nger.... Once outside her door
two drunken women fought. They leaned against the wall, clutching 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 trembling in
every limb. She had never seen the uncontrolled brutality of which
human beings are capable.... But it was even worse when a policeman
arrested the two women and roughly dragged them away.

And after that she was continually coming upon similar scenes, or upon
degraded and derelict types. It was as though she had been blind and
was suddenly able to see--or had the world turned evil?

How could Verschoyle, how could Charles, how could all the well-dressed
and well-fed people be so happy while such things were going on before
their eyes? Perhaps, like herself, they could not see them. It was
very strange.

Stranger still was the release of energy in herself, bringing with it a
new personal interest in her own life. She began to look more keenly
at other women and to understand them a little better, to sympathise
even with their vanity, their mindlessness, 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 when the personal relationship was
suspended--or gone? Yes. That was quite extraordinary, and because of
it she knew that she could never live the ordinary woman's life,
absorbed entirely in external things, in position, clothes, food and
household, shops.

She remembered Charles saying that his feeling for her was at the
farthest end of love, and certainly she had never known anything like
the relationship between, say, Freeland 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 had
been too easy to procure the beginnings of success for Charles. They
had secured control of the machinery of the theatre, and must now act
in accordance with its grinding.

For some weeks she was paralysed and could do nothing but sit and
brood; hardly thinking at all consciously, but gazing in upon herself
and the forces stirring in her, creeping up and up to take control of
her imagination that had hither