d to the
cataclysmic change in her, blind to her new beauty and to her newly
gathered force of character. After all, the magic of the stage was
only illusion, a trick that, if it were not a flowering of the deeper
magic of the heart, was empty, vain, contemptible, a thing of darkness
and cajolery.

'Perhaps it was just an accident,' said Clara.

'Do it again!' said Charles, in a tone of command.

'What?'

'Do it again!'

'I can't.'

'Do it again, I tell you. When you do a thing like that you have to
find out how you did it. Art isn't a thing of chance. You must do it
again now.'

'No.'

To her horror and amazement he pounced on her, seized her roughly by
the shoulders, and shook her until her head rolled from side to side
and her teeth chattered. He was beside himself with passion, ruthless,
impersonal in his fury to catch and hold this treasure of art which had
so suddenly appeared in the child whom hitherto he had regarded as
about as important as his hat or his walking-stick.

'By Jove,' he said, 'I might have known it was not for nothing that I
fished you out of Picquart's studio....'

'How dare you speak to me like that?'

She knocked his hands away and stood quivering in an outraged fury, and
lashed out at him with her tongue.

'I'm not paint that you can squeeze out of a tube,' she said. 'You
treat people as though they were just that and then you complain if
they round on you.... I know what you want. You want to squeeze out
of me what your own work lacks....'

Charles reeled under this assault and his arms fell limply by his side.

'Forgive me,' he said, 'I didn't know what I was doing. I was knocked
out with my astonishment and delight.... Really, really I forgot the
stage was empty. I thought we were working....'

Clara stared at him. Could he really so utterly lose himself in the
play as that? Or was he only persuading himself that it was so? ...
With a sudden intuition she knew that in all innocence he was lying to
her, and that what had enraged him was the knowledge, which he could
never admit, that she was no longer a child living happily in his
imagination but a human being and an artist who had entered upon a
royal possession of her own. She had outstripped him. She had become
an artist without loss of humanity. Henceforth she must deal with
realities, leaving him to his painted mummery... She could understand
his frenzy, his fury, his despair.

'That will do, Cha