Clara Day, an artist, and he had
loved her as such. As woman he had not loved her or any other....
What in the ordinary world passed for love simply did not exist for him
at all.

She turned to Verschoyle.

'Please do what you can for us,' she said. 'And Charles, please don't
try to think of it in anybody else's way but your own. I won't let
them send you to prison. They don't want to do that. They would much
rather have you great and powerful so as to bleed you....'

'It has been very wonderful since you came, chicken,' he said. 'I'm
ten times the man I was. It seems so stupid that because we went into
a dingy office and gabbled a few words we shouldn't be able to be
together.... I sometimes wish we were back in France or Italy in a
studio, with a bird in a cage, and you dancing about, making me laugh
with happiness....'

'I'll see my lawyer,' said Verschoyle.

'For Heaven's sake, don't!' cried Clara. 'Once the lawyers get hold of
it, they'll heap the fire up and throw the fat on it.'

'I'm sorry I forgot myself.... You're a good fellow, Charles, but so
damned silly that you don't deserve your luck.'

They shook hands on it and Verschoyle withdrew, leaving Charles and
Clara to make what they could of the confusion in which they were
plunged.... Charles's way out of it was simply to ignore it. If
people would not or could not live in his fancy world, so much the
worse for them. He did not believe that anything terrible could happen
to him simply because, though calamities of the most serious nature had
befallen him, he had hardly noticed them. He could forget so easily.
He could withdraw and live completely within himself.

He sat at the table and began to draw, and was immediately entirely
absorbed.

'Don't you feel it any more than that, Charles?' she asked.

'If people like to make a fuss, let them,' he said. 'It is their way
of persuading themselves that they are important.... If they put me in
prison, I should just draw on the walls with a nail, and the time would
soon go by. The difference between us and them is that they are in a
hurry and we are not. There won't be much left of my _Tempest_ by the
time they've done with it.... The electricians have secret
instructions from Butcher. There was nothing about lighting in my
contract, so it is to be his and not mine, as if a design could stand
without the lighting planned for it.... There are to be spot-lines on
Sir Henry and Miranda