to country. They were
refreshing in their frank simplicity, compared with which life with
Charles was oppressive in its complexity.

As she surveyed the two, Clara was torn asunder for a time and was
reluctant to take the plunge, and yet she knew that this was the world
to which Charles belonged, this world of violent contrasts, of vivid
light and shadowy darkness, of painted illusion and the throbbing
reality of the audience, of idle days and feverish nights. His mind
was soaked in it, and his soul, all except that obscure part of it that
delighted in flowers and in her own youth, hungered for it, and yet it
seemed she had to force him into it.... If only he had a little more
will, a little more intelligence.

Often she found herself thinking of him as 'poor Charles,' and then she
set her teeth, and shook back her hair, and vowed that no one should
ever think of her as 'poor Clara.' ... Life had been so easy when they
had drifted together from studio to studio, but it threatened to be
mighty difficult now that they had squared up to life and to this huge
London....

_Ivanhoe_ staggered on for six weeks and then collapsed, and an old
successful melodrama was revived to carry the Imperium over the early
summer months. In this production, as a protegee of Miss Wainwright's,
Clara played a small part in which she had ten words to say.... She
was quite inaudible though she seemed to herself to be using every atom
of voice in her slim young body, but always her voice seemed to fill
her own head until it must surely burst.

'Nerves,' said Miss Wainwright. 'You'll get your technique all right,
and then you won't hear yourself speak any more than you do when you
are talking in a room. It's just a question of losing yourself, and
that you learn to do unconsciously.... It'll come all right, dearie.
It'll come all right.'

Clara was determined that it should come all right, though she knew it
would not until she had overcome her loathing of painting her face, and
pencilling her eyes, and dabbing red paint into the corners of them.
So much did she detest this at first that her personality repudiated
this false projection of herself and left her helpless. Over and over
again she said to herself,--

'I shall never be an actress. I shall never be an actress....' But
then again she said, 'I will.'

There was a violence in appearing in the glaring light before so many
people which offended her deeply, and yet she kn