At the time she left Solesby her father and mother were abroad, and it was apparently not convenient that she should join them.  Marcella, looking back, could not remember that she had ever been much desired at home.  No doubt she had been often moody and tiresome in the holidays; but she suspected—­nay, was certain—­that there had been other and more permanent reasons why her parents felt her presence with them a burden.  At any rate, when the moment came for her to leave Miss Pemberton, her mother wrote from abroad that, as Marcella had of late shown decided aptitude both for music and painting, it would be well that she should cultivate both gifts for a while more seriously than would be possible at home.  Mrs. Boyce had made inquiries, and was quite willing that her daughter should go, for a time, to a lady whose address she enclosed, and to whom she herself had written—­a lady who received girl-students working at the South Kensington art classes.

So began an experience, as novel as it was strenuous.  Marcella soon developed all the airs of independence and all the jargon of two professions.  Working with consuming energy and ambition, she pushed her gifts so far as to become at least a very intelligent, eager, and confident critic of the art of other people—­which is much.  But though art stirred and trained her, gave her new horizons and new standards, it was not in art that she found ultimately the chief excitement and motive-power of her new life—­not in art, but in the birth of social and philanthropic ardour, the sense of a hitherto unsuspected social power.

One of her girl-friends and fellow-students had two brothers in London, both at work at South Kensington, and living not far from their sister.  The three were orphans.  They sprang from a nervous, artistic stock, and Marcella had never before come near any one capable of crowding so much living into the twenty-four hours.  The two brothers, both of them skilful and artistic designers in different lines, and hard at work all day, were members of a rising Socialist society, and spent their evenings almost entirely on various forms of social effort and Socialist propaganda.  They seemed to Marcella’s young eyes absolutely sincere and quite unworldly.  They lived as workmen; and both the luxuries and the charities of the rich were equally odious to them.  That there could be any “right” in private property or private wealth had become incredible to them; their minds were full of lurid images or resentments drawn from the existing state of London; and though one was humorous and handsome, the other, short, sickly, and pedantic, neither could discuss the Socialist ideal without passion, nor hear it attacked without anger.  And in milder measure their sister, who possessed more artistic gift than either of them, was like unto them.