For her own part, she had never shrunk from
doing what she knew to be right for mankind in the end, though she
felt sure it must lead her to personal misery. Yet unless one woman
were prepared to lead the way, no freedom was possible. She had
found a man with whom she could spend her life in sympathy and
united usefulness; and with him she had elected to spend it in the
way pointed out to us by nature. Acting on his advice, though
somewhat against her own judgment, she meant to leave England for
the present, only returning again when she could return with the
dear life they had both been instrumental in bringing into the
world, and to which henceforth her main attention must be directed.
She signed it, "Your ever-grateful and devoted HERMINIA."
Poor Miss Smith-Waters laid down that astonishing, that incredible
letter in a perfect whirl of amazement and stupefaction. She didn't
know what to make of it. It seemed to run counter to all her
preconceived ideas of moral action. That a young girl should venture
to think for herself at all about right and wrong was passing
strange; that she should arrive at original notions upon those
abstruse subjects, which were not the notions of constituted
authority and of the universal slave-drivers and obscurantists
generally,--notions full of luminousness upon the real relations and
duties of our race,--was to poor, cramped Miss Smith-Waters
well-nigh inconceivable.
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