How can I say to Dolly, ’I wouldn’t marry your father in my youth, for honor’s sake; but I have consented in middle life to sell my sisters’ cause for a man I love, and for the consideration of society; to rehabilitate myself too late with a world I despise by becoming one man’s slave, as I swore I never would be.’  No, no, dear Harvey; I can’t do that.  Some sense of personal continuity restrains me still.  It is the Nemesis of our youth; we can’t go back in our later life on the holier and purer ideals of our girlhood.”

“Then you say no definitely?” Harvey Kynaston asked.

Herminia’s voice quivered.  “I say no definitely,” she answered; “unless you can consent to live with me on the terms on which I lived with Dolly’s father.”

The man hesitated a moment.  Then he began to plead hard for reconsideration.  But Herminia’s mind was made up.  She couldn’t belie her past; she couldn’t be false to the principles for whose sake she had staked and lost everything.  “No, no,” she said firmly, over and over again.  “You must take me my own way, or you must go without me.”

And Harvey Kynaston couldn’t consent to take her her own way.  His faith was too weak, his ambitions were too earthly.  “Herminia,” he said, before they parted that afternoon, “we may still be friends; still dear friends as ever?  This episode need make no difference to a very close companionship?”