"Oh, that I could help you!" he cried, "my brothers and my sisters. Take
my life, oh God, and spend it for me among your people."

The speech sounds theatrical, as I read it, written down, but to the
young such words are not ridiculous, as to us older men.

In the natural order of events, he fell in love, and with just the woman
one would expect him to be attracted by. Elspeth Grant was of the type
from which the world, by instinct rather than by convention, has drawn
its Madonnas and its saints. To describe a woman in words is impossible.
Her beauty was not a possession to be catalogued, but herself. One felt
it as one feels the beauty of a summer's dawn breaking the shadows of a
sleeping city, but one cannot set it down. I often met her, and, when
talking to her, I knew myself--I, hack-journalist, frequenter of Fleet
Street bars, retailer of smoke-room stories--a great gentleman, incapable
of meanness, fit for all noble deeds.

In her presence life became a thing beautiful and gracious; a school for
courtesy, and tenderness, and simplicity.

I have wondered since, coming to see a little more clearly into the ways
of men, whether it would not have been better had she been less
spiritual, had her nature possessed a greater alloy of earth, making it
more fit for the uses of this work-a-day world. But at the time, these
two friends of mine seemed to me to have been created for one another.

She appealed to all that was highest in Cyril's character, and he
worshipped her with an unconcealed adoration that, from any man less high-
minded, would have appeared affectation, and which she accepted with the
sweet content that Artemis might have accorded to the homage of Endymion.

There was no formal engagement between them. Cyril seemed to shrink from
the materialising of his love by any thought of marriage. To him she was
an ideal of womanhood rather than a flesh-and-blood woman. His love for
her was a religion; it had no taint of earthly passion in its
composition.

Had I known the world better I might have anticipated the result; for the
red blood ran in my friend's veins; and, alas, we dream our poems, not
live them. But at the time, the idea of any other woman coming between
them would have appeared to me folly. The suggestion that that other
woman might be Geraldine Fawley I should have resented as an insult to my
intelligence: that is the point of the story I do not understand to this
day.

That he sho