eat me like a tailor, and expect me to cut my scenery to
fit their theatre.... I wish you'd come back, chicken. I'm in a
dreadful muddle. I've been working till I can't see, and I've been
reading _The Tempest_ till my mind is as salt as a dried haddock....
But I've drawn a marvellous Caliban, part fish, part frog, part man ...
Life emerging from the sea. I'm sure now that we're all spawned from
the sea, and that life on the earth is only what has been left after
the sun has dried it up....'

Clara looked at him apprehensively. She still felt responsible for
him, but she was no longer part and parcel of him. She was free of his
imagination and could be critical of it.

'Never mind, Charles,' she said. 'Let us go and look at the stage, and
you can tell me what you have planned, and then we will go out and
talk, and decide what we will do during the holidays. I have promised
to go to Sir Henry's in the Lakes for a few days, and Verschoyle has
promised to motor me up there.'

Charles's fingers fumbled rather weakly round his lips, and she saw to
her distress that he had been biting his nails again.

'Aren't you ever coming back, my chicken, my love? ... I'm sorry we
came to London now. We should have gone to Sicily as I wanted. One
can live in such places. Here everybody is so business-like, so set,
so used to doing and thinking in one particular way.'

'Has anything happened?' asked Clara, knowing that he was never
critical without a cause.

'No,' he replied, rather shortly, 'no.'

She was rather irritated by him. He had no right to be as foolish and
helpless as to have let her humiliate him by extricating him from his
argument with Smithson, upon which he ought never to have entered.
Smithson was only a kind of tradesman after all.

They went on to the stage and Charles waxed eloquent over the scenery
he had designed. Eloquence with Charles was rather an athletic
performance. He took a tape measure from his pocket, and raced about
with it, making chalk marks on the boards.

The scenery door was open, and the sunlight poured in in a great shaft
upon him, and Clara, watching him, was suddenly most painfully sorry
for him. He worked himself up into a throbbing enthusiasm, torrents of
words poured from his lips, as with strange gesticulations he described
the towering rocks, the wind-twisted trees, the tangle of lemons, the
blue light illuminating the magician's grotto, the golden light that
should