iction 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. 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. 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 boa