Chapter 6

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