e 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
the truth. That morning, indeed, her purpose was simple as God's
own light. She never dreamed of exciting Lancelot's admiration,
even his friendship for herself. She would have started as from a
snake, from the issue which the reader very clearly foresees, that
Lancelot would fall in love, not with Young Englandism, but with
Argemone Lavington. But yet self is not eradicated even from a
woman's heart in one mornin