n which, baffled by the chances of
life, she had striven to live.

'To-morrow,' she said, 'I am going to the bookshop at half-past twelve.'

He bowed and left her, and meeting Mr Clott or Cumberland on the stairs
of his house he had the satisfaction of shaking him until his teeth
rattled, and of telling him that Mr Charles Mann had gone abroad for an
indefinite period.

XVIII

LOVE

The late September sun shone sweetly down upon Charing Cross Road, and
its beams stole into the bookshop where the bookseller, in his shirt
sleeves, sat wrestling with the accounts which he struggled to keep
accurately. He hated them. Of all books the most detestable are
account books. What has a man who trades in mind to do with money?
Far better is it to have good books stolen than to keep them lying
dusty on the shelf.

The bookseller chuckled to himself. The newspapers were full of
praises of his 'young leddy,' though she could never be so wonderful
and like a good fairy in the play-acting as she was when she walked
into his shop bringing sweetness and light.... She had not been in for
some time, and he had been a little worried about her. He was glad to
know that it was only work that had kept her away. He had been half
afraid that there might be 'something up' between her and that damned,
silent Rodd, who had nothing in the world but a few bees in his bonnet.
The bookseller, being a simple soul, wanted her to marry the Lord, to
end the tale as all good heroines should, and he had even gone so far
as to address imaginary parcels of books to her Ladyship.

Charing Cross Road was at its oddest and friendliest on this day when
all London rang with Clara's fame, and the only place in which it found
no echo was her own heart.

She had decided in her dressing-room half-way through the performance
that she could never go near the Imperium again. That was finished.
She had done what she had set out to do in the first instance. In her
subsequent greater purpose she had failed, and she knew now why she had
failed, because she was a woman and in love, and being a woman, she
must work through a man's imagination before she could become a person
fit to dwell on the earth with her fellows.... Without a pang she
surrendered her ambitions, bowed to the inevitable, and for the first
time for many a long week slept the easy, sweet sleep of youth. Her
meeting with Rodd in the supper-room had relieved her of all her
crushing res