ew that she was wrong
to be offended, because the people had come not to look at her, Clara
Day, but at the false projection of Clara Day which was needed for the
play.... Her objection was moral, and so strong that it made her
really ill, and it was with the greatest difficulty that she could keep
going at all, but not a word did she say to a soul. She fought through
it with clenched teeth, going through agony night after night, smiling
when it was over, going home exhausted, and dreading the coming of the
morrow when it would all have to be borne again....

She used to look at the others and wonder if they had been through the
same thing, but it was plain to her clear eyes that they had nearly all
accepted without a struggle, and had surrendered to the false
projection of themselves which the theatre needed. Stage-fright they
knew, but not this moral struggle in which, determined not to be
beaten, she fought on.

Rehearsals she enjoyed. Then the actors were at their indolent best,
and the half-lit stage was full of a dim, suggestive beauty, which
entirely disappeared by the time the scene-painter, the lime-light man,
and the stage-carpenter had done their work. Often at rehearsal, words
would give her the shock of truth that in performance would just puzzle
her by their banality; voices would seem to come from some remote
recess of life; movements would take on dignity; the players seemed
indeed to move and live in an enchanted world.... And so, off the
stage, they did.

Miss Wainwright and Mr Freeland Moore, who had played together for so
many years, were idyllic lovers, though he had a wife in America, and
she a husband who had gone his ways. To them there were no further
stages of love than those which are shown to the Anglo-American public.
For them there were but Romeo and Juliet at the ball with no contending
houses to plague them. They lived in furnished flats and paid their
way, impervious to every conspiracy of life to bring them down to
earth.... Both adored Clara, both soon accepted her and Charles as
lovers even more perfect than themselves, because younger, and both
were never tired of thinking what kindness they could next do to help
their friends.

And Clara struggled on. Sometimes she could have screamed with rage
against the theatre, and these people whose enchantment had been won by
the sacrifice of the fiery essence of themselves, so that they accepted
meekly insults from the manager,