unlike women,
do not care to face their own secrets.

He lived in three rooms at the top of a house in Bloomsbury, one for
his books, one for his work, and one for himself--for sleeping and
bathing. Unlike most men who are indifferent to the outside world he
was clean, because he found that slovenliness impaired his efficiency,
and took the edge off his energy. He was as fastidious mentally as a
trained athlete is physically.

He accepted good-humouredly the apparently unalterable incompatibility
between the theatre and the drama.

A man with a single aim seems mad in a world where aims are scattered,
but Rodd suffered a double isolation. Ordinary people regarded him as
a cracked fool, because he would not or could not exploit his gifts and
personality; while the people who really were cracked dreaded his
sanity and the humorous tolerance with which he indulged their little
weaknesses.

He enjoyed Charing Cross Road because it was rather like himself: it
was shovelled aside and disdained by its ignoble 'betters,' the streets
imposed by cosmopolitanism upon the real English London. That London
he could find in Charing Cross Road, where there still beat the heart
from which Fielding and Dickens had drawn their inspiration, the brave
heart that could laugh through all its sufferings and through all the
indignities put upon it. In Charing Cross Road he could meet almost
any day Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet, Tom Jones and Partridge, Sam
Weller and Sairey Gamp, and every day their descendants walked abroad,
passed in and out of shops, went about their business, little
suspecting that they would be translated into the world of art when
Rodd returned from his holiday to his work. He passionately loved this
London, the real London, and hated everything that denied it or seemed
to deny it. He loved it so greatly that he hardly needed any personal
love, and he detested any loyalty which interfered with his loyalty to
Shakespeare, Fielding, and Dickens, dramatists all, though Fielding's
drama had been too vital for the theatre of his time and had blown it
into atoms, so that since his day the actors had had to scramble along
as best they could and had done so well that they had forgotten the
drama altogether. They had evolved a kind of theatrical bas-relief,
and were so content with it that they regarded the rounded figures of
dramatic sculpture with detestation.... They dared not make room in
their theatre for _Hedda