enchanter's wand, potent over the unseen wonders of the water-world, 
to 'call up spirits from the vasty deep,' which will really 'come if 
you do call for them'--at least if the conjuration be orthodox--and 
they there.  That spell was broken by the sight of poor wearied pug, 
his once gracefully-floating brush all draggled and drooping, as he 
toiled up the sheep-paths towards the open down above.

But Lancelot's sadness reached its crisis, as he met the hounds just 
outside the churchyard.  Another moment--they had leaped the rails; 
and there they swept round under the gray wall, leaping and yelling, 
like Berserk fiends among the frowning tombstones, over the cradles 
of the quiet dead.

Lancelot shuddered--the thing was not wrong--'it was no one's 
fault,'--but there was a ghastly discord in it.  Peace and strife, 
time and eternity--the mad noisy flesh, and the silent immortal 
spirit,--the frivolous game of life's outside show, and the terrible 
earnest of its inward abysses, jarred together without and within 
him.  He pulled his horse up violently, and stood as if rooted to 
the place, gazing at he knew not what.

The hounds caught sight of the fox, burst into one frantic shriek of 
joy--and then a sudden and ghastly stillness, as, mute and 
breathless, they toiled up the hillside, gaining on their victim at 
every stride.  The patter of the horsehoofs and the rattle of 
rolling flints died away above.  Lancelot looked up, startled at the 
silence; laughed aloud, he knew not why, and sat, regardless of his 
pawing and straining horse, still staring at the chapel and the 
graves.

On a sudden the chapel-door opened, and a figure, timidly yet 
loftily stepped out without observing him, and suddenly turning 
round, met him full, face to face, and stood fixed with surprise as 
completely as Lancelot himself.

That face and figure, and the spirit which spoke through them, 
entered his heart at once, never again to leave it.  Her features 
were aquiline and grand, without a shade of harshness; her eyes 
shone out like twain lakes of still azure, beneath a broad marble 
cliff of polished forehead; her rich chestnut hair rippled downward 
round the towering neck.  With her perfect masque and queenly 
figure, and earnest, upward gaze, she might have been the very model 
from which Raphael conceived his glorious St. Catherine--the ideal 
of the highest womanly genius, softened into self-forgetfulness by 
girlish devotion.  She was simply, almost coarsely dressed; but a 
glance told him that she was a lady, by the courtesy of man as well 
as by the will of God.

They gazed one moment more at each other--but what is time to 
spirits?  With them, as with their Father, 'one day is as a thousand 
years.'  But that eye-wedlock was cut short the next instant by the 
decided interference of the horse, who, thoroughly disgusted at his 
master's whole conduct, gave a significant shake of his head, and 
shamming frightened (as both women and horses will do when only 
cross), commenced a war-dance, which drove Argemone Lavington into 
the porch, and gave the bewildered Lancelot an excuse for dashing 
madly up the hill after his companions.

'What a horrible ugly face!' said Argemone to herself, 'but so 
clever, and so unhappy!'

Blest pity! true mother of that graceless scamp, young Love, who is 
ashamed of his real pedigree, and swears to this day that he is the 
child of Venus!--the coxcomb!

* * * * *

[Here, for the sake of the reader, we omit, or rather postpone a 
long dissertation on the famous Erototheogonic chorus of 
Aristophanes's Birds, with illustrations taken from all earth and 
heaven, from the Vedas and Proclus to Jacob Boehmen and Saint 
Theresa.]

'The dichotomy of Lancelot's personality,' as the Germans would call 
it, returned as he dashed on.  His understanding was trying to ride, 
while his spirit was left behind with Argemone.  Hence loose reins 
and a looser seat.  He rolled about like a tipsy man, holding on, in 
fact, far more by his spurs than by his knees, to the utter 
infuriation of Shiver-the-timbers, who kicked and snorted over the 
down like one of Mephistopheles's Demon-steeds.  They had mounted 
the hill--the deer fled before them in terror--they neared the park 
palings.  In the road beyond them the hounds were just killing their 
fox, struggling and growling in fierce groups for the red gobbets of 
fur, a panting, steaming ring of horses round them.  Half a dozen 
voices hailed him as he came up.

'Where have you been?'  'He'll tumble off!'  'He's had a fall!'  'No 
he hasn't!'  ''Ware hounds, man alive!'  'He'll break his neck!'

'He has broken it, at last!' shouted the colonel, as Shiver-the-
timbers rushed at the high pales, out of breath, and blind with 
rage.  Lancelot saw and heard nothing till he was awakened from his 
dream by the long heave of the huge brute's shoulder, and the 
maddening sensation of sweeping through the air over the fence.  He 
started, checked the curb, the horse threw up his head, fulfilling 
his name by driving his knees like a battering-ram against the 
pales--the top-bar bent like a withe, flew out into a hundred 
splinters, and man and horse rolled over headlong into the hard 
flint-road.

For one long sickening second Lancelot watched the blue sky between 
his own knees.  Then a crash as if a shell had burst in his face--a 
horrible grind--a sheet of flame--and the blackness of night.  Did 
you ever feel it, reader?

When he awoke, he found himself lying in bed, with Squire Lavington 
sitting by him.  There was real sorrow in the old man's face, 'Come 
to himself!' and a great joyful oath rolled out.  'The boldest rider 
of them all!  I wouldn't have lost him for a dozen ready-made spick 
and span Colonel Bracebridges!'

'Quite right, squire!' answered a laughing voice from behind the 
curtain.  'Smith has a clear two thousand a year, and I live by my 
wits!'



CHAPTER II:  SPRING YEARNINGS



I heard a story the other day of our most earnest and genial 
humorist, who is just now proving himself also our most earnest and 
genial novelist.  'I like your novel exceedingly,' said a lady; 'the 
characters are so natural--all but the baronet, and he surely is 
overdrawn:  it is impossible to find such coarseness in his rank of 
life!'

The artist laughed.  'And that character,' said he, 'is almost the 
only exact portrait in the whole book.'

So it is.  People do not see the strange things which pass them 
every day.  'The romance of real life' is only one to the romantic 
spirit.  And then they set up for critics, instead of pupils; as if 
the artist's business was not just to see what they cannot see--to 
open their eyes to the harmonies and the discords, the miracles and 
the absurdities, which seem to them one uniform gray fog of 
commonplaces.

Then let the reader believe, that whatsoever is commonplace in my 
story is my own invention.  Whatsoever may seem extravagant or 
startling is most likely to be historic fact, else I should not have 
dared to write it down, finding God's actual dealings here much too 
wonderful to dare to invent many fresh ones for myself.

Lancelot, who had had a severe concussion of the brain and a broken 
leg, kept his bed for a few weeks, and his room for a few more.  
Colonel Bracebridge installed himself at the Priory, and nursed him 
with indefatigable good-humour and few thanks.  He brought Lancelot 
his breakfast before hunting, described the run to him when he 
returned, read him to sleep, told him stories of grizzly bear and 
buffalo-hunts, made him laugh in spite of himself at extempore comic 
medleys, kept his tables covered with flowers from the conservatory, 
warmed his chocolate, and even his bed.  Nothing came amiss to him, 
and he to nothing.  Lancelot longed at first every hour to be rid of 
him, and eyed him about the room as a bulldog does the monkey who 
rides him.  In his dreams he was Sinbad the Sailor, and Bracebridge 
the Old Man of the Sea; but he could not hold out against the 
colonel's merry bustling kindliness, and the almost womanish 
tenderness of his nursing.  The ice thawed rapidly; and one evening 
it split up altogether, when Bracebridge, who was sitting drawing by 
Lancelot's sofa, instead of amusing himself with the ladies below, 
suddenly threw his pencil into the fire, and broke out, a propos de 
rien--

'What a strange pair we are, Smith!  I think you just the best 
fellow I ever met, and you hate me like poison--you can't deny it.'

There was something in the colonel's tone so utterly different from 
his usual courtly and measured speech, that Lancelot was taken 
completely by surprise, and stammered out,--

'I--I--I--no--no.  I know I am very foolish--ungrateful.  But I do 
hate you,' he said, with a sudden impulse, 'and I'll tell you why.'

'Give me your hand,' quoth the colonel:  'I like that.  Now we shall 
see our way with each other, at least.'

'Because,' said Lancelot slowly, 'because you are cleverer than I, 
readier than I, superior to me in every point.'

The colonel laughed, not quite merrily.  Lancelot went on, holding 
down his shaggy brows.

'I am a brute and an ass!--And yet I do not like to tell you so.  
For if I am an ass, what are you?'

'Heyday!'

'Look here.--I am wasting my time and brains on ribaldry, but I am 
worth nothing better--at least, I think so at times; but you, who 
can do anything you put your hand to, what business have you, in the 
devil's name, to be throwing yourself away on gimcracks and fox-
hunting foolery?  Heavens!  If I had your talents, I'd be--I'd make 
a name for myself before I died, if I died to make it.'  The colonel 
griped his hand hard, rose, and looked out of the window for a few 
minutes.  There was a dead, brooding silence, till he turned to 
Lancelot,--

'Mr. Smith, I thank you for your honesty, but good advice may come 
too late.  I am no saint, and God only knows how much less of one I 
may become; but mark my words,--if you are ever tempted by passion, 
and vanity, and fine ladies, to form liaisons, as the Jezebels call 
them, snares, and nets, and labyrinths of blind ditches, to keep you 
down through life, stumbling and grovelling, hating yourself and 
hating the chain to which you cling--in that hour pray--pray as if 
the devil had you by the throat,--to Almighty God, to help you out 
of that cursed slough!  There is nothing else for it!--pray, I tell 
you!'

There was a terrible earnestness about the guardsman's face which 
could not be mistaken.  Lancelot looked at him for a moment, and 
then dropped his eyes ashamed, as if he had intruded on the 
speaker's confidence by witnessing his emotion.

In a moment the colonel had returned to his smile and his polish.

'And now, my dear invalid, I must beg your pardon for sermonising.  
What do you say to a game of ecarte?  We must play for love, or we 
shall excite ourselves, and scandalise Mrs. Lavington's piety.'  And 
the colonel pulled a pack of cards out of his pocket, and seeing 
that Lancelot was too thoughtful for play, commenced all manner of 
juggler's tricks, and chuckled over them like any schoolboy.

'Happy man!' thought Lancelot, 'to have the strength of will which 
can thrust its thoughts away once and for all.'  No, Lancelot! more 
happy are they whom God will not allow to thrust their thoughts from 
them till the bitter draught has done its work.

From that day, however, there was a cordial understanding between 
the two.  They never alluded to the subject; but they had known the 
bottom of each other's heart.  Lancelot's sick-room was now pleasant 
enough, and he drank in daily his new friend's perpetual stream of 
anecdote, till March and hunting were past, and April was half over.  
The old squire came up after dinner regularly (during March he had 
hunted every day, and slept every evening); and the trio chatted 
along merrily enough, by the help of whist and backgammon, upon the 
surface of this little island of life,--which is, like Sinbad's, 
after all only the back of a floating whale, ready to dive at any 
moment.--And then?--

But what was Argemone doing all this time?  Argemone was busy in her 
boudoir (too often a true boudoir to her) among books and 
statuettes, and dried flowers, fancying herself, and not unfairly, 
very intellectual.  She had four new manias every year; her last 
winter's one had been that bottle-and-squirt mania, miscalled 
chemistry; her spring madness was for the Greek drama.  She had 
devoured Schlegel's lectures, and thought them divine; and now she 
was hard at work on Sophocles, with a little help from translations, 
and thought she understood him every word.  Then she was somewhat 
High-Church in her notions, and used to go up every Wednesday and 
Friday to the chapel in the hills, where Lancelot had met her, for 
an hour's mystic devotion, set off by a little graceful asceticism.  
As for Lancelot, she never thought of him but as an empty-headed 
fox-hunter who had met with his deserts; and the brilliant accounts 
which the all smoothing colonel gave at dinner of Lancelot's 
physical well doing and agreeable conversation only made her set him 
down the sooner as a twin clever-do-nothing to the despised 
Bracebridge, whom she hated for keeping her father in a roar of 
laughter.

But her sister, little Honoria, had all the while been busy messing 
and cooking with her own hands for the invalid; and almost fell in 
love with the colonel for his watchful kindness.  And here a word 
about Honoria, to whom Nature, according to her wont with sisters, 
had given almost everything which Argemone wanted, and denied almost 
everything which Argemone had, except beauty.  And even in that, the 
many-sided mother had made her a perfect contrast to her sister,--
tiny and luscious, dark-eyed and dark-haired; as full of wild simple 
passion as an Italian, thinking little, except where she felt much--
which was, indeed, everywhere; for she lived in a perpetual April-
shower of exaggerated sympathy for all suffering, whether in novels 
or in life; and daily gave the lie to that shallow old calumny, that 
'fictitious sorrows harden the heart to real ones.'

Argemone was almost angry with her sometimes, when she trotted whole 
days about the village from school to sick-room:  perhaps conscience 
hinted to her that her duty, too, lay rather there than among her 
luxurious day-dreams.  But, alas! though she would have indignantly 
repelled the accusation of selfishness, yet in self and for self 
alone she lived; and while she had force of will for any so-called 
'self-denial,' and would fast herself cross and stupefied, and quite 
enjoy kneeling thinly clad and barefoot on the freezing chapel-floor 
on a winter's morning, yet her fastidious delicacy revolted at 
sitting, like Honoria, beside the bed of the ploughman's consumptive 
daughter, in a reeking, stifling, lean-to garret, in which had slept 
the night before, the father, mother, and two grown-up boys, not to 
mention a new-married couple, the sick girl, and, alas! her baby.  
And of such bedchambers there were too many in Whitford Priors.

The first evening that Lancelot came downstairs, Honoria clapped her 
hands outright for joy as he entered, and ran up and down for ten 
minutes, fetching and carrying endless unnecessary cushions and 
footstools; while Argemone greeted him with a cold distant bow, and 
a fine-lady drawl of carefully commonplace congratulations.  Her 
heart smote her though, as she saw the wan face and the wild, 
melancholy, moonstruck eyes once more glaring through and through 
her; she found a comfort in thinking his stare impertinent, drew 
herself up, and turned away; once, indeed, she could not help 
listening, as Lancelot thanked Mrs. Lavington for all the pious and 
edifying books with which the good lady had kept his room rather 
than his brain furnished for the last six weeks; he was going to say 
more, but he saw the colonel's quaint foxy eye peering at him, 
remembered St. Francis de Sales, and held his tongue.

But, as her destiny was, Argemone found herself, in the course of 
the evening, alone with Lancelot, at the open window.  It was a 
still, hot, heavy night, after long easterly drought; sheet-
lightning glimmered on the far horizon over the dark woodlands; the 
coming shower had sent forward as his herald a whispering draught of 
fragrant air.

'What a delicious shiver is creeping over those limes!' said 
Lancelot, half to himself.

The expression struck Argemone:  it was the right one, and it seemed 
to open vistas of feeling and observation in the speaker which she 
had not suspected.  There was a rich melancholy in the voice;--she 
turned to look at him.

'Ay,' he went on; 'and the same heat which crisps those thirsty 
leaves must breed the thunder-shower which cools them?  But so it is 
throughout the universe:  every yearning proves the existence of an 
object meant to satisfy it; the same law creates both the giver and 
the receiver, the longing and its home.'

'If one could but know sometimes what it is for which one is 
longing!' said Argemone, without knowing that she was speaking from 
her inmost heart:  but thus does the soul involuntarily lay bare its 
most unspoken depths in the presence of its yet unknown mate, and 
then shudders at its own ABANDON as it first tries on the wedding 
garment of Paradise.

Lancelot was not yet past the era at which young geniuses are apt to 
'talk book' at little.

'For what?' he answered, flashing up according to his fashion.  'To 
be;--to be great; to have done one mighty work before we die, and 
live, unloved or loved, upon the lips of men.  For this all long who 
are not mere apes and wall-flies.'

'So longed the founders of Babel,' answered Argemone, carelessly, to 
this tirade.  She had risen a strange fish, the cunning beauty, and 
now she was trying her fancy flies over him one by one.

'And were they so far wrong?' answered he.  'From the Babel society 
sprung our architecture, our astronomy, politics, and colonisation.  
No doubt the old Hebrew sheiks thought them impious enough, for 
daring to build brick walls instead of keeping to the good old-
fashioned tents, and gathering themselves into a nation instead of 
remaining a mere family horde; and gave their own account of the 
myth, just as the antediluvian savages gave theirs of that strange 
Eden scene, by the common interpretation of which the devil is made 
the first inventor of modesty.  Men are all conservatives; 
everything new is impious, till we get accustomed to it; and if it 
fails, the mob piously discover a divine vengeance in the mischance, 
from Babel to Catholic Emancipation.'

Lancelot had stuttered horribly during the latter part of this most 
heterodox outburst, for he had begun to think about himself, and try 
to say a fine thing, suspecting all the while that it might not be 
true.  But Argemone did not remark the stammering:  the new thoughts 
startled and pained her; but there was a daring grace about them.  
She tried, as women will, to answer him with arguments, and failed, 
as women will fail.  She was accustomed to lay down the law a la 
Madame de Stael, to savants and non-savants and be heard with 
reverence, as a woman should be.  But poor truth-seeking Lancelot 
did not see what sex had to do with logic; he flew at her as if she 
had been a very barrister, and hunted her mercilessly up and down 
through all sorts of charming sophisms, as she begged the question, 
and shifted her ground, as thoroughly right in her conclusion as she 
was wrong in her reasoning, till she grew quite confused and 
pettish.--And then Lancelot suddenly shrank into his shell, claws 
and all, like an affrighted soldier-crab, hung down his head, and 
stammered out some incoherencies,--'N-n-not accustomed to talk to 
women--ladies, I mean.  F-forgot myself.--Pray forgive me!'  And he 
looked up, and her eyes, half-amused, met his, and she saw that they 
were filled with tears.

'What have I to forgive?' she said, more gently, wondering on what 
sort of strange sportsman she had fallen.  'You treat me like an 
equal; you will deign to argue with me.  But men in general--oh, 
they hide their contempt for us, if not their own ignorance, under 
that mask of chivalrous deference!' and then in the nasal fine 
ladies' key, which was her shell, as bitter brusquerie was his, she 
added, with an Amazon queen's toss of the head,--'You must come and 
see us often.  We shall suit each other, I see, better than most 
whom we see here.'

A sneer and a blush passed together over Lancelot's ugliness.

'What, better than the glib Colonel Bracebridge yonder?'

'Oh, he is witty enough, but he lives on the surface of everything!  
He is altogether shallow and blase.  His good-nature is the fruit of 
want of feeling; between his gracefulness and his sneering 
persiflage he is a perfect Mephistopheles-Apollo.'

What a snare a decently-good nickname is!  Out it must come, though 
it carry a lie on its back.  But the truth was, Argemone thought 
herself infinitely superior to the colonel, for which simple reason 
she could not in the least understand him.

[By the bye, how subtly Mr. Tennyson has embodied all this in The 
Princess.  How he shows us the woman, when she takes her stand on 
the false masculine ground of intellect, working out her own moral 
punishment, by destroying in herself the tender heart of flesh, 
which is either woman's highest blessing or her bitterest curse; how 
she loses all feminine sensibility to the under-current of feeling 
in us poor world-worn, case-hardened men, and falls from pride to 
sternness, from sternness to sheer inhumanity.  I should have 
honoured myself by pleading guilty to stealing much of Argemone's 
character from The Princess, had not the idea been conceived, and 
fairly worked out, long before the appearance of that noble poem.]


They said no more to each other that evening.  Argemone was called 
to the piano; and Lancelot took up the Sporting Magazine, and read 
himself to sleep till the party separated for the night.

Argemone went up thoughtfully to her own room.  The shower had 
fallen, and the moon was shining bright, while every budding leaf 
and knot of mould steamed up cool perfume, borrowed from the 
treasures of the thundercloud.  All around was working the infinite 
mystery of birth and growth, of giving and taking, of beauty and 
use.  All things were harmonious--all things reciprocal without.  
Argemone felt herself needless, lonely, and out of tune with herself 
and nature.

She sat in the window, and listlessly read over to herself a 
fragment of her own poetry:--


SAPPHO

She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
Above her glared the moon; beneath, the sea.
Upon the white horizon Athos' peak
Weltered in burning haze; all airs were dead;
The sicale slept among the tamarisk's hair;
The birds sat dumb and drooping.  Far below
The lazy sea-weed glistened in the sun:
The lazy sea-fowl dried their steaming wings;
The lazy swell crept whispering up the ledge,
And sank again.  Great Pan was laid to rest;
And mother Earth watched by him as he slept,
And hushed her myriad children for awhile.

She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
And sighed for sleep, for sleep that would not hear,
But left her tossing still:  for night and day
A mighty hunger yearned within her heart,
Till all her veins ran fever, and her cheek,
Her long thin hands, and ivory-channell'd feet,
Were wasted with the wasting of her soul.
Then peevishly she flung her on her face,
And hid her eyeballs from the blinding glare,
And fingered at the grass, and tried to cool
Her crisp hot lips against the crisp hot sward:
And then she raised her head, and upward cast
Wild looks from homeless eyes, whose liquid light
Gleamed out between deep folds of blue-black hair,
As gleam twin lakes between the purple peaks
Of deep Parnassus, at the mournful moon.
Beside her lay a lyre.  She snatched the shell,
And waked wild music from its silver strings;
Then tossed it sadly by,--'Ah, hush!' she cries,
'Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine!
Why mock my discords with thine harmonies?
'Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine,
Only to echo back in every tone,
The moods of nobler natures than thine own.'


'No!' she said.  'That soft and rounded rhyme suits ill with 
Sappho's fitful and wayward agonies.  She should burst out at once 
into wild passionate life-weariness, and disgust at that universe, 
with whose beauty she has filled her eyes in vain, to find it always 
a dead picture, unsatisfying, unloving--as I have found it.'

Sweet self-deceiver! had you no other reason for choosing as your 
heroine Sappho, the victim of the idolatry of intellect--trying in 
vain to fill her heart with the friendship of her own sex, and then 
sinking into mere passion for a handsome boy, and so down into self-
contempt and suicide?

She was conscious, I do believe, of no other reason than that she 
gave; but consciousness is a dim candle--over a deep mine.

'After all,' she said pettishly, 'people will call it a mere 
imitation of Shelley's Alastor.  And what harm if it is?  Is there 
to be no female Alastor?  Has not the woman as good a right as the 
man to long after ideal beauty--to pine and die if she cannot find 
it; and regenerate herself in its light?'

'Yo-hoo-oo-oo!  Youp, youp!  Oh-hooo!' arose doleful through the 
echoing shrubbery.

Argemone started and looked out.  It was not a banshee, but a 
forgotten fox-hound puppy, sitting mournfully on the gravel-walk 
beneath, staring at the clear ghastly moon.

She laughed and blushed--there was a rebuke in it.  She turned to go 
to rest; and as she knelt and prayed at her velvet faldstool, among 
all the nicknacks which now-a-days make a luxury of devotion, was it 
strange if, after she had prayed for the fate of nations and 
churches, and for those who, as she thought, were fighting at Oxford 
the cause of universal truth and reverend antiquity, she remembered 
in her petitions the poor godless youth, with his troubled and 
troubling eloquence?  But it was strange that she blushed when she 
mentioned his name--why should she not pray for him as she prayed 
for others?

Perhaps she felt that she did not pray for him as she prayed for 
others.

She left the AEolian harp in the window, as a luxury if she should 
wake, and coiled herself up among lace pillows and eider blemos; and 
the hound coiled himself up on the gravel-walk, after a solemn 
vesper-ceremony of three turns round in his own length, looking 
vainly for a 'soft stone.'  The finest of us are animals after all, 
and live by eating and sleeping:  and, taken as animals, not so 
badly off either--unless we happen to be Dorsetshire labourers--or 
Spitalfields weavers--or colliery children--or marching soldiers--
or, I am afraid, one half of English souls this day.

And Argemone dreamed;--that she was a fox, flying for her life 
through a churchyard--and Lancelot was a hound, yelling and leaping, 
in a red coat and white buckskins, close upon her--and she felt his 
hot breath, and saw his white teeth glare. . . .  And then her 
father was there:  and he was an Italian boy, and played the organ--
and Lancelot was a dancing dog, and stood up and danced to the tune 
of 'C'est l'amour, l'amour, l'amour,' pitifully enough, in his red 
coat--and she stood up and danced too; but she found her fox-fur 
dress insufficient, and begged hard for a paper frill--which was 
denied her:  whereat she cried bitterly and woke; and saw the Night 
peeping in with her bright diamond eyes, and blushed, and hid her 
beautiful face in the pillows, and fell asleep again.

What the little imp, who managed this puppet-show on Argemone's 
brain-stage, may have intended to symbolise thereby, and whence he 
stole his actors and stage-properties, and whether he got up the 
interlude for his own private fun, or for that of a choir of brother 
Eulenspiegels, or, finally, for the edification of Argemone as to 
her own history, past, present, or future, are questions which we 
must leave unanswered, till physicians have become a little more of 
metaphysicians, and have given up their present plan of ignoring for 
nine hundred and ninety-nine pages that most awful and significant 
custom of dreaming, and then in the thousandth page talking the 
boldest materialist twaddle about it.

In the meantime, Lancelot, contrary to the colonel's express 
commands, was sitting up to indite the following letter to his 
cousin, the Tractarian curate:--

'You complain that I waste my time in field-sports:  how do you know 
that I waste my time?  I find within myself certain appetites; and I 
suppose that the God whom you say made me, made those appetites as a 
part of me.  Why are they to be crushed any more than any other part 
of me?  I am the whole of what I find in myself--am I to pick and 
choose myself out of myself?  And besides, I feel that the exercise 
of freedom, activity, foresight, daring, independent self-
determination, even in a few minutes' burst across country, 
strengthens me in mind as well as in body.  It might not do so to 
you; but you are of a different constitution, and, from all I see, 
the power of a man's muscles, the excitability of his nerves, the 
shape and balance of his brain, make him what he is.  Else what is 
the meaning of physiognomy?  Every man's destiny, as the Turks say, 
stands written on his forehead.  One does not need two glances at 
your face to know that you would not enjoy fox-hunting, that you 
would enjoy book-learning and "refined repose," as they are pleased 
to call it.  Every man carries his character in his brain.  You all 
know that, and act upon it when you have to deal with a man for 
sixpence; but your religious dogmas, which make out that everyman 
comes into the world equally brutish and fiendish, make you afraid 
to confess it.  I don't quarrel with a "douce" man like you, with a 
large organ of veneration, for following your bent.  But if I am 
fiery, with a huge cerebellum, why am I not to follow mine?--For 
that is what you do, after all--what you like best.  It is all very 
easy for a man to talk of conquering his appetites, when he has none 
to conquer.  Try and conquer your organ of veneration, or of 
benevolence, or of calculation--then I will call you an ascetic.  
Why not!--The same Power which made the front of one's head made the 
back, I suppose?

'And, I tell you, hunting does me good.  It awakens me out of my 
dreary mill-round of metaphysics.  It sweeps away that infernal web 
of self-consciousness, and absorbs me in outward objects; and my 
red-hot Perillus's bull cools in proportion as my horse warms.  I 
tell you, I never saw a man who could cut out his way across country 
who could not cut his way through better things when his turn came.  
The cleverest and noblest fellows are sure to be the best riders in 
the long run.  And as for bad company and "the world," when you take 
to going in the first-class carriages for fear of meeting a swearing 
sailor in the second-class--when those who have "renounced the 
world" give up buying and selling in the funds--when my uncle, the 
pious banker, who will only "associate" with the truly religious, 
gives up dealing with any scoundrel or heathen who can "do business" 
with him--then you may quote pious people's opinions to me.  In 
God's name, if the Stock Exchange, and railway stagging, and the 
advertisements in the Protestant Hue-and-Cry, and the frantic 
Mammon-hunting which has been for the last fifty years the peculiar 
pursuit of the majority of Quakers, Dissenters, and Religious 
Churchmen, are not The World, what is?  I don't complain of them, 
though; Puritanism has interdicted to them all art, all excitement, 
all amusement--except money-making.  It is their dernier ressort, 
poor souls!

'But you must explain to us naughty fox-hunters how all this agrees 
with the good book.  We see plainly enough, in the meantime, how it 
agrees with "poor human nature."  We see that the "religious world," 
like the "great world," and the "sporting world," and the "literary 
world,"


"Compounds for sins she is inclined to,
By damning those she has no mind to;"


and that because England is a money-making country, and money-making 
is an effeminate pursuit, therefore all sedentary and spoony sins, 
like covetousness, slander, bigotry, and self-conceit, are to be 
cockered and plastered over, while the more masculine vices, and no-
vices also, are mercilessly hunted down by your cold-blooded, soft-
handed religionists.

'This is a more quiet letter than usual from me, my dear coz, for 
many of your reproofs cut me home:  they angered me at the time; but 
I deserve them.  I am miserable, self-disgusted, self-helpless, 
craving for freedom, and yet crying aloud for some one to come and 
guide me, and teach me; and WHO IS THERE IN THESE DAYS WHO COULD 
TEACH A FAST MAN, EVEN IF HE WOULD TRY?  Be sure, that as long as 
you and yours make piety a synonym for unmanliness, you will never 
convert either me or any other good sportsman.

'By the bye, my dear fellow, was I asleep or awake when I seemed to 
read in the postscript of your last letter, something about "being 
driven to Rome after all"? . . .  Why thither, of all places in 
heaven or earth?  You know, I have no party interest in the 
question.  All creeds are very much alike to me just now.  But allow 
me to ask, in a spirit of the most tolerant curiosity, what possible 
celestial bait, either of the useful or the agreeable kind, can the 
present excellent Pope, or his adherents, hold out to you in 
compensation for the solid earthly pudding which you would have to 
desert? . . .  I daresay, though, that I shall not comprehend your 
answer when it comes.  I am, you know, utterly deficient in that 
sixth sense of the angelic or supralunar beautiful, which fills your 
soul with ecstasy.  You, I know, expect and long to become an angel 
after death:  I am under the strange hallucination that my body is 
part of me, and in spite of old Plotinus, look with horror at a 
disembodiment till the giving of that new body, the great perfection 
of which, in your eyes, and those of every one else, seems to be, 
that it will be less, and not more of a body, than our present one. 
. . .  Is this hope, to me at once inconceivable and contradictory, 
palpable and valuable enough to you to send you to that Italian 
Avernus, to get it made a little more certain?  If so, I despair of 
your making your meaning intelligible to a poor fellow wallowing, 
like me, in the Hylic Borboros--or whatever else you may choose to 
call the unfortunate fact of being flesh and blood. . . .  Still, 
write.'



CHAPTER III:  NEW ACTORS, AND A NEW STAGE



When Argemone rose in the morning, her first thought was of 
Lancelot.  His face haunted her.  The wild brilliance of his 
intellect struggling through foul smoke-clouds, had haunted her 
still more.  She had heard of his profligacy, his bursts of fierce 
Berserk-madness; and yet now these very faults, instead of 
repelling, seemed to attract her, and intensify her longing to save 
him.  She would convert him; purify him; harmonise his discords.  
And that very wish gave her a peace she had never felt before.  She 
had formed her idea; she had now a purpose for which to live, and 
she determined to concentrate herself for the work, and longed for 
the moment when she should meet Lancelot, and begin--how, she did 
not very clearly see.

It is an old jest--the fair devotee trying to convert the young 
rake.  Men of the world laugh heartily at it; and so does the devil, 
no doubt.  If any readers wish to be fellow-jesters with that 
personage, they may; but, as sure as old Saxon women-worship remains 
for ever a blessed and healing law of life, the devotee may yet 
convert the rake--and, perhaps, herself into the bargain.

Argemone looked almost angrily round at her beloved books and 
drawings; for they spoke a message to her which they had never 
spoken before, of self-centred ambition.  'Yes,' she said aloud to 
herself, 'I have been selfish, utterly!  Art, poetry, science--I 
believe, after all, that I have only loved them for my own sake, not 
for theirs, because they would make me something, feed my conceit of 
my own talents.  How infinitely more glorious to find my work-field 
and my prize, not in dead forms and colours, or ink-and-paper 
theories, but in a living, immortal, human spirit!  I will study no 
more, except the human heart, and only that to purify and ennoble 
it.'

True, Argemone; and yet, like all resolutions, somewhat less than