Iden could plant the potatoes and gossip at the stile, and put the letters unopened on the mantelshelf--a pile of bills over his head where he slept calmly after dinner. Iden could plant potatoes, and cut trusses of hay, and go through _his_ work to appearance unmoved. Amaryllis could not draw--she could not do it; her imagination refused to see the idea; the more she concentrated her mind, the louder she heard the ceaseless grinding and gnashing of teeth. Potatoes can be planted and nails can be hammered, bill-hooks can be wielded and faggots chopped, no matter what the inward care. The ploughman is deeply in debt, poor fellow, but he can, and does, follow the plough, and finds, perhaps, some solace in the dull monotony of his labour. Clods cannot feel. A sensitive mind and vivid imagination--a delicately-balanced organization, that almost lives on its ideas as veritable food--cannot do like this. The poet, the artist, the author, the thinker, cannot follow their plough; their work depends on a serene mind. But experience proves that they _do_ do their work under such circumstances. They do; how greatly then they must be tortured, or for what a length of time they must have suffered to become benumbed. Amaryllis was young, and all her feelings unchecked of Time. She could not sketch--that was a thing of useless paper and pencil; what was wanted was money. She could not read, that was not real; what was wanted was solid coin. So the portfolio was thrust aside, neglected and covered with dust, but she came every day to her flowers in the window-niche. She had drawn up there in the bitter cold of February and March, without a fire, disdainful of ease in the fulness of her generous hope. Her warm young blood cared nothing for the cold, if only by enduring it she could assist those whom she loved. There were artists in the Flamma family in London who made what seemed to her large incomes, yet whose names had never been seen in a newspaper criticism, and who had never even sent a work to the Academy--never even tried to enter. Their work was not of an ambitious order, but it was well paid. Amaryllis did not for a moment anticipate success as an artist, nor think to take the world by storm with her talent. Her one only hope was to get a few pounds now and then--she would have sold twenty sketches for ten shillings--to save her father from insult, and to give her mother the mere necessities of dress she needed. No thought of possible triumph, nor was she sustained by an overmastering love of art; she was inspired by her heart, not her genius. Had circumstances been different she would not have earnestly practised drawing; naturally she was a passive rather than an active artist.