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.