Immeasurably increased was her understanding through this sudden convulsion of her life, and she was very proud of the loyalty to her instinct which had made her wrestle through it alone; and now, when she saw women absorbed in external things, she knew that they had taken refuge in them from just such convulsions in which, had they attempted to face them, they must have been swamped. They clung to external things to prevent themselves being lost in the whirlpool of the internal world of womanhood.... Ah! It was supreme to be a woman, to contain the most fierce and most powerful of all life's manifestations, to smile and to distil all these violent forces into charm, to suffer and to turn all suffering into visible beauty.
If Clara now had any easy pity it was for men, who live always in fantasy, lured on by their own imaginings in the vain effort to solve the mystery of which only a true and loyal woman has the key.
When once more she approached her external life it was through the bookshop, where she found her friend the bookseller munching his lunch of wheaten biscuits and apples in the dingy little room at the back of his shop.
He offered her an apple. She took it and sat on a pile of books tied up with a rope.
'You're looking bonny,' he said.
'I think I'll come and be your assistant.'
'A fine young leddy like you?'
'I might meet some one like Kropotkin.'
'Ah! Isn't that grand? There's none o' your Dumas and Stevensons can beat that; a real happening in our own life-time.... But I can no afford an assistant.'
'Oh! You always seem to have plenty of people in your shop.'