Law and the Church have bestowed her on me.  Mine for better, for worse; mine, drunk or sober.  If she ventures to have a heart or a will of her own, woe betide her!  I have tabooed her for life:  let any other man touch her, let her so much as cast eyes on any other man to admire or desire him—­and, knife, dagger, or law-court, they shall both of them answer for it.”  There you have in all its native deformity another monopolist instinct—­the deepest-seated of all, the grimmest, the most vindictive.  “She is not yours,” says the moral philosopher of the new dispensation; “she is her own; release her!  The Turk hales his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and casts her quick into the eddying Bosphorus.  The Christian Englishman, with more lingering torture, sets spies on her life, drags what he thinks her shame before a prying court, and divorces her with contumely.  All this is monopoly, and essentially slavery.  Mankind must outlive it on its way up to civilization.”

And then the Woman, thus taught by her lords, has begun to retort in these latter days by endeavoring to enslave the Man in return.  Unable to conceive the bare idea of freedom for both sexes alike, she seeks equality in an equal slavery.  That she will never achieve.  The future is to the free.  We have transcended serfdom.  Women shall henceforth be the equals of men, not by levelling down, but by levelling up; not by fettering the man, but by elevating, emancipating, unshackling the woman.

All this Herminia knew well.  All these things she turned over in her mind by herself on the evening of the day when Harvey Kynaston came to tell her of his approaching marriage.  Why, then, did she feel it to some extent a disappointment?  Why so flat at his happiness?  Partly, she said to herself, because it is difficult to live down in a single generation the jealousies and distrusts engendered in our hearts by so many ages of harem life.  But more still, she honestly believed, because it is hard to be a free soul in an enslaved community.  No unit can wholly sever itself from the social organism of which it is a corpuscle.  If all the world were like herself, her lot would have been different.  Affection would have been free; her yearnings for sympathy would have been filled to the full by Harvey Kynaston or some other.  As it was, she had but that one little fraction of a man friend to solace her; to resign him altogether to another woman, leaving herself bankrupt of love, was indeed a bitter trial to her.

Yet for her principles’ sake and Dolly’s, she never let Harvey Kynaston or his wife suspect it; as long as she lived, she was a true and earnest friend at all times to both of them.

XVIII.

Meanwhile, Dolores was growing up to woman’s estate.  And she was growing into a tall, a graceful, an exquisitely beautiful woman.