d suffered so long would be broken by the
drama. The human heart alone could break the obsessions of the human
mind, otherwise humanity would lose its temper and try to smash them by
cracking human heads.... Rodd always thought of humanity as an unity,
an organism subject to the laws of organic life. Talk about persons
and nations, groups and combinations, seemed to him irrelevant.
Humanity had a will, and everything had to comply with it or suffer.
At present it seemed to him that the will of humanity was diseased, and
that society here in London, as elsewhere, was inert. He escaped into
his imagination where he could employ to the full his dramatic energy.
On the whole he hated books, but his affection for the Charing Cross
Road, and for the bookseller, drew him to the shop dedicated to the
efforts of revolutionary idealists, whom he thought on the whole
mistaken. He desired not revolution but the restoration of the health
of humanity, and like so many others, he had his nostrum--the drama.
However, the air was so full of theories, social and political, that he
did not expect any one to understand him.

'Have you got Mann's new book?' he asked the bookseller, who produced
it: forty plates of Charles's pet designs with rather irrelevant
letterpress. Rodd bought it, and that moment Clara entered the shop.

Rodd paid no attention to her. The bookseller left him with his money
in his hand, and he stood turning over the pages of Charles's book, and
shaking his head over the freakish will o' the wisp paragraphs. Clara
spoke, and he stiffened, stared at the books in front of him, turned,
caught sight of her profile, and stood gazing in amazement--a girl's
face that was more than pretty, a face in which there was purpose, and
proof of clear perception.

After her holiday she was looking superbly well. Health shone in her.
She moved, and it was with complete unconcern for her surroundings.
She lived at once in Rodd's imagination, took her rightful place as of
course side by side with Beatrice, Portia, Cordelia, and Sophia
Western. His imagination had not to work on her at all to re-create
her, or to penetrate to the dramatic essence of her personality, which
she revealed in her every gesture.

He could not hear what she was saying, but her voice went thrilling to
his heart. He gasped and reeled and dropped Charles Mann's book with a
crash.

Clara, who had not seen him, turned, and she, too, was overcome. He
m