Rodd paid no attention to her. The bookseller left him with his money in his hand, and he stood turning over the pages of Charles's book, and shaking his head over the freakish will o' the wisp paragraphs. Clara spoke, and he stiffened, stared at the books in front of him, turned, caught sight of her profile, and stood gazing in amazement--a girl's face that was more than pretty, a face in which there was purpose, and proof of clear perception. After her holiday she was looking superbly well. Health shone in her. She moved, and it was with complete unconcern for her surroundings. She lived at once in Rodd's imagination, took her rightful place as of course side by side with Beatrice, Portia, Cordelia, and Sophia Western. His imagination had not to work on her at all to re-create her, or to penetrate to the dramatic essence of her personality, which she revealed in her every gesture. He could not hear what she was saying, but her voice went thrilling to his heart. He gasped and reeled and dropped Charles Mann's book with a crash. Clara, who had not seen him, turned, and she, too, was overcome. He moved towards her, and stood devouring her with his eyes, and hers sought his. 'This is Rodd,' said the bookseller. 'Adnor Rodd, a great friend of mine.' 'Rodd,' repeated Clara. 'He is very much interested in the theatre,' said the bookseller. 'I was just looking at Charles Mann's new book.... Will you let me give it you?' He moved away to pick up the book and came back clutching it, took out his fountain pen and wrote in it in a small, precise hand,-- 'To my friend, from Adnor Rodd.' 'My name is Clara Day,' said she, 'You can't have a name yet.... You are just you.' She understood him. He meant that externals were of no account in the delighted shock of their meeting. As they stood gazing at each other the book-shop vanished, London disappeared, there was nothing but they two on all the earth. Neither could move. The beginning and the end were in this moment. Nothing that they could do could alter it or make the world again as it had been for them.... Consciously neither admitted it, both stubbornly clung to what they had made of their lives. He still held the book in his hand. She had not put out hers for it. He wrote 'Clara Day,' and he wanted to write it down several times as he did with the names of the persons in his plays, to make certain that they were rightly called. With a faintly recurrent sense of actuality he thought of his three rooms in Bloomsbury and of the hundred and fifty pounds a year on which he lived, and with a wry smile he handed her the book, took stock of her rich clothes, bowed and turned away.... For his imagination it was enough to have met and loved her in that one moment. She had broken down the intellectual detachment in which he lived: the icy solitude in which so painfully he struggled on was at an end.