loped all the airs of independence and all the jargon of two
professions. Working with consuming energy and ambition, she pushed her
gifts so far as to become at least a very intelligent, eager, and
confident critic of the art of other people--which is much. But though
art stirred and trained her, gave her new horizons and new standards, it
was not in art that she found ultimately the chief excitement and
motive-power of her new life--not in art, but in the birth of social and
philanthropic ardour, the sense of a hitherto unsuspected social power.

One of her girl-friends and fellow-students had two brothers in London,
both at work at South Kensington, and living not far from their sister.
The three were orphans. They sprang from a nervous, artistic stock, and
Marcella had never before come near any one capable of crowding so much
living into the twenty-four hours. The two brothers, both of them
skilful and artistic designers in different lines, and hard at work all
day, were members of a rising Socialist society, and spent their
evenings almost entirely on various forms of social effort and Socialist
propaganda. They seemed to Marcella's young eyes absolutely sincere and
quite unworldly. They lived as workmen; and both the luxuries and the
charities of the rich were equally odious to them. That there could be
any "right" in private property or private wealth had become incredible
to them; their minds were full of lurid images or resentments drawn from
the existing state of London; and though one was humorous and handsome,
the other, short, sickly, and pedantic, neither could discuss the
Socialist ideal without passion, nor hear it attacked without anger.
And in milder measure their sister, who possessed more artistic gift
than either of them, was like unto them.

Marcella saw much of these three persons, and something of their
friends. She went with them to Socialist lectures, or to the public
evenings of the Venturist Society, to which the brothers belonged. Edie,
the sister, assaulted the imagination of her friend, made her read the
books of a certain eminent poet and artist, once the poet of love and
dreamland, "the idle singer of an empty day," now seer and prophet, the
herald of an age to come, in which none shall possess, though all shall
enjoy. The brothers, more ambitious, attacked her through the reason,
brought her popular translations and selections from Marx and Lassalle,
together with each Venturist pamphl