Mummery

, and she allowed him to furnish her rooms for her upon condit

walking together down Piccadilly, there would be talk. They will say I am going to marry you, but we know different.... Your way of living is exactly my ideal, abs

tsche, Havelock Ellis, Shaw, Ibsen, Anarchist tracts, Socialist and Labour journals, R.P.A. cheap reprints, every sort and kind of book that in an ordinary shop would only be procured upon a special order.... It was a very fierc

most gently helped all who needed help and most wholly sympathised with all, and they were many, who turned to him for sympathy.... The frequenters of his shop were poor, mostly long-haired eaters of nuts, and drinkers of ideas. There were young men who hovered in the background of his shop arguing, chatting, filling in the

astonished and delighted him with her radiance. She was the kind of

as a present, at least he gave her the second volume, for he could not find the first.... He always hotly denied

the fortress moved Clara deeply, and

nd and round hunting fame and money.... He was like you, Verschoyle, in ju

they wouldn't send me. I'm too rich. They wouldn't do it. If I became an Anarchist

hat shop for nothing. Something is

ature you are! Here you are with everything at your feet, the greatest artist, the r

. I say that I f

t yet. They are still clinging to men. That is what I cannot stand about them. I should hate t

to marry. You w

is head an

e that imposs

I

ho wanted to marry me I might cons

th

ine. They tell me you are more wicked than Cleopatra

, a little gray-bearded man in a tweed suit. Verschoyle liked him

go,' said the bookseller. 'Sell all

Verschoyle. 'I'm onl

s always a certain strain for him, because Mann wanted something definite; but with the bookseller and his young friends, he was at his ease, for they were very like himself, wi

and she saw the young men of the bookshop as potential Kropotkins, people who stood upon the e

-the London of the poor.... Poverty she had never known, except the poverty of the world of art which is created rather by indifference to money than by the grim lack of it. With Charles days had been so busy, nights so happy, that it was a small thing that every now and then she had to go hungry for a day in order that he might not lack. The immense poverty which now she saw everywhere in this West End of London, in courts off Charing C

ching each other by the hair, and attempted, while they breathed thick curses into each other's glaring faces, to bite, to scratch, each to bang the other's head against the wall.... Clara ran past them

r upon degraded and derelict types. It was as though she had bee

d well-fed people be so happy while such things were going on before their

their insistence upon homage and flattery from their men. From that she passed to a somewhat bewildered introspection, realising that it was extraordinary that she should have been able to sever her connection with Charles and to maintain the impersonal

and and Julia-easy, comfortable romance. To be either easy or comfortable had become an abomination to her, and at bottom this was the reason for her dissatisfaction. It ha

mplacable, and changed her whole physical sensation of being. Her body changed, her figure altered most subtly and imperceptibly, her face gained in strength and beauty, but she loathed the change, because it was taking place without reference to her own will, or her own imagination, which for the first time in her life was baffled.... It was appalling to her, who had always found it so easy to direct the lives of others, to find her own life slipping with a terrible velocity ou

ined. Both Booth and Rose dealt with the past, but that made them the more palatable, and they reassured her. The facts she was now discovering had been present to other minds and her own had not unsupported to bear the whole weight of them.... In her untouched youth she had always accepted responsibility for the whole universe, and so long as her life had been made easy, first of all by her grandfather, and then by Charles, the burden had b

e welling up of the mysterious forces which swamped the clari

Coventry Street by night: the illuminated theatres: the statue in Piccadilly Circus: the hotel in which she and Charles had stayed on their first night in London: the painted faces of the women: policemen: commissionaires: wonderful cars lit up at night, gliding through the streets with elegant ladies in evening dress reclining at their ea

made it impossible for her to succumb. Deep in her heart she knew that she could not; that she had

l, the full nature of which had yet to be revealed. And she had wrestled through it alone. Her childish detestation o

prison, and she was full of a delighted gratitude to the little bookseller

she knew that they had taken refuge in them from just such convulsions in which, had they attempted to face them, they must have been swamped. They clung to external things to prevent themselves being lost in the whirlpool of the internal worl

fantasy, lured on by their own imaginings in the vain effort to

hop, where she found her friend the bookseller munching his lunch of whe

took it and sat on a pile o

oking bonn

come and be yo

ung leddy

some one lik

d Stevensons can beat that; a real happening in our

to have plenty of p

hough the authors may be as famous as old Nick and the publishers may roll by in their cars and build their castles in the countryside.... I sell my books all the week, and I gro

munched away at it, rosy defiance of an ill-

le of bills, and old cheques, and it was not

ould sell your

ou'll draw them to the playhouse; but bookselling is a

s though he could savour and weigh its contents through his finger-tips, glanced through it, and put it away as though it were finally disposed of. There was a concentrated absorption in everything he did that made it definite and final. He was so sensitive that at the approach of another person he edged

name she could not bring herself to ask her old friend who he was. That did not matter. He was, and Charing

emotions thrilled through her, uplifted her, and she had a sensation of being deliciously intimate with all things animate and inanimate. She touched the desk by her side, and it seemed to her that life tingled through her fingers into the wood. She smiled at the old man, and

bring me luck. But she's was