that by this dedication of herself to the theatre she
could dominate it. She could not define the danger, but it threatened
Charles, and it menaced Rodd, whom she had decided not to see again.

Sir Henry was delighted with her, and said she had rejuvenated his own
art.

'I used to play Caliban,' he said. 'But Prospero is the part if there
is to be an Ariel who can move as you can move and speak in a fairy
voice as you can speak.... The rest of the play is all in the day's
work....

'Go make thyself like a nymph of the sea: be subject
To no sight but thine and mine, invisible
To every eyeball else.'

And for Clara it was almost literally true. She felt that she was like
a spirit moving among these people marooned on this island of the West
End of London, all spell-bound by the money of this great roaring city,
all enslaved, all amphibious, living between two elements, the actual
and the imagined, but in neither, because of the spell that bound them,
fully and passionately.... Living in the play she saw Sir Henry merged
in Prospero, and when he said,--

'Thou shalt be as free
As mountain winds: but then exactly do
All points of my command,'

she took that also literally, and was blissfully happy to surrender to
a will more potent than her own.... She did not know that the will she
was acknowledging was Shakespeare's, and that with her rare capacity
for living in the imagination she was creeping into his and accepting
life, gaining her freedom, upon his terms.

After some time her spirit began to affect the whole company. She
created an enchantment in which all moved, and Charles, watching, began
to understand more fully the art he had first perceived in her on the
day when he had attempted to force her, like a practised hand, to
capture and fix an apparently accidental effect.... It was no
accident. The girl was possessed with a rare dramatic genius, entirely
unspoiled--pure enough and strong enough to subsist and to move in the
theatrical atmosphere of the Imperium.... What was more, Charles
understood that she was fighting for his ideas, and was, before his
eyes, making their fulfilment possible.

You might talk and argue with Sir Henry until you were blue in the
face, but give him a piece of real acting and he understood at once,
was kindled and became fertile in invention, even courageous in
innovation. Give him that, and he would drop all thought of the public
and the news