ody else there, she was accepted as a rational and normal--or
shall we say inevitable?--sort of human being. At worst they called her
The Pusher; but to them no more than to herself had it ever occurred
that she was pushing the air, and pushing it in a wrong direction.
Still, she was not happy. She was growing desperate. Her one asset, the
fact that her mother was what the Epsom greengrocer called a carriage
lady had no exchange value, apparently. It had prevented her from
getting educated, because the only education she could have afforded
was education with the Earlscourt green grocer's daughter. It had led
her to seek the society of her mother's class; and that class simply
would not have her, because she was much poorer than the greengrocer,
and, far from being able to afford a maid, could not afford even a
housemaid, and had to scrape along at home with an illiberally treated
general servant. Under such circumstances nothing could give her an air
of being a genuine product of Largelady Park. And yet its tradition
made her regard a marriage with anyone within her reach as an
unbearable humiliation. Commercial people and professional people in a
small way were odious to her. She ran after painters and novelists; but
she did not charm them; and her bold attempts to pick up and practise
artistic and literary talk irritated them. She was, in short, an utter
failure, an ignorant, incompetent, pretentious, unwelcome, penniless,
useless little snob; and though she did not admit these
disqualifications (for nobody ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind
until the possibility of a way out dawns on them) she felt their
effects too keenly to be satisfied with her position.

Clara had a startling eyeopener when, on being suddenly wakened to
enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who dazzled her and produced in her
a gushing desire to take her for a model, and gain her friendship, she
discovered that this exquisite apparition had graduated from the gutter
in a few months' time. It shook her so violently, that when Mr. H. G.
Wells lifted her on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at
the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society
to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs
and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a conviction
of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of General Booth or
Gypsy Smith. Clara's snobbery went bang. Life suddenly began to mov