d strengthens
the hold; as in those invincible algx towering in the stormy straits of
Tierra del Fuego, swept from Antartic homes toward the
equator,--defying the fierce flail of surf that pulverizes rock, "Breed
is stronger than pasture; and no matter how savage a stepmother the
circumstances of life may prove, the inherited psychological strain
will sometimes dominate, and triumph." According to the Talmud: "A
myrtle, even in a desert, remains a myrtle".

From her tenth year, Beryl had begun to build her castle in the Spain
of Art; daubed its walls with wonderful frescoes, filled its echoing
corridors with heroic men and lovely women of the classic ages; and
through its mullioned windows looked into an enchanted land, clothed
with that witching "light that never was on sea or land". When all else
on earth was sombre and dun-hued, sunlight and moonlight still gilded
those magical towers. In darkest nights, through hissing rain and
hurtling hail, she caught the glitter of its starry vanes smiling
through murkiness, and above the wail and sob of the storms that had
swept over the waste places of her youth, she heard the divine melodies
which the immortal harper, Hope, played always in the marvellous palace
of the Muses.

In early girlhood she had followed her father into the solemn mysteries
of Greek Tragedy; and in that vast white temple dedicated to the
inexorable Fates, where predestined victims moved like marble images to
their immolation, her own plastic nature had been moulded in unison
with the classic cult. Among the throng of Attic types, an immortal
statue of filial devotion and sisterly love had attracted her
irresistibly, and to Antigone she rendered the homage of a boundless
admiration, an unwavering fealty.

Intellectually, humanity cleaves to idolatry; and each of us worships
in the Pantheon, where our favorite divinities in literature crowd the
niches. To become a skilful artist, and paint the portrait of Antigone,
vas the ambition that had shaped and colored Beryl's young dreams, long
ere she suspected that a mournful parallelism in fate would consign her
to a living tomb more intolerable than that devised by Theban Creon.

Our grandest pictures, statues, poems, are not the canvas, the marble,
the bronze, and the gilded vellum, that the world handles, criticises,
weighs, buys and sells, accepts with praise, or rejects with anathema.
Invisible and inviolate, imagination, keeps our best, our ideals,