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 been one of the worst obstacles in her path, and that, like all unadvised purchasers, she had paid a price that might well have been spared.  A little more craft, a little more patience—­it is with these that the world is conquered.  The world was her enemy, and had proved too strong; woman though she was—­ only a girl striving to attain the place for which birth adapted her—­pursuing only her irrepressible instincts—­fate flung her to the ground pitilessly, and bade her live out the rest of her time in wretchedness.

No!  There remained one more endeavour that was possible to her, one bare hope of saving herself from the extremity which only now she estimated at its full horror.  If that failed, why, then, there was a way to cure all ills.