Marcella saw much of these three persons, and something of their friends.  She went with them to Socialist lectures, or to the public evenings of the Venturist Society, to which the brothers belonged.  Edie, the sister, assaulted the imagination of her friend, made her read the books of a certain eminent poet and artist, once the poet of love and dreamland, “the idle singer of an empty day,” now seer and prophet, the herald of an age to come, in which none shall possess, though all shall enjoy.  The brothers, more ambitious, attacked her through the reason, brought her popular translations and selections from Marx and Lassalle, together with each Venturist pamphlet and essay as it appeared; they flattered her with technical talk; they were full of the importance of women to the new doctrine and the new era.

The handsome brother was certainly in love with her; the other, probably.  Marcella was not in love with either of them, but she was deeply interested in all three, and for the sickly brother she felt at that time a profound admiration—­nay, reverence—­which influenced her vitally at a critical moment of life.  “Blessed are the poor”—­“Woe unto you, rich men”—­these were the only articles of his scanty creed, but they were held with a fervour, and acted upon with a conviction, which our modern religion seldom commands.  His influence made Marcella a rent-collector under a lady friend of his in the East End; because of it, she worked herself beyond her strength in a joint attempt made by some members of the Venturist Society to organise a Tailoresses’ Union; and, to please him, she read articles and blue-books on Sweating and Overcrowding.  It was all very moving and very dramatic; so, too, was the persuasion Marcella divined in her friends, that she was destined in time, with work and experience, to great things and high place in the movement.

The wholly unexpected news of Mr. Boyce’s accession to Mellor had very various effects upon this little band of comrades.  It revived in Marcella ambitions, instincts and tastes wholly different from those of her companions, but natural to her by temperament and inheritance.  The elder brother, Anthony Craven, always melancholy and suspicious, divined her immediately.

“How glad you are to be done with Bohemia!” he said to her ironically one day, when he had just discovered her with the photographs of Mellor about her.  “And how rapidly it works!”

“What works?” she asked him angrily.

“The poison of possession.  And what a mean end it puts to things!  A week ago you were all given to causes not your own; now, how long will it take you to think of us as ’poor fanatics!’—­and to be ashamed you ever knew us?”

“You mean to say that I am a mean hypocrite!” she cried.  “Do you think that because I delight in—­in pretty things and old associations, I must give up all my convictions?  Shall I find no poor at Mellor—­no work to do?  It is unkind—­unfair.  It is the way all reform breaks down—­through mutual distrust!”