The Woman Who Did | Page 5

very free and advanced; a perfect firebrand. In fact, my dear child,
I don't know which of you makes my hair stand on end most." And with that introductory
hint, she left the pair forthwith to their own devices.
Mrs. Dewsbury was right. It took those two but little time to feel quite at home with one
another. Built of similar mould, each seemed instinctively to grasp what each was aiming
at. Two or three turns pacing up and down the lawn, two or three steps along the
box-covered path at the side, and they read one another perfectly. For he was true man,
and she was real woman.
"Then you were at Girton?" Alan asked, as he paused with one hand on the rustic seat
that looks up towards Leith Hill, and the heather-clad moorland.

"Yes, at Girton," Herminia answered, sinking easily upon the bench, and letting one arm
rest on the back in a graceful attitude of unstudied attention. "But I didn't take my
degree," she went on hurriedly, as one who is anxious to disclaim some too great honor
thrust upon her. "I didn't care for the life; I thought it cramping. You see, if we women
are ever to be free in the world, we must have in the end a freeman's education. But the
education at Girton made only a pretence at freedom. At heart, our girls were as enslaved
to conventions as any girls elsewhere. The whole object of the training was to see just
how far you could manage to push a woman's education without the faintest danger of her
emancipation."
"You are right," Alan answered briskly, for the point was a pet one with him. "I was an
Oxford man myself, and I know that servitude. When I go up to Oxford now and see the
girls who are being ground in the mill at Somerville, I'm heartily sorry for them. It's
worse for them than for us; they miss the only part of university life that has educational
value. When we men were undergraduates, we lived our whole lives, lived them all round,
developing equally every fibre of our natures. We read Plato, and Aristotle, and John
Stuart Mill, to be sure,--and I'm not quite certain we got much good from them; but then
our talk and thought were not all of books, and of what we spelt out in them. We rowed
on the river, we played in the cricket-field, we lounged in the billiard-rooms, we ran up to
town for the day, we had wine in one another's rooms after hall in the evening, and
behaved like young fools, and threw oranges wildly at one another's heads, and generally
enjoyed ourselves. It was all very silly and irrational, no doubt, but it was life, it was
reality; while the pretended earnestness of those pallid Somerville girls is all an
affectation of one-sided culture."
"That's just it," Herminia answered, leaning back on the rustic seat like David's Madame
Recamier. "You put your finger on the real blot when you said those words, developing
equally every fibre of your natures. That's what nobody yet wants us women to do.
They're trying hard enough to develop us intellectually; but morally and socially they
want to mew us up just as close as ever. And they won't succeed. The zenana must go.
Sooner or later, I'm sure, if you begin by educating women, you must end by
emancipating them."
"So I think too," Alan answered, growing every moment more interested. "And for my
part, it's the emancipation, not the mere education, that most appeals to me."
"Yes, I've always felt that," Herminia went on, letting herself out more freely, for she felt
she was face to face with a sympathetic listener. "And for that reason, it's the question of
social and moral emancipation that interests me far more than the mere political
one,--woman's rights as they call it. Of course I'm a member of all the woman's franchise
leagues and everything of that sort,--they can't afford to do without a single friend's name
on their lists at present; but the vote is a matter that troubles me little in itself, what I want
is to see women made fit to use it. After all, political life fills but a small and unimportant
part in our total existence. It's the perpetual pressure of social and ethical restrictions that
most weighs down women."
Alan paused and looked hard at her. "And they tell me," he said in a slow voice, "you're

the Dean of Dunwich's daughter!"
Herminia laughed lightly,--a ringing girlish laugh. Alan noticed it with pleasure. He felt
at once that the iron of Girton had not entered into her soul, as into so many of our
modern young women's. There was vitality enough left in