As yet, however, there was no hint or forecast of actual martyrdom.
On the contrary, her life flowed in all the halo of a honeymoon. It
was a honeymoon, too, undisturbed by the petty jars and discomforts
of domestic life; she saw Alan too seldom for either ever to lose
the keen sense of fresh delight in the other's presence. When she
met him, she thrilled to the delicate fingertips. Herminia had
planned it so of set purpose. In her reasoned philosophy of life,
she had early decided that 'tis the wear and tear of too close daily
intercourse which turns unawares the lover into the husband; and she
had determined that in her own converse with the man she loved that
cause of disillusion should never intrude itself. They conserved
their romance through all their plighted and united life. Herminia
had afterwards no recollections of Alan to look back upon save
ideally happy ones.
So six months wore away. On the memory of those six months Herminia
was to subsist for half a lifetime. At the end of that time, Alan
began to fear that if she did not soon withdraw from the Carlyle
Place School, Miss Smith-Waters might begin to ask inconvenient
questions. Herminia, ever true to her principles, was for stopping
on till the bitter end, and compelling Miss Smith-Waters to dismiss
her from her situation. But Alan, more worldly wise, foresaw that
such a course must inevitably result in needless annoyance and
humiliation for Herminia; and Herminia was now beginning to be so
far influenced by Alan's personality that she yielded the point with
reluctance to his masculine judgment. It must be always so. The man
must needs retain for many years to come the personal hegemony he
has usurped over the woman; and the woman who once accepts him as
lover or as husband must give way in the end, even in matters of
principle, to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a woman,
and he less a man, were any other result possible. Deep down in the
very roots of the idea of sex we come on that prime antithesis,--the
male, active and aggressive; the female, sedentary, passive, and
receptive.
And even on the broader question, experience shows one it is always
so in the world we live in. No man or woman can go through life in
consistent obedience to any high principle,--not even the willing
and deliberate martyrs. We must bow to circumstances. Herminia
had made up her mind beforehand for the crown of martyrdom, the one
possible guerdon this planet can bestow upon really noble and
disinterested action. And she never shrank from any necessary
pang, incidental to the prophet's and martyr's existence. Yet even
so, in a society almost wholly composed of mean and petty souls,
incapable of comprehending or appreciating any exalted moral
standpoint, it is practically impossible to live from day to day in
accordance with a higher or purer standard. The martyr who should
try so to walk without deviation of any sort, turning neither to
the right nor to the left in the smallest particular, must
accomplish his martyrdom prematurely on the pettiest side-issues,
and would never live at all to assert at the stake the great truth
which is the lodestar and goal of his existence.