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.
CHAPTER XVIII
Meanwhile, Dolores was growing up to woman’s estate. And she was growing into a tall, a graceful, an exquisitely beautiful woman.
Yet in some ways Herminia had reason to be dissatisfied with her daughter’s development. Day by day she watched for signs of the expected apostolate. Was Dolores pressing forward to the mark for the prize of her high calling? Her mother half doubted it. Slowly and regretfully, as the growing girl approached the years when she might be expected to think for herself, Herminia began to perceive that the child of so many hopes, of so many aspirations, the child predestined to regenerate humanity, was thinking for herself—in a retrograde direction. Incredible as it seemed to Herminia, in the daughter of such a father and such a mother, Dolores’ ideas—nay, worse, her ideals—were essentially commonplace. Not that she had much opportunity of imbibing commonplace opinions from any outside source; she redeveloped them from within by a pure effort of atavism. She had reverted to lower types. She had thrown back to the Philistine.
Heredity of mental and moral qualities is a precarious matter. These things lie, as it were, on the topmost plane of character; they smack of the individual, and are therefore far less likely to persist in offspring than the deeper-seated and better-established peculiarities of the family, the clan, the race, or the species. They are idiosyncratic. Indeed, when we remember how greatly the mental and moral faculties differ from brother to brother, the product of the same two parental factors, can we wonder that they differ much more from father to son, the product of one like factor alone, diluted by the addition of a relatively unknown quality, the maternal influence? However this may be, at any rate, Dolores early began to strike out for herself all the most ordinary and stereotyped opinions of British respectability. It seemed as if they sprang up in her by unmitigated reversion. She had never heard in the society of her mother’s lodgings any but the freest and most rational ideas; yet she herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her remoter ancestry. She showed her individuality only by evolving for herself all the threadbare platitudes of ordinary convention.
Moreover, it is not parents who have most to do with moulding the sentiments and opinions of their children. From the beginning, Dolly thought better of the landlady’s views and ideas than of her mother’s. When she went to school, she considered the moral standpoint of the other girls a great deal more sensible than the moral standpoint of Herminia’s attic. She accepted the beliefs and opinions of her schoolfellows because they were natural and congenial to her character. In short, she had what the world calls common-sense: she revolted from the unpractical Utopianism of her mother.
From a very early age, indeed, this false note in Dolly had begun to make itself heard. While she was yet quite a child, Herminia noticed with a certain tender but shrinking regret that Dolly seemed to attach undue importance to the mere upholsteries and equipages of life—to rank, wealth, title, servants, carriages, jewelry. At first, to be sure, Herminia hoped this might prove but the passing foolishness of childhood: as Dolly grew up, however, it became clearer each day that the defect was in the grain—that Dolly’s whole mind was incurably and congenitally aristocratic or snobbish. She had that mean admiration for birth, position, adventitious advantages, which is the mark of the beast in the essentially aristocratic or snobbish nature. She admired people because they were rich, because they were high-placed, because they were courted, because they were respected; not because they were good, because they were wise, because they were noble-natured, because they were respectworthy.