leaders by no means unwilling to sympathize and fraternize with her.  To be sure, they didn’t ask the free woman to their homes, nor invite her to meet their own women:—­even an enlightened journalist must draw a line somewhere in the matter of society; but they understood and appreciated the sincerity of her motives, and did what they could to find employment and salary for her.  Herminia was an honest and conscientious worker; she knew much about many things; and nature had gifted her with the instinctive power of writing clearly and unaffectedly the English language.  So she got on with editors.  Who could resist, indeed, the pathetic charm of that girlish figure, simply clad in unobtrusive black, and sanctified in every feature of the shrinking face by the beauty of sorrow?  Not the men who stand at the head of the one English profession which more than all others has escaped the leprous taint of that national moral blight that calls itself “respectability.”

In a slow and tentative way, then, Herminia crept back into unrecognized recognition.  It was all she needed.  Companionship she liked; she hated society.  That mart was odious to her where women barter their bodies for a title, a carriage, a place at the head of some rich man’s table.  Bohemia sufficed her.  Her terrible widowhood, too, was rendered less terrible to her by the care of her little one.  Babbling lips, pattering feet, made heaven in her attic.  Every good woman is by nature a mother, and finds best in maternity her social and moral salvation.  She shall be saved in child-bearing.  Herminia was far removed indeed from that blatant and decadent sect of “advanced women” who talk as though motherhood were a disgrace and a burden, instead of being, as it is, the full realization of woman’s faculties, the natural outlet for woman’s wealth of emotion.  She knew that to be a mother is the best privilege of her sex, a privilege of which unholy manmade institutions now conspire to deprive half the finest and noblest women in our civilized communities.  Widowed as she was, she still pitied the unhappy beings doomed to the cramped life and dwarfed heart of the old maid; pitied them as sincerely as she despised those unhealthy souls who would make of celibacy, wedded or unwedded, a sort of anti-natural religion for women.  Alan’s death, however, had left Herminia’s ship rudderless.  Her mission had failed.  That she acknowledged herself.  She lived now for Dolores.  The child to whom she had given the noble birthright of liberty was destined from her cradle to the apostolate of women.  Alone of her sex, she would start in life emancipated.  While others must say, “With a great sum obtained I this freedom,” Dolores could answer with Paul, “But I was free born.”  That was no mean heritage.