Guy was very indignant when he heard from Pauline the sequel of her sisters' vigilance. That they should afterward have tried to atone with gentleness for what they had made her suffer did not avail with him. Monica and Margaret now impressed him with their unworldly beauty in a strange way, for they became sinister figures like the Lady Geraldine in Christabel, sly malignant sylphs set in ambush to haunt the romantic path of his love. He was intensely aware that he ought not to resent their interference, but that he ought in fact to acknowledge the justice of it and by a stoical endeavour prove himself entitled to the cares of this long engagement. Actually Guy was enduring a violent jealousy, and illogically he began to declare how the others were jealous of him and Pauline. The consciousness that he could not carry her off into immediate marriage galled him and he suffered all the pangs of an unmerited servitude. He and Pauline became the prisoners of tyrants who were urging them to accept the yoke of convention; the more he suffered, the more he knew in his heart that he was culpable, and the more culpable he recognized himself, the more he chafed against the burden of waiting. All the resolutions that with the announcement of their betrothal had seemed to sail before a prospering breeze now turned and beat up against adverse influences and were every moment in danger of being irreparably wrecked. Naturally coincident with all the stress of a situation, that owing to the temperament of the Greys was never relieved by discussion, was a complete failure to advance on the private road of his poetical ambition. All that he had written was seeming vain and bad: all that he was now trying to write deteriorated with every word painfully inscribed upon the cheerless empty page. He had conceived a set of eclogues that were to mark his contempt for the feverish incompetence of the modern school, whose ears had been corrupted by Wagner's filthy din; and all he could manage to achieve were seeming the banal inspirations of Mendelssohn. Guy was like an alchemist perpetually on the verge of discovering the stone that will transmute base metals to gold as he tried to find the secret by which such an one as Beethoven could purify with art the most violent emotions of humanity, yet always preserve their intrinsic value. He craved the secret which even the most obscure Elizabethans seemed to have possessed, that unearthly power of harmony which could fuse all baseness in a glittering song. Passion had never lost itself in arid decoration when they sang; nor yet had it ever betrayed itself with that impudently direct appeal these modern lyrists made, these shameless Rousseaus of verse. Yet he was as bad as any of them, for he was either like them when he tried to write his heart, or he expired in the mere sound of words like the degenerate ruck of the Caroline heirs to a great tradition. He was almost on the point of