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