Lure of Life Author:Agnes Castle Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III A CONFESSION OF FAITH "YouR letter just to hand, my dear John Gordon. Five lines for my five hundred, but how pregnant! It is like you, and goo... more »d of you, to be so stern with me, and to be so sure that I shall be grateful and not resentful for your sternness. How urbane you can be with those you don't think worth your interest! Allow this sop to my vanity. 'Remember Hippolytus was no prig,' say you. Master, is that all that my soul laid bare before you proved me? "Then there is that line from Euripides, in that Greek writing of yours which is in itself pure charm to the eye. Ol yap Trveoires "Well, now, as I sit with your letter before me, I feel again — and would it were reality ! — the fire of your deep- set eyes upon me, drawing the truth from me, drawing my inmost thought and hidden weakness. Dear John Gordon, have I been trying to pose to you as Hippolytus? I am (and woe for my sordid little story) no such highhearted and happy, free comrade of Artemis. I once tried to kindle my fire to Cypris — Great Jove, what a fizzle it was, and what a dingy smoke it made! Even now, I sometimes feel the horror of it in my nostrils. It was in my first days at Oxford when I had a craving to live thelife of the youth about me for the full enjoyment of my own youth and the fellowship of similar experiences with my comrades. A brief spell of madness, hideous days! I tried to laugh their laughter, drink in their cups, love as they loved. I but too soon understood that I was not as my fellows. Some spring of self-illusion was wanting in me, something placed me higher or lower than the average man. "But if I am to be the poorer in those natural emotions, am I not perhaps the richer in those infinitely more delicate, more satisfying ecstasies of the mind? For me, more than...« less