'He is no particular friend of mine. He is a wood-engraver, and
writes also, I believe, for the newspapers.'
'He can talk as well as write.' 'Yes, he can talk very well.'
'Do you not think there was something unreal about what he said?'
'I do not believe he is actually insincere. I have noticed that men
who write or read much often appear somewhat shadowy.'
'How do you account for it?' 'What they say is not experience.'
'I do not quite understand. A man may think much which can never
become an experience in your sense of the word, and be very much in
earnest with what he thinks; the thinking is an experience.'
'Yes, I suppose so, but it is what a person has gone through which I
like to hear. Poor Dennis has suffered much. You are perhaps
surprised, but it is true, and when he leaves politics alone he is a
different creature.' 'I am afraid I must be very uninteresting to you?'
'I did not mean that I care for nothing but my friend's aches and
pains, but that I do not care for what he just takes up and takes
on.' 'It is my misfortune that my subjects are not very--I was about to
say--human. Perhaps it is because I am a Jew.'
'I do not know quite what you mean by your "subjects," but if you
mean philosophy and religion, they are human.'
'If they are, very few people like to hear anything about them. Do
you know, Miss Hopgood, I can never talk to anybody as I can to you.
' Clara made no reply. A husband was to be had for a look, for a
touch, a husband whom she could love, a husband who could give her
all her intellect demanded. A little house rose before her eyes as
if by Arabian enchantment; there was a bright fire on the hearth, and
there were children round it; without the look, the touch, there
would be solitude, silence and a childless old age, so much more to
be feared by a woman than by a man. Baruch paused, waiting for her
answer, and her tongue actually began to move with a reply, which
would have sent his arm round her, and made them one for ever, but it
did not come. Something fell and flashed before her like lightning
from a cloud overhead, divinely beautiful, but divinely terrible.
'I remember,' she said, 'that I have to call in Lamb's Conduit Street
to buy something for my sister. I shall just be in time.' Baruch
went as far as Lamb's Conduit Street with her. He, too, would have
determined his own destiny if she had uttered the word, but the power
to proceed without it was wanting and he fell back. He left her at
the door of the shop. She bid him good-bye, obviously intending that
he should go no further with her, and he shook hands with her, taking
her hand again and shaking it again with a grasp which she knew well
enough was too fervent for mere friendship. He then wandered back
once more to his old room at Clerkenwell. The fire was dead, he
stirred it, the cinders fell through the grate and it dropped out all
together. He made no attempt to rekindle it, but sat staring at the
black ashes, not thinking, but dreaming. Thirty years more perhaps
with no change! The last chance that he could begin a new life had
disappeared. He cursed himself that nothing drove him out of himself
with Marshall and his fellowmen; that he was not Chartist nor
revolutionary; but it was impossible to create in himself enthusiasm
for a cause. He had tried before to become a patriot and had failed,
and was conscious, during the trial, that he was pretending to be
something he was not and could not be. There was nothing to be done
but to pace the straight road in front of him, which led nowhere, so
far as he could see.