have thrown herself heart and soul into the career that had been given her by Carol and destiny, and therein found the satisfaction that art, according to common-places, bestows upon those who follow Her for herself, and not for her reward? Possibly and yet there might be the divine fire in her, and it might only be a torment to her, all the same. To be an artist one must surely know what art means. From Lucas, Zelda had learned that Art means the deliberate practice of pedantic rules. From Carol, she had learned that Art means the readiest way of getting money. From Abner, she had learned that Art means performing his own music and no other. Finally, from the great public, the highest court of appeal, she had learned that Art means an occasional evening's amusement. It was not likely that she, to whom the books of history and experience were sealed, should be wiser than they, and she looked upon her solitary indulgencies of her natural musical instinct as so many follies. She was bound to be false to her genius, and to bend it into a machine for getting all she could out of a world that, except as an enormous gathering of gulls, was nothing to her. That she succeeded so marvellously was of course owing to higher qualities which she could not contrive to crush or conceal. But as she could not possibly suspect this, and as none of her guides, philosophers or friends had ever uttered in her hearing or out of it a single noble word, so she was compelled for want of knowledge to despise her own genius and to find an outlet for the demon within her in less wholesome ways.

No wonder that the whims and caprices of the prima donna were without end. Foolish admirers admired and encouraged them, common-sense people sneered at them as affectation or charlatanism. They were neither. But then neither did whims and caprices provide an outlet: they were but palliatives, and symptoms that she needed one. They were simply moral issues. But her banker's book and her bouquets were real: as real existences to her as Harold Vaughan. Perhaps all alike were dross and dreams, Harold Vaughan and all. The real Harold Vaughan was most assuredly no hero, save to her. It was not his fault, however, that a girl chose to regard him through a prism. Not even yet will I call this love, for love, like art, requires an element of conscious knowledge. It was rather the worship of an idea, which a larger soul had somehow chanced to find growing out of itself and to have transplanted into a smaller. I suppose everybody must worship something or other, if only a common clay fetish and large souls have a curious tendency to worship the small -it is but human nature to feel drawn to what is most unlike ourselves. So much the better, in spite of the apparent waste and bitterness. The soul, too high to be worshipped, worships: the soul too small to worship, is worshipped. The smaller is ennobled, and the greater ennobles, so that both gain in the only fitting way. But as it is better to give than to receive, so, as is most due, the greater soul is the greater gainer after all.

So out of these three poor corner-stones, a bank-book, a bundle of bouquets, and a blockhead-it was Vaughan himself who had given himself the title the threefold Zelda, Sylvia and Pauline had built up her

mansion in the air. The petals of the bundle became leaves of the book, and the leaves of the book became stones of the bridge that would lead everywhere, even to such a star as Harold Vaughan.

What the end was to be had not even begun to shape itself in her mind. The whole story was with no more visible beginning or end than the bridge of trap-doors in the vision of Mirza. She had never tried to look forward beyond the next sunset since she was born: and as her life was confined to the present, so was it all the more intense. Her unconscious life implied the idea of some future or other, and of course it was to bring happiness: without intense hope, intense life is a contradiction in terms. And here at last enters her third life, in which she was not Pauline, not Zelda, but Sylvia, She could not act the same part night after night without to a certain extent confusing her own identity. This was one result of her unrecognised genius, but it was also the result of the intensity with which she lived every hour, in whatever form it came. It was not that she made deliberate comparisons between her life on and off the stage. But she never quite ceased to be Sylvia, even when she was most simply Zelda. The great situation in the last act, where the heroine has her foot upon the necks of all her enemies, was the grandest ideal of human life that had ever been presented to her-indeed the only consistent and intelligible ideal. This was the thirst which the discovery of the watch had only increased by destroying every reasonable hope of satisfaction. She was almost in the mood that leads us to move fiends to our purpose if the benignant powers refuse to be reconciled.

THE

CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

AUGUST, 1873.

Young Brown.

CHAPTER IX.
NIGHT LINES.

HE Reverend Mr. Mowledy had one delight on this sublunary sphere of unrewarded merit. He was fond of fishing. He might have had some difficulty in reconciling a sport so cruel to a tender conscience, but he reflected that Simon Peter, and Andrew his brother, with James and John the sons of Zebedee, were all fishers, as well as divines; and by the first rules of sound doctrine that which they did unreproved could not be considered wrong without heresy by an orthodox clergyman of the Established Church of England; on the contrary, it was worthy of respect and imitation. Mr. Mowledy was so merciful a man that he practised the fisher

man's art with as little pain to the fish as their case allowed; but he was also a logician and a casuist. He reflected that he might be a humble instrument in the hands of Providence, selected to wage war against the order of Apodes, who ruthlessly devoured snails and other harmless living things alive, prowling greedily about in the darkness beneath the waters to satisfy VOL. XXVIII.-No. 164.

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