For Herminia's devotion to principle was not
less but far greater than Miss Smith-Waters's own; only, as it
happened, the principles themselves were diametrically opposite.
Herminia wrote her note with not a few tears for poor Miss
Smith-Waters's disappointment. That is the worst of living a life
morally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundest
conviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostile
and painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded of
your friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies and
the conventional injustices. It is the good, indeed, who are most
against you. Still, Herminia steeled her heart to tell the simple
truth,--how, for the right's sake and humanity's she had made up her
mind to eschew the accursed thing, and to strike one bold blow for
the freedom and unfettered individuality of women. She knew in what
obloquy her action would involve her, she said; but she knew too,
that to do right for right's sake was a duty imposed by nature upon
every one of us; and that the clearer we could see ahead, and the
farther in front we could look, the more profoundly did that duty
shine forth for us.
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