nd
forget their jealousy and suspicion of each other's aims.

VIII

SOLITUDE

Verschoyle swept aside her reluctance to accept gifts from him, and she
allowed him to furnish her rooms for her upon condition that he never
came there without her permission. He said,--

'Why shouldn't I have the pleasure of indulging my desire to give you
everything in the world? People will talk! ... People talk anyhow in
London. If we were seen walking together down Piccadilly, there would
be talk. They will say I am going to marry you, but we know
different.... Your way of living is exactly my ideal, absolute
independence, peace, and privacy. We're rather alike in that. It
seems so odd that we should be living with these people whose whole aim
in life is publicity.'

They had many happy hours together reading and discussing the books
which he bought for her by the armful at a shop in Charing Cross Road,
where, open to the street, were piles of books almost blatantly
subversive of society--Nietsche, Havelock Ellis, Shaw, Ibsen, Anarchist
tracts, Socialist and Labour journals, R.P.A. cheap reprints, every
sort and kind of book that in an ordinary shop would only be procured
upon a special order.... It was a very fierce shop. Its woodwork was
painted scarlet, and above the shelves in gilt letters were such names
as Morris, Marx, Bakounin, Kropotkin, Lassalle, and mottoes such as
'The workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains.'

It was Clara who discovered the shop in her wanderings through the West
End, which she desired to know even to its remotest crannies, and its
oddity seized her imagination when she discovered that for all its
fierceness it was kept by a gentle little old Scotsman, who most
ferociously desired the destruction of society, but most gently helped
all who needed help and most wholly sympathised with all, and they were
many, who turned to him for sympathy.... The frequenters of his shop
were poor, mostly long-haired eaters of nuts, and drinkers of ideas.
There were young men who hovered in the background of his shop arguing,
chatting, filling in the time they had to spend away from their
lodgings in the frequent intervals between their attempts to do work
for which their convictions made them unfitted. They believed, as he
did, in the nobility of work, but could find none that was not ignoble.
It was his boast that he had no book in his shop in which he did not
believe.

The bea