'Ah! Verschoyle....' Sir Henry looked suspiciously at her. Though he wanted to be, he was never quite at his ease with her. She was not calculable like the women he had known. What they wanted were things definite and almost always material, while her purposes were secret, subtle, and, as he sometimes half suspected, beyond his range. She was new. That was her fascination. She belonged to this strange world that was coming into being of discordant rhythmic music, of Russian ballet and novels, of a kind of poetry that anybody could write, of fashions that struck him as indecent, of a Society more riotous and rowdy than ever the Bohemia of his day had been, because women--ladies too--were the moving spirit in it and women never did observe the rules of any game.... And yet, in his boyish, sentimental way, he adored her, and clung to her as though he thought she could take him into this new world. 'I can't go on with Mann,' he said almost tearfully. 'It is too disturbing. You never know what he is going to do, and, after all, the theatre is a business, isn't it?-- Isn't it?' 'I suppose so,' replied Clara. It was extraordinary to feel the great machine of the theatre gathering momentum for the launching of the play. It was marvellous to be caught up, as the rehearsals proceeded, into the loveliest fantasy ever created by the human mind. Clara threw herself into it heart and soul. Life outside the play ceased for her. She lived entirely between her rooms and the stage of the theatre. Unlike the other players, when she was not wanted she was watching the rest of the piece, surrendered herself to it completely, and was continually discovering a vast power of meaning in words that had been so familiar to her as to have become like remembered music, an habitual thought without conscious reference to anything under the sun.... And as her sense of the beauty of the play grew more living to her, so she saw the apparatus that kept it in motion as more and more comic.... Mr Gillies had a thousand and one points on which he consulted his chief with the most ruthless disregard of the work going forward on the stage. Lady Butcher would come bustling in, take Sir Henry aside and whisper to him, and words like Bracebridge--Sir George--Lady Amabel--Prime Minister--Chancellor--would come hissing out. Then when the rehearsal was resumed she would stay surveying it with the indulgent smile of a vicar's wife at a school treat.... During the exquisite scene between Prospero and Miranda one day the scenery door was flung open, and Mr Smithson arrived with a small army of men, who dumped paint-pots on the boards, threw hammers down, and rushed across the stage with flats and fly-cloths. Yet, in spite of all these accidents introducing the spirit of burlesque, the play survived. Sir Henry would tolerate interruptions up to a point, but, when a charwoman in the auditorium started brushing or turned on a