ngines, marvellous
ships, miraculous motor-cars, but dull, listless, sodden people--inert.
It is the inertia of London that is so appalling.'

Clara made him take her on the wooden horses, and they went round three
times. He admitted reluctantly that he had enjoyed it.

'But only because you did.'

To try him still further she made him have tea in the yard of an inn,
at a long table with a number of East Enders, whole families, courting
couples, and young men and maidens who had selected each other out of
the crowd. They stared at the remarkable pair, the elegant young woman
and the moody, handsome man, but they made no impertinent comment
except that when they left a girl shrieked,--

'My! look at her shoes.'

And another girl said mournfully,--

'I wisht I 'ad legs like _that_ and silk stockings.'

It was near evening. The haze over the heath shimmered with an apricot
glow. Windows, catching the low sun, blazed like patches of fire. The
people on the heath dwindled and seemed to sink away into the
landscape, and their movements were hardly perceptible.

Rodd asked,--

'Has it been a good day for you?'

'A wonderful day. I want to see where you live.'

He took her home. Down in London, after the Heath, the air seemed
thick and stifling. The square in which he lived was surrounded with
unsavoury streets from which smells that were almost overpowering were
wafted in. His house was a once fashionable mansion now cut up into
flats. He had what were once the servants' quarters under the roof,
three rooms and a bathroom. The windows of his front room looked out
on the tops of trees. Here he worked. The room contained nothing but
a table, a chair, a piano, and a sofa.

'This is the only room,' he said.

'That woman was waiting for you,' said Clara.

'Was she? I didn't see her.'

'Yes. She whisked into her room when she saw me.'

He took up his manuscript from the table.

'It has stopped short.' He turned it over ruefully; fingering the
pages, he began to read and was sinking into absorption in it when she
dashed it out of his hand.

'How dare you read it when I am with you?' she cried. 'It was written
before you knew me. It isn't any good.... I know it isn't any good.'

He was stunned by this outburst of jealousy and protested,--

'There's years of work in it.'

'But what's the good of sitting here working, if you never do anything
with it?'

He pointed to the sofa and said,--