So, day after day, she met Alan Merrick, half by accident, half by
design, on the slopes of the Holmwood. They talked much together,
for Alan liked her and understood her. His heart went out to her.
Compact of like clay, he knew the meaning of her hopes and
aspirations. Often as he sketched he would look up and wait,
expecting to catch the faint sound of her light step, or see her
lithe figure poised breezy against the sky on the neighboring
ridges. Whenever she drew near, his pulse thrilled at her coming,--a
somewhat unusual experience with Alan Merrick. For Alan, though
a pure soul in his way, and mixed of the finer paste, was not quite
like those best of men, who are, so to speak, born married. A man
with an innate genius for loving and being loved cannot long remain
single. He MUST marry young; or at least, if he does not marry, he
must find a companion, a woman to his heart, a help that is meet
for him. What is commonly called prudence in such concerns is only
another name for vice and cruelty. The purest and best of men
necessarily mate themselves before they are twenty. As a rule, it
is the selfish, the mean, the calculating, who wait, as they say,
"till they can afford to marry." That vile phrase scarcely veils
hidden depths of depravity. A man who is really a man, and who has
a genius for loving, must love from the very first, and must feel
himself surrounded by those who love him. 'Tis the first necessity
of life to him; bread, meat, raiment, a house, an income, rank far
second to that prime want in the good man's economy.

But Alan Merrick, though an excellent fellow in his way, and of
noble fibre, was not quite one of the first, the picked souls of
humanity. He did not count among the finger-posts who point the
way that mankind will travel. Though Herminia always thought him
so. That was her true woman's gift of the highest idealizing
power. Indeed, it adds, to my mind, to the tragedy of Herminia
Barton's life that the man for whom she risked and lost everything
was never quite worthy of her; and that Herminia to the end not
once suspected it. Alan was over thirty, and was still "looking
about him." That alone, you will admit, is a sufficiently grave
condemnation. That a man should have arrived at the ripe age of
thirty and not yet have lighted upon the elect lady--the woman
without whose companionship life would be to him unendurable is in
itself a strong proof of much underlying selfi