another in Euripides, had shaken her head and said, "What
can he make of that?"

Now for the first time she saw what he had made of it. Rickman's Helen
was to the Helena of Euripides what Shelley's Prometheus is to the
Prometheus of AEschylus. Rickman had done what seemed good in his own
eyes. He had made his own metres, his own myth and his own drama. A
drama of flesh and blood, a drama of spirit, a drama of dreams. Only a
very young poet could have had the courage to charge it with such a
weight of symbolism; but he had contrived to breathe into his symbols
the breath of life; the phantoms of his brain, a shadowy Helen and
Achilles, turned into flesh and blood under his hands. It was as if
their bodies, warm, throbbing, full-formed, instinct with irresistible
and violent life, had come crashing through the delicate fabric of his
dream.

As she read Lucia's mind was troubled, shaken out of its critical
serenity. She heard a new music; she felt herself in the grasp of a
new power, a new spirit. It was not the classic spirit. There was too
much tumult in its harmonies, as if the music of a whole orchestra had
been torn from its instruments and flung broadcast, riding
triumphantly on the wings of a great wind. There were passages
(notably the Hymn to Aphrodite in the second Act) that brought the
things of sense and the terrible mysteries of flesh and blood so near
to her that she flinched. Rickman had made her share the thrilling
triumph, the flushed passion of his youth. And when she was most hurt
and bruised under the confusion of it, he lifted her up and carried
her away into the regions of spiritual beauty and eternal strength.

It was all over; the tumult of the flesh and the agony of the spirit;
over, too, the heaven-piercing singing, the rapture of spirit and of
flesh made one. Rickman had ended his amazing drama with the broad
majestic music of his Hymn to Athene. Lucia had borne up under the
parting of Helen and Menelaus; but she was young, and at that touch of
superb and ultimate beauty, two tears, the large and heavy tears of
youth, fell upon Rickman's immaculate manuscript, where their marks
remain to this day. The sight of them had the happy effect of making
her laugh, and then, and not till then, she thought of Rickman--Mr.
Rickman. She thought of him living a dreadful life among dreadful
people; she thought of him sitting in his father's shop, making
catalogues _raisonnes_; she thought of him sitting in