ht to do.

'The man Jesus put you right years ago,' said the bookseller. 'Sell
all that thou hast and give to the poor.'

'But I can't,' said Verschoyle. 'I'm only a _cestui que trust_.'

To both Verschoyle and Clara the bookshop was a place of escape, a
holiday ground where they could play with ideas which to Verschoyle
were a new kind of toy. With Mann there was always a certain strain
for him, because Mann wanted something definite; but with the
bookseller and his young friends, he was at his ease, for they were
very like himself, without ambition, and outside all the press and
hurry of society. Like himself they wanted nothing except to be
amused, and like himself they hated amusement which entailed effort.

Clara, however, as usual took it seriously. The Kropotkin Memoirs had
jolted her imagination, and she saw the young men of the bookshop as
potential Kropotkins, people who stood upon the edge of an abyss of
suffering and asked nothing better than to be engulfed in the world's
misery.

The disturbance in her serenity was so great that for some weeks she
shut herself up alone to collect her ideas. The world was not so
simple as she had thought; certainly by no means so simple as it had
appeared during her three years with Charles. As she had said, London
was different. She had progressed so far with this great London of
Butcher and Verschoyle only to find through the bookshop another London
suddenly opened up before her--the London of the poor.... Poverty she
had never known, except the poverty of the world of art which is
created rather by indifference to money than by the grim lack of it.
With Charles days had been so busy, nights so happy, that it was a
small thing that every now and then she had to go hungry for a day in
order that he might not lack. The immense poverty which now she saw
everywhere in this West End of London, in courts off Charing Cross
Road, in vast workmen's dwellings, in Soho, and by her own rooms at the
back of Leicester Square, everywhere round the calculated magnificence
of the theatres, overwhelmed her and changed many of her conceptions;
first of all her attitude towards Kitty Messenger, whom she had
regarded as a vulgar nuisance, a horrible intrusion from the past. It
was impossible for her to accept her position of security above the
dirty sea of poverty.

She loathed the poor, their indolence, their coarseness, their horrible
manners, their loud mirth and violent a