ngs, she knew that they had taken
refuge in them from just such convulsions in which, had they attempted
to face them, they must have been swamped. They clung to external
things to prevent themselves being lost in the whirlpool of the
internal world of womanhood.... Ah! It was supreme to be a woman, to
contain the most fierce and most powerful of all life's manifestations,
to smile and to distil all these violent forces into charm, to suffer
and to turn all suffering into visible beauty.

If Clara now had any easy pity it was for men, who live always in
fantasy, lured on by their own imaginings in the vain effort to solve
the mystery of which only a true and loyal woman has the key.

When once more she approached her external life it was through the
bookshop, where she found her friend the bookseller munching his lunch
of wheaten biscuits and apples in the dingy little room at the back of
his shop.

He offered her an apple. She took it and sat on a pile of books tied
up with a rope.

'You're looking bonny,' he said.

'I think I'll come and be your assistant.'

'A fine young leddy like you?'

'I might meet some one like Kropotkin.'

'Ah! Isn't that grand? There's none o' your Dumas and Stevensons can
beat that; a real happening in our own life-time.... But I can no
afford an assistant.'

'Oh! You always seem to have plenty of people in your shop.'

'These damned publishers put their prices up and up on the poor
bookseller, and my brains are all my capital, and I will not sell the
stuff that's turned out like bars o' soap, though the authors may be as
famous as old Nick and the publishers may roll by in their cars and
build their castles in the countryside.... I sell my books all the
week, and I grow my own food on my own plot on Sundays, and I'll win
through till I'm laid in the earth, and have a pile o' books to keep me
down when I'm dead as they have done in my lifetime.'

He thrust a slice of apple into his mouth and munched away at it, rosy
defiance of an ill-ordered world shining from his healthy cheeks.

On his desk Clara saw his account book, a pile of bills, and old
cheques, and it was not difficult to guess the cause of his trouble.

'I'm sure I should sell your books for you.'

'You'd draw all London into my shop, young leddy, as you'll draw them
to the playhouse; but bookselling is a dusty trade and is not for fair
wits or fine persons.'

Clara looked out into the shop, and was happ