The Woman Who Did - Page 32/103

Thus, half against his will, Alan Merrick was drawn into this

irregular compact.

Next came that more difficult matter, the discussion of ways and

means, the more practical details. Alan hardly knew at first on

what precise terms it was Herminia's wish that they two should pass

their lives together. His ideas were all naturally framed on the

old model of marriage; in that matter, Herminia said, he was still

in the gall of bitterness, and the bond of iniquity. He took it

for granted that of course they must dwell under one roof with one

another. But that simple ancestral notion, derived from man's

lordship in his own house, was wholly adverse to Herminia's views

of the reasonable and natural. She had debated these problems at

full in her own mind for years, and had arrived at definite and

consistent solutions for every knotty point in them. Why should

this friendship differ at all, she asked, in respect of time and

place, from any other friendship? The notion of necessarily

keeping house together, the cramping idea of the family tie,

belonged entirely to the regime of the manmade patriarchate, where

the woman and the children were the slaves and chattels of the lord

and master. In a free society, was it not obvious that each woman

would live her own life apart, would preserve her independence, and

would receive the visits of the man for whom she cared,--the father

of her children? Then only could she be free. Any other method

meant the economic and social superiority of the man, and was

irreconcilable with the perfect individuality of the woman.

So Herminia reasoned. She rejected at once, therefore, the idea of

any change in her existing mode of life. To her, the friendship

she proposed with Alan Merrick was no social revolution; it was but

the due fulfilment of her natural functions. To make of it an

occasion for ostentatious change in her way of living seemed to her

as unnatural as is the practice of the barbarians in our midst who

use a wedding--that most sacred and private event in a young girl's

life--as an opportunity for display of the coarsest and crudest

character. To rivet the attention of friends on bride and

bridegroom is to offend against the most delicate susceptibilities

of modesty. From all such hateful practices, Herminia's pure mind

revolted by instinct. She felt that here at least was the one

moment in a woman's history when she would shrink with timid

reserve from every eye save one man's,--when publicity of any sort

was most odious and horrible.

Only the blinding effect of custom, indeed, could ever have shut

good women's eyes to the shameful indecorousness of wedding

ceremonial. We drag a young girl before the prying gaze of all the

world at the very crisis in her life, when natural modesty would

most lead her to conceal herself from her dearest acquaintance.

And our women themselves have grown so blunted by use to the

hatefulness of the ordeal that many of them face it now with

inhuman effrontery. Familiarity with marriage has almost killed

out in the maidens of our race the last lingering relics of native

modesty.