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.
Herminia, however, could dispense with all that show. She had a
little cottage of her own, she told Alan,--a tiny little cottage,
in a street near her school-work; she rented it for a small sum,
in quite a poor quarter, all inhabited by work-people. There she
lived by herself; for she kept no servants.
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