and you, if he is still pleased with you....'

Charles was talking in a cold, unmoved voice, but she knew that there
must have been a furious tussle. She was up in arms at once,--

'It is disgraceful!' she cried. 'What is the good of his pretending to
let you work in his theatre if you can have nothing as you wish it?'

'He believes in actors,' said Charles, 'People with painted faces and
painted souls, people whose minds are daubed with paint, whose eyes are
sealed with it, whose ears are stopped with it....'

'Am I one of them?' she asked plaintively.

'No! Never! Never!' he said, looking up from his drawing. 'They'll
turn us into a success, chicken, but they won't let us do what we want
to do.... I shan't go near the place again. But you are Ariel, and
without you there can be no _Tempest_.'

'I'll go through with it,' she said, her will setting. 'I'll go
through with it, and I'll make nonsense of everything but you....
You've done all you can, Charles. Just go on working. That's the only
thing, the only thing....'

As she said these words, she thought of Rodd with an acute hostility
that amounted almost to hatred. It was the meeting with him that had
so confounded all her aims, that sudden plunge into humanity with him
that had so exposed her to love that even Verschoyle's tone had changed
towards her.... With Charles, love was as impersonal as a bird's song.
It was only a call to her swift joy and claimed nothing for himself,
though, perhaps, everything for his art. That was where he was so
baffling. He expected the whole world to accept service under his
banner, and was so confident that in time it would do so that no rebuff
ruffled him.

Clara was tempted to accept his point of view, and to run all risks to
serve him; but she realised now, as he did not, the forces arrayed
against him. There was no blinking the fact that what the
Butcher-Bracebridge combination detested was being forced to take him
seriously: him or anything else under the sun. Even the public upon
which they fawned was only one of several factors in their calculations.

'It will all come right, Charles,' she said. 'I am sure it will all
come right. We won't give in. They have diluted you----'

'Diluted?' he exclaimed. 'Butchered!'

She admired him for accepting even that, but, in spite of herself, it
hurt her that he still had no thought for her, but to him only artistic
problems were important. The problems of