inity which Argemone
lent him--to be laid by unread.

'What DO you believe in?' she asked him one day, sadly.

'In THIS!' he said, stamping his foot on the ground. 'In the earth
I stand on, and the things I see walking and growing on it. There
may be something beside it--what you call a spiritual world. But if
He who made me intended me to think of spirit first, He would have
let me see it first. But as He has given me material senses, and
put me in a material world, I take it as a fair hint that I am meant
to use those senses first, whatever may come after. I may be
intended to understand the unseen world, but if so, it must be, as I
suspect, by understanding the visible one: and there are enough
wonders there to occupy me for some time to come.'

'But the Bible?' (Argemone had given up long ago wasting words about
the 'Church.')

'My only Bible as yet is Bacon. I know that he is right, whoever is
wrong. If that Hebrew Bible is to be believed by me, it must agree
with what I know already from science.'

What was to be done with so intractable a heretic? Call him an
infidel and a Materialist, of course, and cast him off with horror.
But Argemone was beginning to find out that, when people are really
in earnest, it may be better sometimes to leave God's methods of
educating them alone, instead of calling the poor honest seekers
hard names, which the speakers themselves don't understand.

But words would fail sometimes, and in default of them Lancelot had
recourse to drawings, and manifested in them a talent for thinking
in visible forms which put the climax to all Argemone's wonder. A
single profile, even a mere mathematical figure, would, in his
hands, become the illustration of a spiritual truth. And, in time,
every fresh lesson on the Odyssey was accompanied by its
illustration,--some bold and simple outline drawing. In Argemone's
eyes, the sketches were immaculate and inspired; for their chief,
almost their only fault, was just those mere anatomical slips which
a woman would hardly perceive, provided the forms were generally
graceful and bold.

One day his fancy attempted a bolder flight. He brought a large
pen-and-ink drawing, and laying it silently on the table before her,
fixed his eyes intensely on her face. The sketch was labelled, the
'Triumph of Woman.' In the foreground, to the right and left, were
scattered groups of men, in the dresses and insignia of