Yet it was John who revived her misery in its worst form.  Pitying her unoccupied loneliness, he brought home one day a book that he had purchased from a stall in Farringdon Street; it was a novel (with a picture on the cover which seemed designed to repel any person not wholly without taste), and might perhaps serve the end of averting her thoughts from their one subject.  Clara viewed it contemptuously, but made a show of being thankful, and on the next day she did glance at its pages.  The story was better than its illustration; it took a hold upon her; she read all day long.  But when she returned to herself, it was to find that she had been exasperating her heart’s malady.  The book dealt with people of wealth and refinement, with the world to which she had all her life been aspiring, and to which she might have attained.  The meanness of her surroundings became in comparison more mean, the bitterness of her fate more bitter.  You must not lose sight of the fact that since abandoning her work-girl existence Clara had been constantly educating herself, not only by direct study of books, but through her association with people, her growth in experience.  Where in the old days of rebellion she had only an instinct, a divination to guide her, there was now just enough of knowledge to give occupation to her developed intellect and taste.  Far keener was her sense of the loss she had suffered than her former longing for what she knew only in dream.  The activity of her mind received a new impulse when she broke free from Scawthorne and began her upward struggle in independence.  Whatever books were obtainable she read greedily; she purchased numbers of plays in the acting-editions, and studied with the utmost earnestness such parts as she knew by repute; no actress entertained a more superb ambition, none was more vividly conscious of power.  But it was not only at stage-triumph that Clara aimed; glorious in itself, this was also to serve her as a means of becoming nationalised among that race of beings whom birth and breeding exalt above the multitude.  A notable illusion; pathetic to dwell upon.  As a work-girl, she nourished envious hatred of those the world taught her to call superiors; they were then as remote and unknown to her as gods on Olympus.  From her place behind the footlights she surveyed the occupants of boxes and stalls in a changed spirit; the distance was no longer insuperable; she heard of fortunate players who mingled on equal terms with men and women of refinement.  There, she imagined, was her ultimate goal.  ’It is to them that I belong!  Be my origin what it may, I have the intelligence and the desires of one born to freedom, Nothing in me, nothing, is akin to that gross world from which I have escaped!’ So she thought—­with every drop of her heart’s blood crying its source from that red fountain of revolt whereon never yet did the upper daylight gleam!  Brain and pulses such as hers belong not to the mild breed of mortals fostered in sunshine.  But for the stroke of fate, she might have won that reception which was in her dream, and with what self-mockery when experience had matured itself!  Never yet did true rebel, who has burst the barriers of social limitation, find aught but ennui in the trim gardens beyond.