This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected by Freddy's
mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions into those artistic
circles which were the highest within her reach, discovered that her
conversational qualifications were expected to include a grounding in
the novels of Mr. H.G. Wells. She borrowed them in various directions
so energetically that she swallowed them all within two months. The
result was a conversion of a kind quite common today. A modern Acts of
the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles if anyone were capable of
writing it.
Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as a disagreeable
and ridiculous person, and to her own mother as in some inexplicable
way a social failure, had never seen herself in either light; for,
though to some extent ridiculed and mimicked in West Kensington like
everybody else there, she was accepted as a rational and normal--or
shall we say inevitable?--sort of human being. At worst they called her
The Pusher; but to them no more than to herself had it ever occurred
that she was pushing the air, and pushing it in a wrong direction.
Still, she was not happy. She was growing desperate. Her one asset, the
fact that her mother was what the Epsom greengrocer called a carriage
lady had no exchange value, apparently. It had prevented her from
getting educated, because the only education she could have afforded
was education with the Earlscourt green grocer's daughter. It had led
her to seek the society of her mother's class; and that class simply
would not have her, because she was much poorer than the greengrocer,
and, far from being able to afford a maid, could not afford even a
housemaid, and had to scrape along at home with an illiberally treated
general servant. Under such circumstances nothing could give her an air
of being a genuine product of Largelady Park. And yet its tradition
made her regard a marriage with anyone within her reach as an
unbearable humiliation. Commercial people and professional people in a
small way were odious to her. She ran after painters and novelists; but
she did not charm them; and her bold attempts to pick up and practise
artistic and literary talk irritated them. She was, in short, an utter
failure, an ignorant, incompetent, pretentious, unwelcome, penniless,
useless little snob; and though she did not admit these
disqualifications (for nobody ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind
until the possibility of a way out dawns on them) she felt their
effects too keenly to be satisfied with her position.
Clara had a startling eyeopener when, on being suddenly wakened to
enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who dazzled her and produced in her
a gushing desire to take her for a model, and gain her friendship, she
discovered that this exquisite apparition had graduated from the gutter
in a few months' time. It shook her so violently, that when Mr. H. G.
Wells lifted her on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at
the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society
to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs
and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a conviction
of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of General Booth or
Gypsy Smith. Clara's snobbery went bang. Life suddenly began to move
with her. Without knowing how or why, she began to make friends and
enemies. Some of the acquaintances to whom she had been a tedious or
indifferent or ridiculous affliction, dropped her: others became
cordial. To her amazement she found that some "quite nice" people were
saturated with Wells, and that this accessibility to ideas was the
secret of their niceness. People she had thought deeply religious, and
had tried to conciliate on that tack with disastrous results, suddenly
took an interest in her, and revealed a hostility to conventional
religion which she had never conceived possible except among the most
desperate characters. They made her read Galsworthy; and Galsworthy
exposed the vanity of Largelady Park and finished her. It exasperated
her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many
unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she
had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping
well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have
come into any sort of sincere human contact. In the radiance of these
discoveries, and the tumult of their reaction, she made a fool of
herself as freely and conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted
Eliza's expletive in Mrs. Higgins's drawing-room; for the new-born
Wellsian had to find her bearings almost as ridiculously as a baby; but
nobody hates a baby for its ineptitudes, or thinks the worse of it for
trying to eat the matches; and Clara lost no friends by her follies.
They laughed at her to her face this time; and she had to defend
herself and fight it out as best she could.