 Having stood on one spot for nearly ten
minutes, Clara made a quick movement and withdrew; she latched the front door
with as little noise as possible, ran upstairs and shut herself again in her own
room.
    Presently she was standing at her window, the blind partly raised. On a
clear day the view from this room was of wide extent, embracing a great part of
the City; seen under a low, blurred, dripping sky, through the ragged patches of
smoke from chimneys innumerable, it had a gloomy impressiveness well in keeping
with the mind of her who brooded over it. Directly in front, rising
mist-detached from the lower masses of building, stood in black majesty the dome
of St. Paul's; its vastness suffered no diminution from this high outlook,
rather was exaggerated by the flying scraps of mirky vapour which softened its
outline and at times gave it the appearance of floating on a vague troubled sea.
Somewhat nearer, amid many spires and steeples, lay the surly bulk of Newgate,
the lines of its construction shown plan-wise; its little windows multiplied for
points of torment to the vision. Nearer again, the markets of Smithfield,
Bartholomew's Hospital, the tract of modern deformity, cleft by a gulf of
railway, which spreads between Clerkenwell Road and Charterhouse Street. Down in
Farringdon Street the carts, waggons, vans, cabs, omnibuses, crossed and
intermingled in a steaming splash-bath of mud; human beings, reduced to their
due paltriness, seemed to toil in exasperation along the strips of pavement,
bound on errands, which were a mockery, driven automaton-like by forces they
neither understood nor could resist.
    »Can I go out into a world like that - alone?« was the thought which made
Clara's spirit fail as she stood gazing. »Can I face life as it is for women who
grow old in earning bare daily bread among those terrible streets? Year after
year to go in and out from some wretched garret that I call home, with my face
hidden, my heart stabbed with misery till it is cold and bloodless!«
    Then her eye fell upon the spire of St. James's Church, on Clerkenwell
Green, whose bells used to be so familiar to her. The memory was only of
discontent and futile aspiration, but - Oh, if it were possible to be again as
she was then, and yet keep the experience with which life had since endowed her!
With no moral condemnation did she view the records of her rebellion; but how
easy to see now that ignorance had
