Page:Her Roman Lover (Frothingham, 1911).djvu/53

 But it no longer seemed to her impossible that there might exist men whose supreme vocation it was to love.

She had been educated to the consciousness of an imperfect and unhappy world which needed the more or less strenuous attention of each individual: men and women must work in such a world, work either to win money and power which would make them less imperfect and unhappy than the rest, or work to comfort and save the rest. What room was there, then, for women who only existed to be loved, and men whose only vocation it was to love them? That such men and women were a paramount influence in the society about her was stirring her supple and sensitive nature. Her imagination was troubled. Instincts, dissatisfactions, longings which she had been dimly conscious of at home, or which had been awakened only by poetry, music, or some poignantly beautiful instant of earth or sky, were becoming definite things to her as she walled alone between the ilex trees of Roman gardens. She felt her youth, and youth without love suddenly appeared to her as a futile and abnormal thing. Were not those brief hours, those hours that must seem strange compared with the rest of life, the hours of passion, of wonder, of exquisite or terrible madness, worth all the others