5IO 



The Review of Reviews. 



November 1, 1906. 



of affording charitable relief to the widow and 

 orphan daughter of a scientific friend. Mingled with 

 this there may have been an afterthought that this 

 new member of his household might be as useful a 

 private secretary to him as she had been to her 

 father in his lifetime. So the grave, kindly-eyed 

 savant, the King of Shadows, who had made the 

 whole realm of human knowledge his own, added 

 the little Sybil to his possessions, and took her and 

 her mother to live under his roof. Sybil went a 

 willing and quite unknown victim to the sacrifice. 

 She used to help her father in his plodding, un- 

 ceasing work — " a wise learned girl at fourteen, 

 who writes official letters, makes notes, and copies 

 diagrams, as another girl would keep poultry or do 

 woolwork." So when Burgoyne asks her, two days 

 after her father's funeral, to transfer her trained 

 energies to another study, she assents without other 

 emotion than that of gratitude. 



All that sbe gives up is nothing to her. She is sim- 

 plicity itself: a daughter of science, handmaid of these 

 old tliiuking mea — without dreams, without cravings. . . . 

 It will he all just the same — husband to work for, instead 

 of father. 



At fifty-six Burgoyne was splendid ; never a 

 strong man really, but the life in him most wonder- 

 ful. Nevertheless it seems to have been a marriage 

 only in name. If it was ever consummated, there 

 were no results either in offspring or in the awaken- 

 ing of womanhood in the breast of this worshipper 

 at the shrine of thought. So she lived on year after 

 year, contented, submissive, enjoying the placid con- 

 solation of an atrophied sex. No one could have 

 been kinder than the high priest of science. He 

 was a tender and considerate master whom she 

 served diligently and well, for years happily uncon- 

 scious of need for more. 



Into this secluded and comfortable cloister of 

 modern science, where thought was all in all, where 

 God was not — not even the fair Freya of any of the 

 deities of Olympus — there entered the inevitable 

 disturbing elements. First, one Jack Stone, a bril- 

 liantly clever medical student whose health had 

 broken down from overwork, and who is added, as 

 was Sybil, to the worlcing staff of the Temple. 

 After him came a young and pretty great-niece of 

 the old philosopher, who, with characteristic kindli- 

 ness of heart took compassion upon this lonely child 

 of the third generation and brought her up as his 

 daughter, Effie was young and vivacious, and she 

 dragged Mrs, Burgoyne from the dim thought world 

 into the dancing daylight. Aunt and niece become 

 pla}Tnates, they learn to cycle together, thev live 

 together, they work together, and at last they both 

 love together the same man — Jack Stone, to wit, 

 who at last finds himself engaged to one and in 

 love with the other. 



It is the revenge of the blind god. At first Sybil 

 is entirely unconscious of the tempest that is brood- 

 ing beneath the placid surface of things. All three, 

 Stone, Effie and Sybil, are represented as preoccu- 



pied continually with guarding the flame of Bur- 

 goyne's genius, shielding him from any interruption, 

 ministering to his slightest wants, and preserving all 

 his precious savings from oblivion. Burgovne is not 

 so much the high priest of the Temple of Science — 

 he is Science itself, the new Idol of Mankind whom 

 all must worship and whom these dwellers within 

 the threshold must for ever serve and obey, regard- 

 ing the privilege of offering such service and obedi- 

 ence as their supreme reward. 



Effie was the first to become conscious of longings 

 that philosophy, even of the latest modem kind, 

 could not satisfy. Her uncle finds that she fills her 

 portfolio with sketches of Stone, his handsome and 

 clever secretary, and at once draws the deduction 

 that she is in love. When she admits the soft im- 

 peachment the old man promptly makes a match of 

 it, hustling Stone into an engagement with a deft 

 dexteritv and an irresistible authority which left 

 Stone no chance of asserting a will somewhat en- 

 feebled by ill health against the mandate of his 

 master, who backs his match-making by making a 

 handsome marriage settlement on his niece. This 

 engagement was the beginning of the end. Mrs. 

 BurgoxTie, who before then had not even seen a 

 faint glimmering of the fact that she herself had 

 fallen in love with her constant companion and 

 fellow-secretary, woke up to discover the truth. 

 Before the engagement Stone had told her : — 



I fight for life sometimes, and then I know what the 

 old monks felt. You cant understand— no woman can. 

 You women have learut your lessons. You can crush out 

 the longings, freeze the instinct of the blood with streams 

 of cold thought. The nuns never suffered as the monks 

 did. In men's lives the flesh dies hard. I tell you there 

 are days when I feel I shall go mad. melancholy mad. 

 when I think of it — not of noble hopes that are gone, but 

 of the base things I am called on to renounce, the plea- 

 sures of the senses, the things the intellect spurns. 



When the engagement was announced, Sybil im- 

 agined that Stone had felt all these things because 

 he was in love with Effie. She felt vaguely miser- 

 able, and as the months went on the spectacle of 

 Effie's jov in life increased her discontent She, 

 too, began to realise that perhaps Stone was wrong 

 in saying that the nuns never suffered as the monks 

 did. The world became verv' grey to her. She 

 could not sleep. She bec.ime restless. " Why is 

 there pain in the thought of it — of the union itself, 

 the happv lover, the thrice-happy bride ?" She 

 could not answer those questions, for as yet she was 

 unaware of her own feelings towards Stone, She is 

 a sexed creature as yet unaware of her sex. But 

 the day of the awakening was not far off. One fine 

 summer's da\, when the trippers were abroad in 

 the seaside village where they lived, filling the place 

 with an atmosphere of amorous emotion, Sybil 

 bicycled far away into the countr}' into a beech 

 wood, and sat down in the shade to rest and to 

 think : — 



To-day for the first time she analysed the thought itself 

 in which the pain lay throbbing. Suddenly she 



burst into tears — passionate sobbing that seems to burn 

 her throat — a child's passionate revolt against injustice. 



