Humphrey stood listening. To this young man, perhaps to others, the effect of Molly's singing, as of her presence and of her voice and of her eyes, was to fill his mind with visions. They came to him in the shape of dancing-girls with tambourines and castanets. When a girl is endowed with the real faculty of singing, she may create in the minds of those who hear, those visions which best fit their inclinations and their natures. To this young man came the troop of dancing-girls, because his disposition inclined him that way: they sang as they danced, and they threw up white arms to a music of wild and reckless joy; they filled him with the longing, the yearning, for the delirium of youth and rapture which seizes every young man from time to time, and sometimes possesses him all the days of his youth, and casts him out long before his youth is over to the husks among the swine. Others, more fortunate, feel the yearning, too, but they make of it a stimulus and an incentive. There is no such rapture beneath the sky as young men dream of; yet the vision may make them poets, and may strengthen them for endeavour; and it may fill them with the worship of woman, which is the one thing needful for a man. Humphrey, wholly filled and possessed by this rapture, would not be cast forth to the husks, because--oh! sordid reason--his mother would pay his debts. Alas! poor Molly! and she so ignorant. She had no such vision--girls never do. When young men reel and tremble with the vision of rapture inconceivable, girls have to be contented with a mild happiness. To them there comes no dream of gleaming arms--no imagined magic of voice and eyes and face. There is no such thing as a Prodigal daughter; the humble _rôle_ of the Prodigal Girl is to minister, as with the white arms and the castanets, to the service of the Prodigal Son; for which she, too, has to go out presently to sit with the swine, and to maintain a precarious existence on the husks. Molly had no such vision: yet by the mere power of her voice she could awaken this vision in the mind of a listener. It is a power which makes an actress; makes a queen; makes a lady of authority; whom all obey to whom that power appeals. Molly, I say, had no respect at all for the flowery way; she could not understand, nor did she ask, why young men should want to dance hand-in-hand with the girls; nor why they like to crown their heads with roses; nor why they drink huge draughts of the wine that fizzeth in the cup, to make their heads as light as their feet.