Page:Yeast. A Problem - Kingsley (1851).djvu/49

 beauty she has filled her eyes in vain, to find it always a dead picture, unsatisfying, unloving—as I have found it.'

Sweet self-deceiver! had you no other reason for choosing as your heroine Sappho, the victim of the idolatry of intellect—trying in vain to fill her heart with the friendship of her own sex, and then sinking into mere passion for a handsome boy, and so down into self-contempt and suicide?

She was conscious, I do believe, of no other reason than that she gave; but consciousness is a dim candle over a deep mine.

'After all,' she said, pettishly, 'people will call it a mere imitation of Shelley's Alastor. And what harm if it is? Is there to be no female Alastor? Has not the woman as good a right as the man to long after ideal beauty—to pine and die if she cannot find it; and regenerate herself in its light?'

Yo-hoo-oo-oo! Youp-youp! Oh-hooo!' arose doleful through the echoing shrubbery.

Argemone started and looked out. It was not a banshee, but a forgotten foxhound puppy, sitting mournfully on the gravel-walk beneath, staring at the clear ghastly moon.

She laughed, and blushed—there was a rebuke in it. She turned to go to rest; and as she knelt and prayed at her velvet faldstool, among all the knick-nacks which nowadays make a luxury of devotion, was it strange if, after she had prayed for the fate of nations and churches, and for those who, as she