ned to her couch by the window and lay looking at the sun
setting behind the roofs, chimneys, and towers of London. Amethyst and
ruddy was the sky: smoked yellow and amber: blue and green, speckled
with little dark clouds. She drank in its beauty, and lost herself in
the dying day, aching at heart because there was nowhere in humanity a
beauty of equal power in which she could lose herself, but everywhere
barriers of egoism, intrigue, selfish calculation.... She thought of
the little bookseller in the Charing Cross Road.... 'Doing good to
others is doing good to yourself....' Ay, but make very sure that you
are doing good and not well-intentioned harm.

She had meant to help Charles, had sacrificed herself to him, and look
what had come of it! Deep within her heart she knew that she had been
at fault, and that the mischief had been done when she had imposed her
will on him.... As a child she had been brought up in the Catholic
faith, and she had still some remnants of a religious conscience, and
to this now she whispered that this was the sin against the Holy Ghost,
for one person to impose his will on that of another.

XV

IN BLOOMSBURY

At the same time, in his attic, Rodd was pacing up and down his empty
room, surveying the impotence to which he had reduced both his life and
his work by his refusal to accept the social system of his time. His
work was consciously subversive, and therefore unprofitable: his life
was nothing. He was a solitary in London, as though he spoke a
language which no one understood. So indeed he did. His words had
meanings for him to which no one else had the smallest clue, for they
referred rather to his imagined world than to any actuality.

Hitherto that had troubled him not at all. Spinoza, Kant, Galileo had
all talked a language unintelligible to their contemporaries, and with
how many had Nietzsche been able to converse? The stories had it that
there was one butcher and he was mad.

Groping with his imagination into the vitals of the society into which
he had been born, Rodd had consoled himself with the assurance that a
cataclysm would come to smash the odious system by which the old
enslaved the young, and that then there would be a cleaner atmosphere
in which his ideas could live, and his words would be intelligible to
all, because in it that deeper consciousness which was released in his
imagined world would come into play to sweep away all falsehoods and
st