She felt she could not cope with Lancelot's quaint logic, which, however unsound, cut deeper into questions than she had yet looked for herself.

Somehow, too, she was tongue-tied before him just when she wanted to be most eloquent in behalf of her principles; and that fretted her still more.

But his manner puzzled her most of all.

First he would run on with his face turned away, as if soliloquising out into the air, and then suddenly look round at her with most fascinating humility; and, then, in a moment, a dark shade would pass over his countenance, and he would look like one possessed, and his lips wreathe in a sinister artificial smile, and his wild eyes glare through and through her with such cunning understanding of himself and her, that, for the first time in her life, she quailed and felt frightened, as if in the power of a madman.

She turned hastily away to shake off the spell.
He sprang after her, almost on his knees, and looked up into her beautiful face with an imploring cry.
'What, do you, too, throw me off?
Will you, too, treat the poor wild uneducated sportsman as a Pariah and an outcast, because he is not ashamed to be a man ?--because he cannot stuff his soul's hunger with cut-and-dried hearsays, but dares to think for himself ?-- because he wants to believe things, and dare not be satisfied with only believing that he ought to believe them ?' She paused, astonished.
'Ah, yes,' he went on, 'I hoped too much! What right had I to expect that you would understand me?
What right, still more, to expect that you would stoop, any more than the rest of the world, to speak to me, as if I could become anything better than the wild hog I seem?
Oh yes!--the chrysalis has no butterfly in it, of course! Stamp on the ugly motionless thing! And yet--you look so beautiful and good!--are all my dreams to perish, about the Alrunen and prophet-maidens, how they charmed our old fighting, hunting forefathers into purity and sweet obedience among their Saxon forests?
Has woman forgotten her mission--to look at the heart and have mercy, while cold man looks at the act and condemns?
Do you, too, like the rest of mankind, think no-belief better than misbelief; and smile on hypocrisy, lip-assent, practical Atheism, sooner than on the unpardonable sin of making a mistake?
Will you, like the rest of this wise world, let a man's spirit rot asleep into the pit, if he will only lie quiet and not disturb your smooth respectabilities; but if he dares, in waking, to yawn in an unorthodox manner, knock him on the head at once, and "break the bruised reed," and "quench the smoking flax"?
And yet you churchgoers have "renounced the world"!' 'What do you want, in Heaven's name ?' asked Argemone, half terrified.
'I want YOU to tell me that.