Her first task was to find rooms; her next to find a livelihood. Even the first involved no small relapse from the purity of her principles. After long hours of vain hunting, she found at last she could only get lodgings for herself and Alan’s child by telling a virtual lie, against which her soul revolted. She was forced to describe herself as Mrs Barton; she must allow her landlady to suppose she was really a widow. Woe unto you, scribes and hypocrites! in all Christian London, _Miss_ Barton and her baby could never have found a “respectable” room in which to lay their heads. So she yielded to the inevitable, and took two tiny attics in a small street off the Edgware Road at a moderate rental. To live alone in a cottage as of yore would have been impossible now she had a baby of her own to tend, besides earning her livelihood; she fell back regretfully on the lesser evil of lodgings.
To earn her livelihood was a hard task, though Herminia’s indomitable energy rode down all obstacles. Teaching, of course, was now quite out of the question; no English parent could entrust the education of his daughters to the hands of a woman who has dared and suffered much, for conscience’ sake, in the cause of freedom for herself and her sisters. But even before Herminia went away to Perugia, she had acquired some small journalistic connection; and now, in her hour of need, she found not a few of the journalistic leaders by no means unwilling to sympathise and fraternise 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.”