His words rather repelled and hurt her, and in her secret mind she protested,—
'But I am a woman. But I am a woman.'
It hurt her cruelly that Charles should be blind to that, blind to the cataclysmic change in her, blind to her new beauty and to her newly gathered force of character. After all, the magic of the stage was only illusion, a trick that, if it were not a flowering of the deeper magic of the heart, was empty, vain, contemptible, a thing of darkness and cajolery.
'Perhaps it was just an accident,' said Clara.
'Do it again!' said Charles, in a tone of command.
'What?'
'Do it again!'
'I can't.'
'Do it again, I tell you. When you do a thing like that you have to find out how you did it. Art isn't a thing of chance. You must do it again now.'
'No.'