e
with her. Without knowing how or why, she began to make friends and
enemies. Some of the acquaintances to whom she had been a tedious or
indifferent or ridiculous affliction, dropped her: others became
cordial. To her amazement she found that some "quite nice" people were
saturated with Wells, and that this accessibility to ideas was the
secret of their niceness. People she had thought deeply religious, and
had tried to conciliate on that tack with disastrous results, suddenly
took an interest in her, and revealed a hostility to conventional
religion which she had never conceived possible except among the most
desperate characters. They made her read Galsworthy; and Galsworthy
exposed the vanity of Largelady Park and finished her. It exasperated
her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many
unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she
had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping
well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have
come into any sort of sincere human contact. In the radiance of these
discoveries, and the tumult of their reaction, she made a fool of
herself as freely and conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted
Eliza's expletive in Mrs. Higgins's drawing-room; for the new-born
Wellsian had to find her bearings almost as ridiculously as a baby; but
nobody hates a baby for its ineptitudes, or thinks the worse of it for
trying to eat the matches; and Clara lost no friends by her follies.
They laughed at her to her face this time; and she had to defend
herself and fight it out as best she could.

When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he never did when he
could possibly help it) to make the desolating announcement that he and
his Eliza were thinking of blackening the Largelady scutcheon by
opening a shop, he found the little household already convulsed by a
prior announcement from Clara that she also was going to work in an old
furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been started by a fellow
Wellsian. This appointment Clara owed, after all, to her old social
accomplishment of Push. She had made up her mind that, cost what it
might, she would see Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had achieved her
end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise
deserved. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered
him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His
pleas