That a young girl should prefer freedom to
slavery; should deem it more moral to retain her divinely-conferred
individuality in spite of the world than to yield it up to a man for
life in return for the price of her board and lodging; should refuse
to sell her own body for a comfortable home and the shelter of a
name,--these things seemed to Miss Smith-Waters, with her
smaller-catechism standards of right and wrong, scarcely short of
sheer madness. Yet Herminia had so endeared herself to the old
lady's soul that on receipt of her letter Miss Smith-Waters went
upstairs to her own room with a neuralgic headache, and never again
in her life referred to her late second mistress in any other terms
than as "my poor dear sweet misguided Herminia."
But when it became known next morning in Bower Lane that the
queenly-looking school-mistress who used to go round among "our
girls" with tickets for concerts and lectures and that, had
disappeared suddenly with the nice-looking young man who used to
come a-courting her on Sundays and evenings, the amazement and
surprise of respectable Bower Lane was simply unbounded.
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