o be, he was never quite at his ease with her. She was not
calculable like the women he had known. What they wanted were things
definite and almost always material, while her purposes were secret,
subtle, and, as he sometimes half suspected, beyond his range. She was
new. That was her fascination. She belonged to this strange world
that was coming into being of discordant rhythmic music, of Russian
ballet and novels, of a kind of poetry that anybody could write, of
fashions that struck him as indecent, of a Society more riotous and
rowdy than ever the Bohemia of his day had been, because women--ladies
too--were the moving spirit in it and women never did observe the rules
of any game.... And yet, in his boyish, sentimental way, he adored
her, and clung to her as though he thought she could take him into this
new world.

'I can't go on with Mann,' he said almost tearfully. 'It is too
disturbing. You never know what he is going to do, and, after all, the
theatre is a business, isn't it?-- Isn't it?'

'I suppose so,' replied Clara.

It was extraordinary to feel the great machine of the theatre gathering
momentum for the launching of the play. It was marvellous to be caught
up, as the rehearsals proceeded, into the loveliest fantasy ever
created by the human mind. Clara threw herself into it heart and soul.
Life outside the play ceased for her. She lived entirely between her
rooms and the stage of the theatre. Unlike the other players, when she
was not wanted she was watching the rest of the piece, surrendered
herself to it completely, and was continually discovering a vast power
of meaning in words that had been so familiar to her as to have become
like remembered music, an habitual thought without conscious reference
to anything under the sun.... And as her sense of the beauty of the
play grew more living to her, so she saw the apparatus that kept it in
motion as more and more comic.... Mr Gillies had a thousand and one
points on which he consulted his chief with the most ruthless disregard
of the work going forward on the stage. Lady Butcher would come
bustling in, take Sir Henry aside and whisper to him, and words like
Bracebridge--Sir George--Lady Amabel--Prime Minister--Chancellor--would
come hissing out. Then when the rehearsal was resumed she would stay
surveying it with the indulgent smile of a vicar's wife at a school
treat.... During the exquisite scene between Prospero and Miranda one
day th