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Dolly found her mother's friends were apt to bore her; she preferred the society of the landlady's daughters. It was a delicious day. Hard by, a slow-worm sunned himself on the basking sand. Blue dragon-flies flashed on gauze wings in the hollows. Harvey Kynaston looked on Herminia's face and saw that she was fair. With an effort he made up his mind to speak at last.
A vague suspicion began to cross Herminia's mind, as she gazed at the girlish Madonna of the Sposalizio, that perhaps she wasn't quite as well adapted to love Italy as Switzerland. Nature she understood; was art yet a closed book to her?
Bees buzzed, broom crackled, the chirp of the field cricket rang shrill from the sand-banks. Herminia's light foot tripped over the spongy turf.
One other question Alan ventured gently to raise, the question of children. Fools always put that question, and think it a crushing one. Alan was no fool, yet it puzzled him strangely. He did not see for himself how easy is the solution; how absolutely Herminia's plan leaves the position unaltered. But Herminia herself was as modestly frank on the subject as on every other.
Widowed as she was, she still pitied the unhappy beings doomed to the cramped life and dwarfed heart of the old maid; pitied them as sincerely as she despised those unhealthy souls who would make of celibacy, wedded or unwedded, a sort of anti-natural religion for women. Alan's death, however, had left Herminia's ship rudderless. Her mission had failed. That she acknowledged herself.
It was hateful, it was horrible to have to con the thing over, where that faultless soul was concerned, in the vile and vulgar terms other people would apply to it; but for Herminia's sake, con it over so he must; and though he shrank from the effort with a deadly shrinking, he nevertheless faced it. Men at the clubs would say he had seduced Herminia.
The papers mentioned it, as seen through the optic lens of the society journalist, with what strange refraction. Most of them descried in poor Herminia's tragedy nothing but material for a smile, a sneer, or an innuendo. The Dean himself wrote to her, a piteous, paternal note, which bowed her down more than ever in her abyss of sorrow.
The pessimist knows well self-deception like that is either a fraud or a blind, and recognizing the seething mass of misery at his doors gives what he can, his pity, or, where possible, his faint aid, in redressing the crying inequalities and injustices of man or nature. All honest art is therefore of necessity pessimistic. Herminia's romance was something more than that.
An eager imagination a vivid sense of beauty quick readiness to be moved by the sight of physical or moral loveliness these were palliations, the old clergyman held, of much that seemed wrong and contradictory to our eyes in the lives of so many great men and women. At sound of such immoral and unworthy teaching, Herminia's ardent soul rose up in revolt within her.
Herminia's face turned deadly white; she knew it had come at last. But still she never flinched. "You shall hear the truth from me, darling," she said, with a gentle touch. "You have always heard it." They passed under the doorway and up the stairs in silence. As soon as they were in the sitting-room, Dolly fronted Herminia fiercely.
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