She remembered how when Horace had first told her of the subject, Helen in Leuce, she had looked it up in Lempriere, found a reference in Homer and another in Euripides, had shaken her head and said, “What can he make of that?”

Now for the first time she saw what he had made of it.  Rickman’s Helen was to the Helena of Euripides what Shelley’s Prometheus is to the Prometheus of AEschylus.  Rickman had done what seemed good in his own eyes.  He had made his own metres, his own myth and his own drama.  A drama of flesh and blood, a drama of spirit, a drama of dreams.  Only a very young poet could have had the courage to charge it with such a weight of symbolism; but he had contrived to breathe into his symbols the breath of life; the phantoms of his brain, a shadowy Helen and Achilles, turned into flesh and blood under his hands.  It was as if their bodies, warm, throbbing, full-formed, instinct with irresistible and violent life, had come crashing through the delicate fabric of his dream.

As she read Lucia’s mind was troubled, shaken out of its critical serenity.  She heard a new music; she felt herself in the grasp of a new power, a new spirit.  It was not the classic spirit.  There was too much tumult in its harmonies, as if the music of a whole orchestra had been torn from its instruments and flung broadcast, riding triumphantly on the wings of a great wind.  There were passages (notably the Hymn to Aphrodite in the second Act) that brought the things of sense and the terrible mysteries of flesh and blood so near to her that she flinched.  Rickman had made her share the thrilling triumph, the flushed passion of his youth.  And when she was most hurt and bruised under the confusion of it, he lifted her up and carried her away into the regions of spiritual beauty and eternal strength.

It was all over; the tumult of the flesh and the agony of the spirit; over, too, the heaven-piercing singing, the rapture of spirit and of flesh made one.  Rickman had ended his amazing drama with the broad majestic music of his Hymn to Athene.  Lucia had borne up under the parting of Helen and Menelaus; but she was young, and at that touch of superb and ultimate beauty, two tears, the large and heavy tears of youth, fell upon Rickman’s immaculate manuscript, where their marks remain to this day.  The sight of them had the happy effect of making her laugh, and then, and not till then, she thought of Rickman—­Mr. Rickman.  She thought of him living a dreadful life among dreadful people; she thought of him sitting in his father’s shop, making catalogues raisonnes; she thought of him sitting in the library making one at that very moment.  And this was the man she had had the impertinence to pity; whom Horace would say she now proposed to patronize.  As she stood contemplating the pile of manuscript before her, Miss Lucia Harden felt (for a great lady) quite absurdly small.

In that humble mood she was found by Miss Palliser.