life must be left to solve
themselves. She could not help saying,--

'You ought not to leave everything to me, Charles.'

'You can handle people. I can't. I thought I was going to be rich,
but there's no money. And even if this affair is a success I shall be
ashamed of it.... I think I shall write to the papers and repudiate
it. But it is the same everywhere. People take my ideas and vulgarise
them. Actors are the same everywhere. They will leave nothing to the
audience. They want to be adored for the very qualities they have
lost.'

'You don't blame me, then?'

'Blame? What's the good of blaming any one. It doesn't help. It
makes one angry. There is a certain pleasure in that, but it doesn't
help.'

It was brought home to her, then, that all her care for his
helplessness was in vain. He neither needed nor looked for help. It
was all one to him whether he lived in magnificence in a furnished
house or in apartments over a cook-shop.

'I've a good mind to disown the whole production now,' he said.

'No. No. They will do all they can to hurt you then.... I think they
know.'

'Know what?'

'That you have a wife.'

He brought his fist down with such a crash on the frail table that it
cracked right across, and Clara was sickeningly alarmed when she saw
his huge hands grip the table on either side and rend it asunder.
There was something terrible and almost miraculous in his enormous
physical vitality, and his waste of it now in such a petty act of rage
forced her to admit that which she had been attempting to suppress, the
thought of Rodd, and she was compelled now to compare the two men. So
she saw Charles more clearly, and had to acknowledge to herself how
fatally he lacked moral force. She trembled as it was made plain to
her that the old happy days could never come again, and that the child
who had believed in him so implicitly was gone for ever. She had the
frame, the mind, the instinct of a woman, and these things could no
longer be denied.

When his rage was spent, she determined to give him one more chance,--

'We can win through, Charles. We have Verschoyle backing us. I accept
my responsibility, and I will be a wife to you.'

'For God's sake, don't talk like that. I want you to be as you were,
adorable, happy, free.'

She shook her head slowly from side to side.

Charles, offended, went out. She heard him go blundering down the
stairs and out into the street.

She tur