te
him from his own thoughts, which abroad kept him blissfully happy but
prevented his doing work which was intelligible to any one else.

He was rather a long time over the luggage, and at last she ran along
the platform to find him lost in contemplation.

'Have you decided where we are going to?' she asked.

'Eh?'

'Have you decided where we are going to?'

'I must get a secretary,' he replied, and Clara laughed. 'But I must,'
he went on. 'It is absolutely necessary for me to have a secretary. I
can do nothing without one.... He shall be a good man, and he shall be
paid four hundred a year.'

Clara approached a porter and told him to take their luggage to the
hotel.

'We can stay there while we look about us,' she said. She had learned
that when Charles talked about money it was best to ignore him. She
took cheap rooms at the top of the hotel, with a view out over the
river to the Surrey hills, and there until three o'clock in the morning
Charles smoked cigars and talked, as only he could talk, of art and
Italy and Paris--which they had left without paying their rent--and the
delights and abominations of London.

'I feel satisfied now that you were right,' he said. 'Here we are in
London and I shall begin to do my real work. I shall have a secretary
and an advertising agent, and I shall talk to London in the language it
understands.... Paris knows me, Munich knows me, St Petersburg knows
me; London shall know me. There are artists in London. All they want
is a lead.'

Clara went to bed and lay for a long time with erratic memories
streaming through her brain--days in the hills in Italy, nights of
hunger in Paris, the cross-eyed man who stared so hard at her on the
boat, the dismal port at Calais, the more dismal landing at Dover, the
detached existence of her three years with Charles, whose astonishing
vitality kindled and continually disappointed her hope.... And then
queer, ugly memories of her own wandering, homeless childhood with her
grandfather, who had died in Paris, leaving her the little money he
had, so that she had stayed among the artists in Paris, had been numbed
and dazed by them, until Charles took possession of her exactly as he
did of stray cats and dogs and birds in cages.

'This is London,' she said, 'and I am twenty-one.' So she, too,
approached London in a spirit of challenging hostility, determined if,
as she believed, there was nothing a woman could not do, that London