'I'll go through with it,' she said, her will setting. 'I'll go through with it, and I'll make nonsense of everything but you.... You've done all you can, Charles. Just go on working. That's the only thing, the only thing....' As she said these words, she thought of Rodd with an acute hostility that amounted almost to hatred. It was the meeting with him that had so confounded all her aims, that sudden plunge into humanity with him that had so exposed her to love that even Verschoyle's tone had changed towards her.... With Charles, love was as impersonal as a bird's song. It was only a call to her swift joy and claimed nothing for himself, though, perhaps, everything for his art. That was where he was so baffling. He expected the whole world to accept service under his banner, and was so confident that in time it would do so that no rebuff ruffled him. Clara was tempted to accept his point of view, and to run all risks to serve him; but she realised now, as he did not, the forces arrayed against him. There was no blinking the fact that what the Butcher-Bracebridge combination detested was being forced to take him seriously: him or anything else under the sun. Even the public upon which they fawned was only one of several factors in their calculations. 'It will all come right, Charles,' she said. 'I am sure it will all come right. We won't give in. They have diluted you----' 'Diluted?' he exclaimed. 'Butchered!' She admired him for accepting even that, but, in spite of herself, it hurt her that he still had no thought for her, but to him only artistic problems were important. The problems of life must be left to solve themselves. She could not help saying,-- 'You ought not to leave everything to me, Charles.' 'You can handle people. I can't. I thought I was going to be rich, but there's no money. And even if this affair is a success I shall be ashamed of it.... I think I shall write to the papers and repudiate it. But it is the same everywhere. People take my ideas and vulgarise them. Actors are the same everywhere. They will leave nothing to the audience. They want to be adored for the very qualities they have lost.' 'You don't blame me, then?' 'Blame? What's the good of blaming any one. It doesn't help. It makes one angry. There is a certain pleasure in that, but it doesn't help.' It was brought home to her, then, that all her care for his helplessness was in vain. He neither needed nor looked for help. It was all one to him whether he lived in magnificence in a furnished house or in apartments over a cook-shop. 'I've a good mind to disown the whole production now,' he said. 'No. No. They will do all they can to hurt you then.... I think they know.' 'Know what?' 'That you have a wife.'