ion.

It was Will Locke's fate to vibrate between drudgery and dreaming;
always tending more inevitably towards the latter, and lapsing into more
distant, absorbing trances, till he became more and more fantastic and
unearthly, with his thin light hair, his half-transparent cheek, and his
strained eyes. To prophesy on cardboard and canvas, in flower and
figure, with monster and star, crescent and triangle, in emerald green
and ruby red and sea blue, in dyes that, like those of the Bassani,
resembled the clear shining of a handful of jewels, to prophesy in high
art, to be half pitied, half derided, and to starve: was that Will
Locke's duty?

Will thought so, in the most artless, unblemished, unswerving style; and
he was a devout fellow as well as a gifted one. He bowed to revelation,
and read nature's secrets well before he forsook her for heaven, or
rather Hades. He devoted himself to the sacrifice; he did not grudge his
lust of the eye, his lust of the flesh, his pride of life. He devoted
Dulcie, not without pangs; and he devoted his little sickly children
pining and dying in St. Martin's Lane. He must follow his calling, he
must fulfil his destiny.

Dulcie was not quite such an enthusiast; she did love, honour, and obey
Will Locke, but she was sometimes almost mad to see him such a wreck. It
had been a sent evil, and she had looked down into the gulf; but she had
missed the depths. She had never seen its gloomy, dark, dreary nooks,
poor lass! in her youthful boldness and lavishness; and our little
feminine Curtius in the scoured silk, with the powdered brown curls, had
not merely to penetrate them in one plunge, but had to descend,
stumbling and groping her way, and starting back at the sense of
confinement, the damp and the darkness. Who will blame her that she
sometimes turned her head and looked back, and stretched up her arms
from the desert to the flesh-pots of Egypt? She would have borne
anything for her husband; and she did work marvels: she learned to
engrave for him, coloured constantly with her light, pliant fingers, and
drew and painted from old fresh memories those articles of stoneware for
the potteries. She clothed herself in the cheapest and most lasting of
printed linen sacques and mob caps, and hoods and aprons, fed herself
and him and the children on morsels wellnigh miraculously. She even
swallowed down the sight of Clary in her cut velvet and her own coach,
whose panel Sam Winnington himself had