Poor
purblind Bower Lane! A life-time would have failed it to discern
for itself how infinitely higher than its slavish "respectability"
was Herminia's freedom. In which respect, indeed, Bower Lane was
no doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, or, for the matter of
that, with Lambeth Palace.
But Herminia, for her part, never discovered she was talked about.
To the pure all things are pure; and Herminia was dowered with that
perfect purity. And though Bower Lane lay but some few hundred
yards off from the Carlyle Place Girl's School, the social gulf
between them yet yawned so wide that good old Miss Smith-Waters
from Cambridge, the head-mistress of the school, never caught a
single echo of the washerwomen's gossip. Herminia's life through
those six months was one unclouded honeymoon. On Sundays, she and
Alan would go out of town together, and stroll across the breezy
summit of Leith Hill, or among the brown heather and garrulous
pine-woods that perfume the radiating spurs of Hind Head with their
aromatic resins. Her love for Alan was profound and absorbing;
while as for Alan, the more he gazed into the calm depths of that
crystal soul, the more deeply did he admire it.
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