'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.'
He brought his fist down with such a crash on the frail table that it cracked right across, and Clara was sickeningly alarmed when she saw his huge hands grip the table on either side and rend it asunder. There was something terrible and almost miraculous in his enormous physical vitality, and his waste of it now in such a petty act of rage forced her to admit that which she had been attempting to suppress, the thought of Rodd, and she was compelled now to compare the two men. So she saw Charles more clearly, and had to acknowledge to herself how fatally he lacked moral force. She trembled as it was made plain to her that the old happy days could never come again, and that the child who had believed in him so implicitly was gone for ever. She had the frame, the mind, the instinct of a woman, and these things could no longer be denied.
When his rage was spent, she determined to give him one more chance,—