Waters prayed nightly for Herminia's
"conversion," yet not without an uncomfortable suspicion, after
all, that Herminia had very little indeed to be "converted" from.
Other people also got to know her by degrees; an editor's wife;
a kind literary hostess; some socialistic ladies who liked to be
"advanced;" a friendly family or two of the Bohemian literary or
artistic pattern. Among them Herminia learned to be as happy in
time as she could ever again be, now she had lost her Alan. She
was Mrs. Barton to them all; that lie she found it practically
impossible to fight against. Even the Bohemians refused to let
their children ask after Miss Barton's baby.

So wrapt in vile falsehoods and conventions are we. So far have we
travelled from the pristine realities of truth and purity. We lie
to our children--in the interests of morality.

After a time, in the intervals between doing her journalistic work
and nursing Alan's baby, Herminia found leisure to write a novel.
It was seriously meant, of course, but still it was a novel. That
is every woman's native idea of literature. It reflects the
relatively larger part which the social life plays in the existence
of women. If a man tells you he wants to write a book, nine times
out of ten he means a treatise or argument on some subject that
interests him. Even the men who take in the end to writing novels
have generally begun with other aims and other aspirations, and
have only fallen back upon the art of fiction in the last resort as
a means of livelihood. But when a woman tells you she wants to
write a book, nine times out of ten she means she wants to write a
novel. For that task nature has most often endowed her richly.
Her quicker intuitions, her keener interest in social life, her
deeper insight into the passing play of emotions and of motives,
enable her to paint well the complex interrelations of every-day
existence. So Herminia, like the rest, wrote her own pet novel.

By the time her baby was eighteen months old, she had finished it.
It was blankly pessimistic, of course. Blank pessimism is the one
creed possible for all save fools. To hold any other is to curl
yourself up selfishly in your own easy chair, and say to your soul,
"O soul, eat and drink; O soul, make merry. Carouse thy fill.
Ignore the maimed lives, the stricken heads and seared hearts,
the reddened fangs and ravening claws of nature all round thee."
Pessimism is sympathy. Optimism is self