egan to feel that those
faces did hide living souls; formerly he had half believed--he had
tried, but from laziness, to make himself wholly believe--that they
were all empty masks, phantasies, without interest or significance
for him. But, somehow, in the light of his new love for Argemone,
the whole human race seemed glorified, brought nearer, endeared to
him. So it must be. He had spoken of a law wider than he thought
in his fancy, that the angels might learn love for all by love for
an individual. Do we not all learn love so? Is it not the first
touch of the mother's bosom which awakens in the infant's heart that
spark of affection which is hereafter to spread itself out towards
every human being, and to lose none of its devotion for its first
object, as it expands itself to innumerable new ones? Is it not by
love, too--by looking into loving human eyes, by feeling the care of
loving hands,--that the infant first learns that there exist other
beings beside itself?--that every body which it sees expresses a
heart and will like its own? Be sure of it. Be sure that to have
found the key to one heart is to have found the key to all; that
truly to love is truly to know; and truly to love one, is the first
step towards truly loving all who bear the same flesh and blood with
the beloved. Like children, we must dress up even our unseen future
in stage properties borrowed from the tried and palpable present,
ere we can look at it without horror. We fear and hate the utterly
unknown, and it only. Even pain we hate only when we cannot KNOW
it; when we can only feel it, without explaining it, and making it
harmonise with our notions of our own deserts and destiny. And as
for human beings, there surely it stands true, wherever else it may
not, that all knowledge is love, and all love knowledge; that even
with the meanest, we cannot gain a glimpse into their inward trials
and struggles, without an increase of sympathy and affection.

Whether he reasoned thus or not, Lancelot found that his new
interest in the working classes was strangely quickened by his
passion. It seemed the shortest and clearest way toward a practical
knowledge of the present. 'Here,' he said to himself, 'in the
investigation of existing relations between poor and rich, I shall
gain more real acquaintance with English society, than by dawdling
centuries in exclusive drawing-rooms.'

The inquiry had not yet pre