dd's terrible concentration ending in
impotence or the dissipation of real powers, as in Butcher and Mann, in
fantasy.

Absorbed in her work, intent upon the forthcoming production, she was
detached from them all and could at last discover how little any of
them needed her. She could not really enter into their work though all
three had been disturbed by her and diverted for a time at least from
their habitual purposes.... What mattered in each of the three men was
the artist, and in each the artist was fettered by life. She had
promised them release only to plunge them into greater difficulties.

She brooded over herself, wondering what she was, and how she came to
be so unconcerned with things that to other women seemed paramount. It
was nothing to her that Charles had a wife. It had all happened long
before he met her, and was no affair of hers.... That Sir Henry should
make love to her was merely comic. She could not even take advantage
of it, for in that direction she could not move at all. Instinctively
she knew that her sex was given her for one purpose only, and that the
highest, and she could not turn it to any base or material use. While
she adhered to this she could be Ariel, pure spirit to dominate her
life and direct her will, which no power on earth could break.... How
came she to be so free, and so foreign to the world of women? Her
upbringing! Her early independence! Or some new spirit stirring in
humanity?

Already she had caught from Rodd his habit of generalising from his own
experience, and in her heart she knew it, knew that she had begun what
might prove to be her real life with him, but, caught up as she had
been in Mann's schemes and dreams and visions, she would not accept
this until all the threads were snapped. Being frank with herself, she
knew that she desired and intended to snap them, but in her own time
and with as little hurt as possible to those concerned.... Meanwhile
it was wonderful, it was almost intoxicatingly comic to carry all the
confused facts of her own life into the ordered world where she was
Ariel and to imagine Mann, for instance, discoursing of birds and
fishes to Trinculo and Stephano, or Rodd, with his passionate dreams of
a sudden jet of loveliness in a desert of misery comparing notes with
good Gonzalo, while she, both as Clara Day and as Ariel, danced among
them and played freakish tricks upon them, and lured them on to believe
that all kinds of mar