omething she did not really want to do, and who understands
her true feeling abruptly.

In the course of years she had become so accustomed to the routine of a
full life, a life charged with incessant variety of interests,
occupations, amusements, a life offering day after day "something to
look forward to," and teeming with people whom she knew, that she now
confronted weeks, months even, of solitude with Claude almost in fear.
He had his work. She had never been a worker in what she considered the
real sense, that is a creator striving to "arrive." She conceived of
such work as filling the worker's whole life. She knew it must be so,
for she had read many lives of great men. Claude, therefore, had his
life in Mustapha filled up to the brim for him. But what was she going
to do?

Claude, on his part, was striving to recapture in Africa the desire for
popularity, the longing for fame, the wish to give people what they
wanted of him in art, which he had sometimes felt of late in London. But
now there were about him no people who knew anything of his art or of
him. The cries of cultivated London had faded out of his ears. In Africa
he felt strongly the smallness of that world, the insignificance of
every little world. His true and indifferent self seemed to gather
strength. He fought it. He felt that it would be a foe to the
contemplated opera. He wished Alston Lake were with them, or someone who
would "wake him up." Charmian, in her present condition, lacked the
force which he had often felt in London, a force which had often
secretly irritated and troubled him, but which had not been without
tonic properties.

With very great difficulty, with a heavy reluctance of which he was
ashamed, he exerted his will, he forced himself to begin the appointed
task. With renewed and anxious attention he re-studied the libretto. He
laid out his music-paper, closed his door, and hoped for a stirring of
inspiration, or at least of some power within him which would enable him
to make a start. By experience he knew that once he was in a piece of
work something helped him, often drove him. He must get to that
something. He recalled those dreadful first days in Kensington Square,
when he read Carlyle's _French Revolution_ and sometimes felt criminal.
There must be nothing of that kind here. And, thank Heaven, this was not
Kensington Square. Peace and beauty were here. All the social ties were
broken. If he could not compose an opera here