“Then you say no definitely?” Harvey Kynaston asked.
Herminia’s voice quivered. “I say no definitely,” she answered; “unless you can consent to live with me on the terms on which I lived with Dolly’s father.”
The man hesitated a moment. Then he began to plead hard for reconsideration. But Herminia’s mind was made up. She couldn’t belie her past; she couldn’t be false to the principles for whose sake she had staked and lost everything. “No, no,” she said firmly, over and over again. “You must take me my own way, or you must go without me.”
And Harvey Kynaston couldn’t consent to take her her own way. His faith was too weak, his ambitions were too earthly. “Herminia,” he said, before they parted that afternoon, “we may still be friends; still dear friends as ever? This episode need make no difference to a very close companionship?”
“It need make no difference,” Herminia answered, with a light touch of her hand. “Harvey, I have far too few friends in the world willingly to give up one of them. Come again and go down with Dolly and me to Hind Head as usual next Sunday.”
“Thank you,” the man answered. “Herminia, I wish it could have been otherwise. But since I must never have you, I can promise you one thing; I will never marry any other woman.”
Herminia started at the words. “Oh, no,” she cried quickly. “How can you speak like that? How can you say anything so wrong, so untrue, so foolish? To be celibate is a very great misfortune even for a woman; for a man it is impossible, it is cruel, it is wicked. I endure it myself, for my child’s sake, and because I find it hard to discover the help meet for me; or because, when discovered, he refuses to accept me in the only way in which I can bestow myself. But for a man to pretend to live celibate is to cloak hateful wrong under a guise of respectability. I should be unhappy if I thought any man was doing such a vicious thing out of desire to please me. Take some other woman on free terms if you can; but if you cannot, it is better you should marry than be a party to still deeper and more loathsome slavery.”
And from that day forth they were loyal friends, no more, one to the other.
And yet—our Herminia was a woman after all. Some three years later, when Harvey Kynaston came to visit her one day, and told her he was really going to be married—what sudden thrill was this that passed through and through her. Her heart stood still. She was aware that she regretted the comparative loss of a very near and dear acquaintance.