he knew a
solace in which there was something of gratitude.

Yet it was John who revived her misery in its worst form. Pitying her
unoccupied loneliness, he brought home one day a book that he had
purchased from a stall in Farringdon Street; it was a novel (with a
picture on the cover which seemed designed to repel any person not
wholly without taste), and might perhaps serve the end of averting her
thoughts from their one subject. Clara viewed it contemptuously, but
made a show of being thankful, and on the next day she did glance at
its pages. The story was better than its illustration; it took a hold
upon her; she read all day long. But when she returned to herself, it
was to find that she had been exasperating her heart's malady. The book
dealt with people of wealth and refinement, with the world to which she
had all her life been aspiring, and to which she might have attained.
The meanness of her surroundings became in comparison more mean, the
bitterness of her fate more bitter. You must not lose sight of the fact
that since abandoning her work-girl existence Clara had been constantly
educating herself, not only by direct study of books, but through her
association with people, her growth in experience. Where in the old
days of rebellion she had only an instinct, a divination to guide her,
there was now just enough of knowledge to give occupation to her
developed intellect and taste. Far keener was her sense of the loss she
had suffered than her former longing for what she knew only in dream.
The activity of her mind received a new impulse when she broke free
from Scawthorne and began her upward struggle in independence. Whatever
books were obtainable she read greedily; she purchased numbers of plays
in the acting-editions, and studied with the utmost earnestness such
parts as she knew by repute; no actress entertained a more superb
ambition, none was more vividly conscious of power. But it was not only
at stage-triumph that Clara aimed; glorious in itself, this was also to
serve her as a means of becoming nationalised among that race of beings
whom birth and breeding exalt above the multitude. A notable illusion;
pathetic to dwell upon. As a work-girl, she nourished envious hatred of
those the world taught her to call superiors; they were then as remote
and unknown to her as gods on Olympus. From her place behind the
footlights she surveyed the occupants of boxes and stalls in a changed
spirit; the distance was n