'You ridicule and denounce these women for trying peacefully—yes, I say peacefully—to get their rights as citizens. Do you know what our fathers did to get ours? They broke down Hyde Park railings, they burnt the Bristol Municipal Buildings, they led riots, and they shed blood. These women have hurt nobody.'

'What about the policeman?'

He went on steadily, comparing the moderation of the women with the red-hot violence of their Chartist forbears—till one half-drunken listener, having lost the thread, hiccuped out—

'Can't do nothin'—them women. Even after we've showed 'em 'ow!'

'Has he got his history right?' Vida asked through her smiling at the last sally. 'Not that it applies, of course,' she was in haste to add.

'Oh, what does it matter?' Her sister waved it aside. 'An unscrupulous politician hasn't come here to bother about little things like facts.'

'I don't think I altogether agree with you there. That man may be a fanatic, but he's honest, I should say. Those Scotch peasants, you know——'

'Oh, because he's rude, and talks with a burr, you think he's a sort of political Thomas Carlyle?'

Though Vida smiled at the charge, something in her alert air as she followed the brief recapitulation of the Chartist story showed how an appeal to justice, or even to pity, may fail, where the rousing of some dim sense of historical significance (which is more than two-thirds fear), may arrest and even stir to unsuspected deeps. The grave Scotsman's striking that chord even in a mind as innocent as Vida's, of accurate or ordered knowledge of the past, even here the chord could vibrate to a strange new sense of possible significance in this scene '——after all.' It would be queer, it would be horrible, it was fortunately incredible, but what if, 'after all,' she were ignorantly assisting at a scene that was to play its part in the greatest revolution the world had seen? Some such mental playing with possibilities seemed to lurk behind the intent reflective face.

'There are far too many voters already,' her sister had flung out.

'Yes—yes, a much uglier world they want to make!'

But in the power to make history—if these people indeed had that, then indeed might they be worth watching—even if it were only after one good look to hide the eyes in dismay. That possibility of historic significance had suddenly lifted the sordid exhibition to a different plane.

As the man, amid howls, ended his almost indistinguishable peroration, the unmoved chairman stepped forward again to try to win back for the next speaker that modicum of quiet attention which he, at all events, had the art of gaining and of keeping. As she came forward this time one of her auditors looked at the Woman Leader in the Crusade with new eyes—not with sympathy, rather with a vague alarm. Vida Levering's air of almost strained attention was an unconscious public confession: 'I haven't understood these strange women; I haven't understood the spirit of the mob that hoots the man we know vaguely for their champion; I haven't understood the allusions nor the argot that they talk; I can't check the history that peasant has appealed to. In the midst of so much that is obscure, it is meet to reserve judgment.' Something of that might have been read in the look lifted once or twice as though in wonderment, above the haggard group up there between the guardian lions, beyond even the last reach of the tall monument, to the cloudless sky of June. Was the great shaft itself playing a part in the impression? Was it there not at all for memory of some battle long ago, but just to mark on the fair bright page of afternoon a huge surprise? What lesser accent than just this Titanic exclamation point could fitly punctuate the record of so strange a portent!—women confronting the populace of the mightiest city in the world—pleading in her most public place their right to a voice in her affairs.

In the face of this unexpected mood of receptivity, however unwilling, came a sharp corrective in the person of the next speaker.

'Oh, it's not going to be one that's been to prison!'

'Oh, dear! It's the one with the wild black hair and the awful "picture hat"!' But they stared for a few moments as if, in despite of themselves, fascinated by this lady be-feathered, be-crimped, and be-ringed, wearing her huge hat cocked over one ear with a defiant coquetry above a would-be conquering smile. The unerring wits in the crowd had already picked her out for special attention, but her active 'public form' was even more torturing to the fastidious feminine sense than her 'stylish' appearance. For her language, flowery and grandiloquent, was excruciatingly genteel, one moment conveyed by minced words through a pursed mouth, and the next carried away on a turgid tide of rhetoric—the swimmer in this sea of sentiment flinging out braceleted arms, and bawling appeals to the 'Wim—men—nof—Vinglund!' The crowd howled with derisive joy.

All the same, when they saw she had staying power, and a kind of Transpontine sense of drama in her, the populace mocked less and applauded more. Why not? She was very much like an overblown Adelphi heroine, and they could see her act for nothing. But every time she apostrophized the 'Wim—men—nof—Vinglund!' two of those same gave way to overcharged feelings.

'Oh, my dear, I can't stand this! I'm going home!'

'Yes, yes. Let's get away from this terrible female. I suppose they keep back the best speakers for the last.'

The two ladies turned, and began to edge their way out of the tightly packed mass of humanity.

'It's rather a pity, too,' said Mrs. Fox-Moore, looking back, 'for this is the only chance we'll ever have. I did want to hear what the skilly was.'

'Yes, and about the dog-whip.'

'Skilly! Sounds as if it might be what she hit the policeman with.' Mrs. Fox-Moore was again pausing to look back. 'That gyrating female is more what I expected them all to be.'

'Yes; but just listen to that.'

'To what?'

'Why, the way they're applauding her.'

'Yes, they positively revel in the creature!'

It was a long, tiresome business this worming their way out. They paused again and again two or three times, looking back at the scene with a recurrent curiosity, and each time repelled by the platform graces of the lady who was so obviously enjoying herself to the top of her bent. Yet even after the fleeing twain arrived on the fringe of the greatly augmented crowd, something even then prevented their instantly making the most of their escape. They stood criticizing and denouncing.

Again Mrs. Fox-Moore said it was a pity, since they were there, that they should have to go without hearing one of those who had been in prison, 'For we'll never have another chance.'

'Perhaps,' said her sister, looking back at the gesticulating figure—'perhaps we're being a little unreasonable. We were annoyed at first because they weren't what we expected, and when we get what we came to see, we run away.'

While still they lingered, with a final fling of arms and toss of plumes, the champion of the women of England sat down in the midst of applause.

'You hear? It's all very well. Most of them simply loved it.'

And now the chairman, in a strikingly different style, was preparing the way for the next speaker, at mention of whom the crowd seemed to feel they'd been neglecting their prerogative of hissing.

'What name did she say? Why do they make that noise?'

The two ladies began to worm their way back; but this was a different matter from coming out.

'Wot yer doin'?' some one inquired sternly of Mrs. Fox-Moore.

Another turned sharply, 'Look out! Oo yer pushin', old girl?'

The horrid low creatures seemed to have no sense of deference. And the stuff they smoked!

'Pah!' observed Mrs. Fox-Moore, getting the full benefit of a noxious puff. 'Pah!'

'Wot!' said the smoker, turning angrily. 'Pah to you, miss!' He eyed Mrs. Fox-Moore from head to foot with a withering scorn. 'Comin' 'ere awskin' us fur votes' (Vida nearly fainted), 'and ain't able to stand a little tobacco.'

'Stand in front, Janet,' said Miss Levering, hastily recovering herself. 'I don't mind smoke,' she said mendaciously, trying to appease the defiler of the air with a little smile. Indeed, the idea of Mrs. Fox-Moore having come to 'awsk' this person for a vote was sufficiently quaint.

'This is the sort of thing they mean, I suppose,' said that lady, 'when they talk about cockney humour. It doesn't appeal to me.'

Vida bit her lip. Her own taste was less pure. 'We needn't try to get any nearer,' she said hastily. 'This chairman-person can make herself heard without screeching.'

But having lost the key during the passage over the pipe, they could only make out that she was justifying some one to the mob, some one who apparently was coming in for too much sharp criticism for the chairman to fling her to the wolves without first diverting them a little. The battle of words that ensued was almost entirely unintelligible to the two ladies, but they gathered, through means more expressive than speech, that the chairman was dealing with some sort of crisis in the temper of the meeting, brought about by the mention of a name.

The only thing clear was that she was neither going to give in, nor going to turn over the meeting in a state of ferment to some less practised hand.

'Yes, she did! She had a perfect right,' the chairman maintained against a storm of noes—'more than a right, a duty, to perform in going with that deputation on public business to the house of a public servant, since, unlike the late Prime Minister, he had refused to women all opportunity to treat with him through the usual channels always open to citizens having a political grievance.'

'Citizens? Suffragettes!'

'Very well.' She set her mouth. 'Suffragettes if you like. To get an abuse listened to is the first thing; to get it understood is the next. Rather than not have our cause stand out clear and unmistakable before a preoccupied, careless world, we accept the clumsy label; we wear it proudly. And it won't be the first time in history that a name given in derision has become a badge of honour!'

Why, the woman's eyes were suffused!—a flush had mounted up to her hair!

How she cared!

'Yer ain't told us the reason ye want the vote.'

'Reason? Why, she's a woman!'

'Haw! haw!'

The speaker had never paused an instant, but—it began to be clear that she heard any interruption it suited her to hear.

'Some one asking, at this time of day, why women want the vote? Why, for exactly the same reason that you men do. Because, not having any voice in public affairs, our interests are neglected; and since woman's interests are man's, all humanity suffers. We want the vote, because taxation without representation is tyranny; because the laws as they stand bear hardly on women; and because those unfair, man-made laws will never be altered till women have a share in electing the men who control legislation.'

'Yer ought ter leave politics to us——'

'We can't leave politics to the men, because politics have come into the home, and if the higher interests of the home are to be served, women must come into politics.'

'That's a bad argument!'

'Wot I always say is——'

'Can't change nature. Nature says——'

'Let 'er st'y at 'ome and mind 'er business!'

The interjections seemed to come all at once. The woman bent over the crowd. Nothing misty in her eyes now—rather a keener light than before.

'Don't you see,' she appealed to them as equals—'don't you see that in your improvement of the world you men have taken women's business out of her home? In the old days there was work and responsibility enough for woman without going outside her own gate. The women were the bakers and brewers, the soap and candle-makers, the loom-workers of the world. You men,' she said, delicately flattering them, 'you have changed all that. You have built great factories and warehouses and mills. But how do you keep them going? By calling women to come in their thousands and help you. But women love their homes. You couldn't have got these women out of their homes without the goad of poverty. You men can't always earn enough to keep the poor little home going, so the women work in the shops, they swarm at the mill gates, and the factories are full.'

'True! True, every blessed word!' said the old newsvendor.

'Hush!' she said. 'Don't interrupt. In taking women's business out of the home you haven't freed her from the need to see after the business. The need is greater than ever it was. Why, eighty-two per cent of the women of this country are wage-earning women! Yet, you go on foolishly echoing: Woman's place is at home.'

'True! True!' said the aged champion, unabashed.

'Then there are those men, philanthropists, statesmen, who believe they are safeguarding the interests of women by making laws restricting their work, and so restricting their resources without ever consulting these women. If they consulted these women, they would hear truths that would open their blind eyes. But no, the woman isn't worthy of being consulted. She is worthy to do the highest work given to humanity, to bear and to bring up children; she is worthy to teach and to train them; she is worthy to pay the taxes that she has no voice in levying. If she breaks the law that she has no share in making, she is worth hanging, but she is not worth consulting about her own affairs—affairs of supremest importance to her very existence—affairs that no man, however great and good, can understand so well as she. She will never get justice until she gets the vote. Even the well-to-do middle-class woman——'

'Wot are you?'

'And even the woman of what are called the upper classes—even she must wince at the times when men throw off the mask and let her see how in their hearts they despise her. A few weeks ago Mr. Lothian Scott——'

'Boo! Boo!'

'Hooray!'

''ray for Lothian Scott!'

In the midst of isolated cheers and a volume of booing, she went on—

'When he brought a resolution before the House of Commons to remove the sex disqualification, what happened?'

'Y' kicked up a row!'

'Lot o' yer got jugged!'

'The same thing happened that has been happening for half a century every time the question comes up in that English Parliament that Englishmen are supposed to think of with such respect as a place of dignity. What happened?' She leaned forward and her eyes shone. 'What happened in that sacred place, that Ark where they safeguard the honour of England? What happened to our honour, that these men dare tell us is so safe in their hands? Our cause was dragged through filth. The very name "woman" was used as a signal for jests and ribald laughter, and for such an exhibition of sex rancour and mistrust that it passed imagination to think what the mothers and wives of the members must think of the public confession of the deep disrespect their menfolk feel for them. Some one here spoke of "a row."' She threw back her head, and faced the issue as though she knew that by bringing it forward herself, she could turn the taunt against the next speaker into a title of respect. 'You blame us for making a scene in that holy place! You would have us imitate those other women—the well-behaved—the women who think more of manners than of morals. There they were—for an example to us—that night of the debate, that night of the "row"—there they sat as they have always done, like meek mute slaves up there in their little gilded pen, ready to listen to any insult, ready to smile on the men afterward. In only one way, but it was an important exception, in just one way that debate on Woman Suffrage differed from any other that had ever taken place in the House of Commons.'

A voice in the crowd was raised, but before the jeer was out Mrs. Chisholm had flung down her last ringing sentences.

'There were others up there in the little pen that night!—women, too—but women with enough decency to be revolted, and with enough character to resent such treatment as the members down there on the floor of the House were giving to our measure. Though the women who ought to have felt it most sat there cowed and silent, I am proud to think there were other women who cried out, "Shame!" Yes, yes,' she interrupted the interrupters, 'those women were dragged away to prison, and all the world was aghast. But I tell you that cry was the beginning of a new chapter in human history. It began with "Shame!" but it will end with "Honour."'

The old newsvendor led the applause.

'Janet! That woman never spat in a policeman's face.'

'Pull down your veil,' was the lady's sharp response. 'Quick——'

'My——'

'Yes, pull it down, and don't turn round.'

A little dazed by the red-hot torrent the woman on the plinth was still pouring down on the people, Vida's mind at the word 'veil,' so peremptorily uttered, reverted by some trick of association to the Oriental significance of that mark in dress distinctively the woman's.

'Why should I pull down my veil?' she answered abstractedly.

'They're looking this way. Don't turn round. Come, come.'

With a surprising alacrity and skill Mrs. Fox-Moore made her way out of the throng. Vida, following, yet looking back, heard—

'Now, I want you men to give a fair hearing to a woman who——'

'Vida, don't look! Mercifully, they're too much amused to notice us.'

Disobeying the mandate, the younger woman's eyes fell at last upon the figures of two young men hovering on the outer circle. The sun caught their tall, glossy hats, played upon the single flower in the frock coat, struck on the eyeglass, and gleamed mockingly on the white teeth of the one who smiled the broadest as they both stood, craning their necks, whispering and laughing, on the fringe of the crowd.

'Why, it's Dick Farnborough—and that friend of his from the Austrian Embassy.'

Vida pulled down her veil.



CHAPTER VIII

Devoutly thankful at having escaped from her compromising position unrecognized, Mrs. Fox-Moore firmly declined to go 'awskin' fur the vote' again! When Vida gave up her laughing remonstrance, Mrs. Fox-Moore thought her sister had also given up the idea. But as Vida afterwards confessed, she told herself that she would go 'just once more.' It could not be but what she was under some illusion about that queer spectacle. From one impression each admitted it was difficult to shake herself free. Whatever those women were or were not, they weren't fools. What did the leaders (in prison and out), what did they think they were accomplishing, besides making themselves hideously uncomfortable? The English Parliament, having flung them out, had gone on with its routine, precisely as though nothing had happened. Had anything happened? That was the question. The papers couldn't answer. They were given over to lies. The bare idea of women pretending to concern themselves with public affairs—from the point of view of the Press, it was enough to make the soberest sides shake with Homeric laughter.

So, then, one last time to see for one's self. And on this occasion no pettiness of disguise, Miss Levering's aspect seemed to say—no recurrence of any undignified flight. She had been frightened away from her first meeting, but she would not be frightened from the second, which was also to be the last.

An instinct unanalyzed, but significant of what was to follow, kept her from seeking companionship outside. Had Wark not gone over to the market-gardener, her former mistress would have had no misgiving about taking the woman into her confidence. But Wark, with lightning rapidity, had become Mrs. Anderson Slynes, and was beyond recall. So the new maid was told the following Sunday, that she might walk with her mistress across Hyde Park (where the papers said the meetings in future were to be), carrying some music which had to be returned to the Tunbridges.

Pursuing this programme, what more natural than that those two chance pedestrians should be arrested by an apparition on their way, of a flaming banner bearing, along with a demand for the vote, an outrageous charge against a distinguished public servant—'a pity the misguided creatures didn't know him, just a little!'

Yes. There it was! a rectangle of red screaming across the vivid green of the park not a hundred yards from the Marble Arch, the denunciatory banner stretched above the side of an uncovered van. A little crowd of perhaps a hundred collected on one side of the cart—the loafers on the outermost fringe, lying on the grass. Never a sign of a Suffragette, and nearly three o'clock! Impossible for any passer-by to carry out the programme of pausing to ask idly, 'What are those women screeching about?'

Seeming to search in vain for some excuse to linger, Miss Levering's wandering eye fell upon a young mother wheeling a perambulator. She had glanced with mild curiosity at the flaunting ensign, and then turned from it to lean forward and straighten her baby's cap.

'I wonder what she thinks of the Woman Question,' Miss Levering observed, in a careless aside to her maid.

Before Gorringe could reply: 'Doddy's a bootiful angel, isn't Doddy?' said the young mother, with subdued rapture.

'Ah, she's found the solution,' said the lady, looking back.

Other pedestrians glanced at the little crowd about the cart, read demand and denunciation on the banner, laughed, and they, too, for the most part, went on.

An Eton boy, who looked as if he might be her grandson, came by with a white-haired lady of distinguished aspect, who held up her voluminous silken skirts and stared silently at the legend.

'Do you see what it says?' the Eton boy laughed as he looked back. '"We demand the vote." Fancy! They "demand" it. What awful cheek!' and he laughed again at the fatuity of the female creature.

Vida glanced at the dignified old dame as though with an uneasy new sense of the incongruity in the attitude of those two quite commonplace, everyday members of a world that was her world, and that yet could for a moment look quite strange.

She turned and glanced back at the ridiculous cart as if summoning the invisible presence of Mrs. Chisholm to moderate the insolence of the budding male. Still there was no sign either of Mrs. Chisholm or any of her fellow-conspirators against the old order of the world. Miss Levering stood a moment hesitating.

'I believe I'm a little tired,' she said to the discreet maid. 'We'll rest here a moment,' and she sat down with her back to the crowd.

A woman, apparently of the small shopkeeping class, was already established at one end of the only bench anywhere near the cart. Her child who was playing about, was neatly dressed, and to Vida's surprise wore sandals on her stockingless feet. This fashion for children, which had been growing for years among the upper classes, had found little imitation among tradesmen or working people. They presumably were still too near the difficulty of keeping their children in shoes and stockings, to be able to see anything but a confession of failure in going without. In the same way, the 'Simple Life,' when led by the rich, wears to the poverty-struck an aspect of masked meanness—a matter far less tolerable in the eyes of the pauper than the traditional splendour of extravagance in the upper class, an extravagance that feeds more than the famished stomach with the crumbs that it lets fall.

As Miss Levering sat watching the child, and wondering a little at the sandals, the woman caught her eye.

'Could you please tell me the time?' she asked.

Miss Levering took out her watch, and then spoke of the wisdom of that plan of sandals.

The woman answered with such self-possession and good sense, that the lady sent a half-amused glance over her shoulder as if relishing in advance the sturdy disapproval of this highly respectable young mother when she should come to realize how near she and the precious daughter were to the rostrum of the Shrieking Sisterhood. It might be worth prolonging the discussion upon health and education for the amusement there would be in seeing what form condemnation of the Suffragettes took among people of this kind. By turning her head to one side, out of the tail of her eye the lady could see that an excitement of some sort was agitating the crowd. The voices rose more shrill. People craned and pushed. A derisive cheer went up as a woman appeared on the cart. The wearer of the tam-o'-shanter! Three others followed—all women. Miss Levering saw without seeming to look, still listening while the practical-minded mother talked on about her child, and what 'was good for it.' All life had resolved itself into pursuit of that.

An air of semi-abstraction came over the lady. It was as if in the presence of this excellent bourgeoise she felt an absurd constraint in showing an interest in the proceedings of these unsexed creatures behind them.

To her obvious astonishment the mother of the child was the first to jump up.

'Now they're going to begin!' she said briskly.

'Who?' asked Miss Levering.

'Why, the Suffrage people.'

'Oh! Are you going to listen to them?'

'Yes; that's what I've come all this way for.' And she and her bare-legged offspring melted into the growing crowd.

Vida turned to the maid and met her superior smile. 'That woman says she has come a long way to hear these people advocating Woman's Suffrage,' and slowly with an air of complete detachment she approached the edge of the crowd, followed by the supercilious maid. They were quickly hemmed in by people who seemed to spring up out of the ground. It was curious to look back over the vivid green expanse and see the dotted humanity running like ants from all directions to listen to this handful of dowdy women in a cart!

In finding her way through the crowd it would appear that the lady was not much sustained by the presence of a servant, however well-meaning. Much out of place in such a gathering as Mrs. Fox-Moore or any ultra-oldfashioned woman was, still more incongruous showed there the relation of mistress and maid. The punctilious Gorringe was plainly horrified at the proximity to her mistress of these canaille, and the mistress was not so absorbed it would seem but what she felt the affront to seemliness in a servant's seeing her pushed and shoved aside—treated with slight regard or none. Necessary either to leave the scene with lofty disapproval, or else make light of the discomfort.

'It doesn't matter!' she assured the girl, who was trying to protect her mistress's dainty wrap from contact with a grimy tramp. And, again, when half a dozen boys forced their way past, 'It's all right!' she nodded to the maid, 'it's no worse than the crowd at Charing Cross coming over from Paris.'

But it was much worse, and Gorringe knew it. 'The old man is standing on your gown, miss.'

'Oh, would you mind——' Miss Levering politely suggested another place for his feet.

But the old man had no mind left for a mere bystander—it was all absorbed in Suffragettes.

''is feet are filthy muddy, 'm,' whispered Gorringe.

It may have been in part the maid's genteel horror of such proximities that steeled Miss Levering to endure them. Under circumstances like these the observant are reminded that no section of the modern community is so scornfully aristocratic as our servants. Their horror of the meanly-apparelled and the humble is beyond the scorn of kings. The fine lady shares her shrinking with those inveterate enemies of democracy, the lackey who shuts the door in the shabby stranger's face, and the dog who barks a beggar from the gate.

And so while the maid drew her own skirts aside and held her nose high in the air, the gentlewoman stood faintly smiling at the queer scene.

Alas! no Mrs. Chisholm. It looked as if they must have been hard up for speakers to-day, for two of them were younger even than Miss Claxton of the tam-o'-shanter. One of them couldn't be more than nineteen.

'How dreadful to put such very young girls up there to be stared at by all these louts!'

'Oh, yes, 'm, quite 'orrid,' agreed the maid, but with the air of 'What can you expect of persons so low?'

'However, the young girls seem to have as much self-possession as the older ones!' pursued Miss Levering, as she looked in vain for any sign of flinching from the sallies of cockney impudence directed at the occupants of the cart.

They exhibited, too, what was perhaps even stranger—an utter absence of any flaunting of courage or the smallest show of defiance. What was this armour that looked like mere indifference? It couldn't be that those quiet-looking young girls were indifferent to the ordeal of standing up there before a crowd of jeering rowdies whose less objectionable utterances were: 'Where did you get that 'at?' 'The one in green is my girl!' 'Got yer dog-whip, miss?' and such-like utterances.

The person thus pointedly alluded to left her companions ranged along the side of the cart against the background of banner, while she, the famous Miss Claxton, took the meeting in charge. She wasted no time, this lady. Her opening remarks, which, in the face of a fire of interruption, took the form of an attack upon the Government, showed her an alert, competent, cut-and-thrust, imperturbably self-possessed politician, who knew every aspect of the history of the movement, as able to answer any intelligent question off-hand as to snub an impudent irrelevance, able to take up a point and drive it well in—to shrug and smile or frown and point her finger, all with most telling effect, and keep the majority of her audience with her every minute of the time.

As a mere exhibition of nerve it was a thing to make you open your eyes. Only a moment was she arrested by either booing or applause. When a knot of young men, who had pushed their way near the front, kept on shouting argument and abuse, she interrupted her harangue an instant. Pointing out the ring-leader—

'Now you be quiet, if you please,' she said. 'These people are here to listen to me.'

'No, they ain't. They come to see wot you look like.'

'That can't be so,' she said calmly, 'because after they've seen us they stay.' Then, as the interrupter began again, 'No, it's no use, my man'—she shook her head gently as if almost sorry for him—'you can't talk me down!'

'Now, ain't that just like a woman!' he complained to the crowd.

Just in front of where Miss Levering and her satellite first came to a standstill, was a cheerful, big, sandy man with long flowing moustachios, a polo cap, and a very dirty collar. At intervals he inquired of the men around him, in a great jovial voice, 'Are we down-'earted?' as though the meeting had been called, not for the purpose of rousing interest in the question of woman's share in the work of the world, but as though its object were to humiliate and disfranchise the men. But his exclamation, repeated at intervals, came in as a sort of refrain to the rest of the proceedings.

'The Conservatives,' said the speaker, 'had never pretended they favoured broadening the basis of the franchise. But here were these Liberals, for thirty years they'd been saying that the demand on the part of women for political recognition commanded their respect, and would have their support, and yet there were four hundred and odd members who had got into the House of Commons very largely through the efforts of women—oh, yes, we know all about that! We've been helping the men at elections for years.'

'What party?'

Adroitly she replied, 'We have members of every party in our ranks.'

'Are you a Conservative?'

'No, I myself am not a Conservative——'

'You work for the Labour men—I know!'

'It's child's play belonging to any party till we get the vote,' she dismissed it. 'In future we are neither for Liberal nor Conservative nor Labour. We are for Women. When we get the sex bar removed, it will be time for us to sort ourselves into parties. At present we are united against any Government that continues to ignore its duty to the women of the country. In the past we were so confiding that when a candidate said he was in favour of Woman's Suffrage (he was usually a Liberal), we worked like slaves to get that man elected, so that a voice might be raised for women's interests in the next Parliament. Again and again the man we worked for got in. But the voice that was to speak for us—that voice was mute. We had served his purpose in helping him to win his seat, and we found ourselves invariably forgotten or ignored. The Conservatives have never shown the abysmal hypocrisy of the Liberals. We can get on with our open enemies; it's these cowards' ('Boo!' and groans)—'these cowards, I say—who, in order to sneak into a place in the House, pretend to sympathize with this reform—who use us, and then betray us; it's these who are women's enemies!'

'Why are you always worrying the Liberals? Why don't you ask the Conservatives to give you the vote?'

'You don't go to a person for something he hasn't got unless you're a fool. The Liberals are in power; the Liberals were readiest with fair promises; and so we go to the Liberals. And we shall continue to go to them. We shall never leave off' (boos and groans) 'till they leave office. Then we'll begin on the Conservatives.' She ended in a chorus of laughter and cheers, 'I will now call upon Miss Cynthia Chisholm to propose the resolution.'

Wherewith the chairman gave way to the younger of the two girls. This one of the Gracchi—a gentle-seeming creature, carelessly dressed, grave and simple—faced the mob with evident trepidation, a few notes, to which she never referred, in her shaking hand. What brought a girl like that here?—was the question on the few thoughtful faces in the crowd confronting her. She answered the query by introducing the resolution in an earnest little speech which, if it didn't show that much of the failure and suffering that darken the face of the world is due to women's false position, showed, at all events, that this young creature held a burning conviction that the subjection of her sex was the world's Root-Evil. With no apparent apprehension of the colossal audacity of her position, the girl moved gravely that 'this meeting demands of the Government the insertion of an enfranchisement clause in the Plural Voting Bill, and demands that it shall become law during the present session.' Her ignorance of Parliamentary procedure was freely pointed out to her.

'No,' she said, 'it is you who are ignorant—of how pressing the need is. You say it is "out of order." If treating the women of the country fairly is out of order, it is only because men have made a poor sort of order. It is the order that should be changed.'

Of course that dictum received its due amount of hooting.

'The vote is the reward for defending the country,' said a voice.

'No,' said the girl promptly, 'for soldiers and sailors don't vote.'

'It implies fitness for military service,' somebody amended.

'It shouldn't,' said Nineteen, calmly; 'it ought to imply merely a stake in the country. No one denies we have that.'

The crowd kept on about soldiering, till the speaker was goaded into saying—

'I don't say women like fighting, but women can fight! In these days warfare isn't any more a matter of great physical strength, and a woman can pull a trigger as well as a man. The Boer women found that out—and so has the Russian. I don't like thinking about it myself—for I seem to realize too clearly what horrors those women endured before they could carry bombs or shoulder rifles.'

'Rifles? Why a woman can't never hit nothing.'

'It is quite true we can't most of us even throw a stone straight—the great mass of women never in all their lives wanted to hit anybody or anything. And that'—she came nearer, and leaned over the side of the cart with scared face—'it's that that makes it so dreadful to realize how at last when women's eyes are opened—when they see their homes and the holiest things in life threatened and despised, how quickly after all they can learn the art of war.'

'With hatpins!' some one called out.

'Yes, scratching and spitting,' another added.

That sort of interruption did not so much embarrass her, but once or twice she was nearly thrown off her beam-ends by men and boys shouting, 'Wot's the matter with yer anyway? Can't yer get a husband?' and such-like brilliant relevancies. Although she flushed at some of these sallies, she stuck to her guns with a pluck that won her friends. In one of the pauses a choleric old man gesticulated with his umbrella.

'If what the world needed was Woman's Suffrage, it wouldn't have been left for a minx like you to discover it.' At which volleys of approval.

'That gentleman seems to think it's a new madness that we've recently invented.' The child seemed in her loneliness to reach out for companioning. She spoke of 'our friend John Stuart Mill.'

'Oo's Mill?'

'That great Liberal wrote in 1867——' But Mill and she were drowned together. She waited a moment for the flood of derision to subside.

''E wouldn't 'ad nothin' to do with yer if 'e'd thought you'd go on like you done.'

'Benjamin Disraeli was on our side. Mazzini—Charles Kingsley. As long ago as 1870, a Woman's Suffrage Bill that was drafted by Dr. Pankhurst and Mr. Jacob Bright passed a second reading.'

'The best sort of women never wanted it.'

'The kind of women in the past who cared to be associated with this reform—they were women like Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Martineau, and Josephine Butler, and the two thousand other women of influence who memorialized Mr. Gladstone.'

Something was called out that Vida could not hear, but that brought the painful scarlet into the young face.

'Shame! shame!' Some of the men were denouncing the interjection.

After a little pause the girl found her voice. 'You make it difficult for me to tell you what I think you ought to know. I don't believe I could go on if I didn't see over there the Reformer's Tree. It makes me think of how much had to be borne before other changes could be brought about.' She reminded the people of what had been said and suffered on that very spot in the past, before the men standing before her had got the liberties they enjoyed to-day.

'They were men!'

'Yes, and so perhaps it wasn't so hard for them. I don't know, and I'm sure it was hard enough. When we women remember what they suffered—though you think meanly of us because we can't be soldiers, you may as well know we are ready to do whatever has to be done—we are ready to bear whatever has to be borne. There seem to be things harder to face than bullets, but it doesn't matter, they'll be faced.'

The lady standing with her maid in the incongruous crowd, looked round once or twice with eyes that seemed to say, 'How much stranger life is than we are half the time aware, and how much stranger it bids fair to be!' The rude platform with the scarlet backing flaming in the face of the glorious summer afternoon, near the very spot upon which the great battles for Reform had been fought out in the past, and in place of England's sturdy freeman making his historic appeal for justice, and admission to the Commons—a girl pouring out this stream of vigorous English, upholding the cause her family had stood for. Her voice failed her a little towards the close, or rather it did not so much fail as betray to any sensitive listener the degree of strain she put upon it to make it carry above laughter and interjection. As she raised the note she bent over the crowd, leaning forward, with her neck outstretched, the cords in it swelling, and the heat of the sun bringing a flush and a moisture to her face, steadying her voice as the thought of the struggle to come, shook and clouded it, and calling on the people to judge of this matter without prejudice. It was a thing to live in the memory—the vision of that earnest child trying to fire the London louts with the great names of the past, and failing to see her bite her lip to keep back tears, and, bending over the rabble, find a choked voice to say—

'If your forefathers and foremothers who suffered for the freedom you young men enjoy—if they could come out of their graves to-day and see how their descendants use the great privileges they won—I believe they would go back into their graves and pull the shrouds over their eyes to hide them from your shame!'

'Hear! Hear!' 'Right you are.'

But she was done. She turned away, and found friendly hands stretched out to draw her to a seat.

The next speaker was an alert little woman with a provincial accent and the briskness of a cock-sparrow, whose prettiness, combined with pertness, rather demoralized the mob.

'Men and women,' she began, pitching her rather thin voice several notes too high.

'Men and women!' some one piped in mimicry; and the crowd dissolved in laughter.

It was curious to note again how that occasional exaggerated shrillness of the feminine voice when raised in the open air—how it amused the mob. They imitated the falsetto with squeals of delight. Each time she began afresh she was met by the shrill echo of her own voice. The contest went on for several minutes. The spectacle of the agitated little figure, bobbing and gesticulating and nothing heard but shrill squeaks, raised a very pandemonium of merriment. It didn't mend matters for her to say when she did get a hearing—

'I've come all the way from——' (place indistinguishable in the confusion) 'to talk to you this afternoon——'

''ow kind!'

'Do you reely think they could spare you?'

'And I'm going to convert every man within reach of my voice.'

Groans, and 'Hear! Hear!'

'Let's see you try!'

She talked on quite inaudibly for the most part. A phrase here and there came out, and the rest lost. So much hilarity in the crowd attracted to it a bibulous gentleman, who kept calling out, 'Oh, the pretty dear!' to the rapture of the bystanders. He became so elevated that the police were obliged to remove him. When the excitement attending this passage had calmed down, the reformer was perceived to be still piping away.

''ow long are you goin' on like this?'

'Ain't you never goin' to stop?'

'Oh, not for a long time,' she shrilled cheerfully. 'I've got the accumulations of centuries on me, and I'm only just beginning to unload! Although we haven't got the vote—not yet—never mind, we've got our tongues!'

'Lord, don't we know it!' said a sad-faced gentleman, in a rusty topper.

'This one's too intolerable,' said a man to his companion.

'Yes; she ought to be smacked.'

They melted out of the crowd.

'We've got our tongues, and I've been going round among all the women I know getting them to promise to use their tongues——'

'You stand up there and tell us they needed urgin'?'

'To use their tongues to such purpose that it won't be women, but men, who get up the next monster petition to Parliament asking for Woman's Suffrage.'

She went down under a flood of jeers, and rose to the surface again to say—

'A man's petition, praying Parliament for goodness' sake give those women the vote! Yes, you'd better be seeing about that petition, my friends, for I tell you there isn't going to be any peace till we get the franchise.'

'Aw now, they'd give you anything!'

When the jeering had died a little, and she came to the top once more, she was discovered to be shouting—

'You men 'ad just better keep an eye on us——'

'Can't take our eyes off yer!'

'We Suffragettes never have a Day of Rest! Every day in the week, while you men are at work or sitting in the public-house, we are visiting the women in their homes, explaining and stirring them up to a sense of their wrongs.'

'This I should call an example of what not to say!' remarked a shrewd-looking man with a grin.

The crowd were ragging the speaker again, while she shouted—

'We are going to effect such a revolution as the world has never seen!'

'I'd like to bash her head for her!'

'We let them know that so long as women have no citizenship they are outside the pale of the law. If we are outside the law, we can't break the law. It is not our fault that we're outlaws. It is you men's fault.'

'Don't say that,' said a voice in mock agony. 'I love you so.'

'I know you can't help it,' she retorted.

'If we gave you the vote, what would you do with it? Put it in a pie?'

'Well, I wouldn't make the hash of it you men do!' and she turned the laugh. 'Look at you! Look at you!' she said, when quiet was restored.

The young revellers gave a rather blank snigger, as though they had all along supposed looking at them to be an exhilarating occupation for any young woman.

'What do you do with your power? You throw it away. You submit to being taxed and to our being taxed to the tune of a hundred and twenty-seven millions, that a war may be carried on in South Africa—a war that most of you know nothing about and care nothing about—a war that some of us knew only too much about, and wanted only to see abandoned. We see constantly how you men either misuse the power you have or you don't use it at all. Don't appreciate it. Don't know what to do with it. Haven't a notion you ought to be turning it into good for the world. Hundreds of men don't care anything about political influence, except that women shouldn't have it.'

She was getting on better till some one called out, 'You ought to get married.'

'I'm going to. If you don't be good you won't be asked to the wedding.'

Before the temptation of a retort she had dropped her argument and encouraged personalities. In vain she tried to recover that thread of attention which, not her interrupter, but herself had snapped. She retired in the midst of uproar.

The chairman came forward and berated the crowd for its un-English behaviour in not giving a speaker a fair hearing.

A man held up a walking-stick. 'Will you just tell me one thing, miss——'

'Not now. When the last speaker has finished there will be ten minutes for questions. And I may say that it is a great and rare pleasure to have any that are intelligent. Don't waste anything so precious. Just save it up till you're asked for it. I want you now to give a fair hearing to Mrs. Bewley.'

This was a wizened creature of about fifty, in rusty black, widow of a stonemason and mother of four children—'four livin',' she said with some significance. She added her mite of testimony to that of the 96,000 organized women of the mills, that the workers in her way of life realized how their condition and that of the children would be improved 'if the women 'ad some say in things.'

'It's quite certain,' she assured the people, 'there ought to be women relief-officers and matrons in the prisons. And it's very 'ard on women that there isn't the same cheap lodgin'-'ouse accommodation fur single women as there is fur single men. It's very 'ard on poor girls. It's worse than 'ard. But men won't never change that. We women 'as got to do it.'

'Go 'ome and get your 'usban's tea!' said a new-comer, squeezing her way into the tight-packed throng, a queer little woman about the same age as the speaker, but dressed in purple silk and velvet, and wearing a wonderful purple plush hat on a wig of sandy curls. She might have been a prosperous milliner from the Commercial Road, and she had a meek man along who wore the husband's air of depressed responsibility. She was spared the humiliating knowledge, but she was taken at first for a sympathizer with the Cause. In manners she was precisely like what the Suffragette was at that time expected to be, pushing her way through the crowd, and vociferating 'Shyme!' to all and sundry. The men who had been pleasantly occupied in boo-ing the speaker turned and glared at her. The hang-dog husband had an air of not observing. Some of the boys pushed and harried her, but, to their obvious surprise, they heard her advising the rusty widow: 'Go 'ome and get your 'usban's tea!' She varied that advice by repeating her favourite 'Shyme!' varied by 'Wot beayviour!—old enough to know better. Every good wife oughter stay at 'ome and darn 'er 'usban's socks and make 'im comftubble.'

After delivering which womanly sentiment she would nod her purple plumes and smile at the men. It was the sorriest travesty of similar scenes in a politer world. To the credit of the loafers about her, they did not greatly encourage her. She was perhaps overmature for her role. But they ceased to jostle her. They even allowed her to get in front of them. The tall, rusty woman in the cart was meanwhile telling a story of personal experience of the operation of some law which shut out from any share in the benefits of the new Act which regulates the feeding of school children, the very people most in need of it. For it appeared that orphans and the children of widows were excluded. The Bill provided only for children living under their father's roof. If the roof was kept over them by the shackled hands of the mother, according to the speaker, they might go hungry.

'No, no,' Miss Levering shook her head, explaining to her maid. 'I don't doubt the poor soul has had some difficulty, some hard experience, but she can't be quoting the law correctly.'

Nevertheless, in the halting words of the woman who had suffered, if only from misapprehension upon so grave a point, there was a rude eloquence that overbore the lady's incredulity. The crowd hissed such gross unfairness.

'If women 'ad 'ave made the laws, do you think we'd 'ave 'ad one like that disgracin' the statue-book? No! And in all sorts o' ways it looks like the law seems to think a child's got only one parent. I'd like to tell them gentlemen that makes the laws that (it may be different in their world, I only speak for my little corner of it)—but in 'Ackney it looks like when a child's got only one parent, that one is the mother.'

'Sy, let up, old gal! there's some o' them young ones ain't 'ad a show yet.'

'About time you had a rest, mother!'

'If the mother dies,' she was saying, 'wot 'appens?'

'Let's 'ope she goes to heaven.'

'Wot 'appens to the pore little 'ome w'en the mother dies? Why, the pore little home is sold up, and the children's scattered among relations, or sent out so young to work it makes yer 'art ache. But if a man dies—you see it on every side, in 'Ackney—the widow takes in sewin', or goes out charin', or does other people's washin' as well as 'er own, or she mykes boxes—something er ruther, any'ow, that makes it possible fur 'er to keep 'er 'ome together. You don't see the mother scatterin' the little family w'en the only parent the law seems to reconize is dead and gone. I say——'

'You've a been sayin' it for a good while. You must be needin' a cup o' tea yerself.'

'In India I'm told they burn the widows. In England they do worse than that. They keep them half alive.'

The crowd rose to that, with the pinched proof before their eyes.

'Just enough alive to suffer through their children. And so the workin' women round about where I live—that's 'Ackney—they say if we ain't 'eathins in this country let's give up 'eathin ways. Let the mothers o' this country 'ave their 'ands untied. We're willin' to work for our children, but it breaks our 'earts to work without tools. The tool we're needin' is the tool that mends the laws. I 'ave pleasure in secondin' the resolution.'

With nervously twitching lips the woman sat down. They cheered her lustily—a little out of sympathy, a good deal from relief that she had finished, and a very different sort of person was being introduced by the chairman.



CHAPTER IX

'I will now call upon the last speaker. Yes, I will answer any general questions after Miss Ernestine Blunt has spoken.'

'Oh, I sy!'

''Ere's Miss Blunt.'

'Not that little one?'

'Yes. This is the one I was tellin' you about.'

People pushed and craned their necks, the crowd swayed as the other one of the two youngest 'Suffragettes' came forward. She had been sitting very quietly in her corner of the cart, looking the least concerned person in Hyde Park. Almost dull the round rather pouting face with the vivid scarlet lips; almost sleepy the heavy-lidded eyes. But when she had taken the speaker's post above the crowd, the onlooker wondered why he had not noticed her before.

It seemed probable that all save those quite new to the scene had been keeping an eye on this person, who, despite her childish look, was plainly no new recruit. Her self-possession demonstrated that as abundantly as the reception she got—the vigorous hoots and hoorays in the midst of clapping and cries—

'Does your mother know you're out?'

'Go 'ome and darn your stockens.'

'Hurrah!'

'You're a disgryce!'

'I bet on little Blunt!'

'Boo!'

Even in that portion of the crowd that did not relieve its feelings by either talking or shouting, there was observable the indefinable something that says, 'Now the real fun's going to begin.' You see the same sort of manifestation in the playhouse when the favourite comedian makes his entrance. He may have come on quite soberly only to say, 'Tea is ready,' but the grin on the face of the public is as ready as the tea. The people sit forward on the edge of their seats, and the whole atmosphere of the theatre undergoes some subtle change. So it was here.

And yet in this young woman was the most complete lack of any dependence upon 'wiles' that platform ever saw. Her little off-hand manner seemed to say, 'Don't expect me to encourage you in any nonsense, and, above all, don't dare to presume upon my youth.'

She began by calling on the Government to save the need of further demonstration by giving the women of the country some speedy measure of justice. 'They'll have to give it to us in the end. They might just as well do it gracefully and at once as do it grudgingly and after more "scenes."' Whereupon loud booing testified to the audience's horror of anything approaching unruly behaviour. 'Oh, yes, you are scandalized at the trouble we make. But—I'll tell you a secret'—she paused and collected every eye and ear—'we've only just begun! You'd be simply staggered if you knew what the Government still has to expect from us, if they don't give us what we're asking for.'

'Oh, ain't she just awful!' sniggered a girl with dyed hair and gorgeous jewelry.

The men laughed and shook their heads. She just was! They crowded nearer.

'You'd better take care! There's a policeman with 'is eye on you.'

'It's on you, my friends, he's got his eye. You saw a little while ago how they had to take away somebody for disturbing our meeting. It wasn't a woman.'

'Hear, hear!'

'The police are our friends, when the Government allows them to be. The other day when there was that scene in the House, one of the policemen who was sent up to clear the gallery said he wished the members would come and do their own dirty work. They hate molesting us. We don't blame the police. We put the blame where it belongs—on the Liberal Government.'

'Pore old Gov'mint—gettin' it 'ot.'

'Hooray fur the Gov'mint!'

'We see at last—it's taken us a long time, but we see at last—women get nothing even from their professed political friends, they've nothing whatever to expect by waiting and being what's called "ladylike."'

'Shame!'

'We don't want to depreciate the work of preparation the older, the "ladylike," Suffrage women did, but we came at last to see that all that was possible to accomplish that way had been done. The Cause hadn't moved an inch for years. It was even doing the other thing. Yes, it was going backward. Even the miserable little pettifogging share women had had in Urban and Borough Councils—even that they were deprived of. And they were tamely submitting! Women who had been splendid workers ten years ago, women with the best capacities for public service, had fallen into a kind of apathy. They were utterly disheartened. Many had given up the struggle. That was the state of affairs with regard to Woman's Suffrage only a few short months ago. We looked at the Suffragists who had grown grey in petitioning Parliament and being constitutional and "ladylike," and we said, "That's no good."'

Through roars of laughter and indistinguishable denunciation certain fragments rose clear—

'So you tried being a public nuisance!'

'A laughing-stock!'

'When we got to the place where we were a public laughing-stock we knew we were getting on.' The audience screamed. 'We began to feel encouraged!' A very hurricane swept the crowd. Perhaps it was chiefly at the gleam of eye and funny little wag of the head with the big floppity hat that made the people roar with delight. 'Yes; when things got to that point even the worst old fogey in the Cabinet——'

'Name! Name!'

'No, we are merciful. We withhold the name!' She smiled significantly, while the crowd yelled. 'Even the very fogeyest of them all you'd think might have rubbed his eyes and said, "Everybody's laughing at them—why, there must be something serious at the bottom of this!" But no; the members of the present Government never rub their eyes.'

'If you mean the Prime Minister——'

'Hooray for the——'

Through the cheering you heard Ernestine saying, 'No, I didn't mean the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister, between you and me, is as good a Suffragist as any of us. Only he——well, he likes his comfort, does the Prime Minister!'

When Ernestine looked like that the crowd roared with laughter. Yet it was impossible not to feel that when she herself smiled it was because she couldn't help it, and not, singularly enough, because of any dependence she placed upon the value of dimples as an asset of persuasion. What she seemed to be after was to stir these people up. It could not be denied that she knew how to do it, any more than it could be doubted that she was ignorant of how large a part in her success was played by a peculiarly amusing and provocative personality. Always she was the first to be grave again.

'Now if you noisy young men can manage to keep quiet for a minute, I'll tell you a little about our tactics,' she said obligingly.

'We know! Breakin' up meetings!'

'Rotten tactics!'

'That only shows you don't understand them yet. Now I'll explain to you.'

A little wind had sprung up and ruffled her hair. It blew open her long plain coat. It even threatened to carry away her foolish flapping hat. She held it on at critical moments, and tilted her delicate little Greuze-like face at a bewitching angle, and all the while that she was looking so fetching, she was briskly trouncing by turns the Liberal party and the delighted crowd. The man of the long moustachios, who had been swept to the other side of the monument, returned to his old inquiry with mounting cheer—

'Are we down'earted? Oh, no!'

'Pore man! 'Ave a little pity on us, miss!'

There were others who edged nearer, narrowing their eyes and squaring their shoulders as much as to say, 'Now we'll just trip her up at the first opportunity.'

'That's a very black cloud, miss,' Gorringe had whispered several minutes before a big raindrop had fallen on the lady's upturned face.

As Gorringe seemed to be the only one who had observed the overclouding of the sky, so she seemed to be the only one to think it mattered much. But one by one, like some species of enormous black 'four-o-clocks,' umbrellas blossomed above the undergrowth at the foot of the monument. The lady of the purple plumes had long vanished. A few others moved off, head turned over shoulder, as if doubtful of the policy of leaving while Ernestine was explaining things. The great majority turned up their coat collars and stood their ground. The maid hurriedly produced an umbrella and held it over the lady.

''Igher up, please, miss! Caun't see,' said a youth behind.

Nothing cloudy about Ernestine's policy: Independence of all parties, and organized opposition to whatever Government was in power, until something was done to prove it that friend to women it pretended to be.

'We are tired of being lied to and cheated. There isn't a man in the world whose promise at election time I would trust!'

It struck some common chord in the gathering. They roared with appreciation, partly to hear that baby saying it.

'No, not one!' she repeated stoutly, taking the raindrops in her face, while the risen wind tugged at her wide hat. 'They'll promise us heaven, and earth, and the moon, and the stars, just to get our help. Oh, we are old hands at it now, and we can see through the game!'

'Old 'and she is! Ha! ha! Old 'and!'

'Do they let you sit up for supper?'

'We are going to every contested election from this on.'

'Lord, yes! Rain or shine they don't mind!'

'They'll find they'll always have us to reckon with. And we aren't the least bit impressed any more, when a candidate tells us he's in favour of Woman's Suffrage. We say, "Oh, we've got four hundred and twenty of your kind already!"'

'Oh! oh!'

'Haw! haw!'

'Oo did you say that to?'

By name she held up to scorn the candidates who had given every reason for the general belief that they were indifferent, if not opposed, to Woman's Suffrage till the moment came for contesting a seat.

'Then when they find us there (we hear it keeps them awake at night, thinking we always will be there in future!)—when they find us there, they hold up their little white flags. Yes. And they say, "Oh, but I'm in favour of Votes for Women!" We just smile.'

The damp gathering in front of her hallooed.

'Yes. And when they protest what splendid friends of the Suffrage they are, we say, "You don't care twopence about it. You are like the humbugs who are there in the House of Commons already."'

'Humbugs!'

'Calls 'em 'umbugs to their fyces! Haw! haw!'

Roars and booing filled the air.

'We know, for many of us helped to put them there. But that was before we knew any better. Never again!'

Once more that wise little wag of the head, while the people shrieked with laughter. It was highly refreshing to think those Government blokes couldn't take in Ernestine.

'It's only the very young or the very foolish who will ever be caught that way again,' she assured them.

''Ow old are you?'

'Much too old to——'

'Just the right age to think about gettin' married,' shouted a pasty-faced youth.

'Haw! haw!'

Then a very penetrating voice screamed, 'Will you be mine?' and that started off several others. Though the interruptions did not anger nor in the least discompose this surprising young person in the cart—so far at least as could be seen—the audience looked in vain for her to give the notice to these that she had to other interruptions. It began to be plain that, ready as she was to take 'a straight ball' from anybody in the crowd, she discouraged impertinence by dint of an invincible deafness. If you wanted to get a rise out of Ernestine you had to talk about her 'bloomin' policy.' No hint in her of the cheap smartness that had wrecked the other speaker. In that highly original place for such manifestation, Ernestine offered all unconsciously a new lesson of the moral value that may lie in good-breeding. She won the loutish crowd to listen to her on her own terms.

'Both parties,' she was saying, 'have been glad enough to use women's help to get candidates elected. We've been quite intelligent enough to canvass for them; we were intelligent enough to explain to the ignorant men——' She acknowledged the groans by saying, 'Of course there are none of that sort here, but elsewhere there are such things as ignorant men, and women by dozens and by scores are sent about to explain to them why they should vote this way or that. But as the chairman told you, any woman who does that kind of thing in the future is a very poor creature. She deserves no sympathy when her candidate forgets his pledge and sneers at Womanhood in the House. If we put ourselves under men's feet we must expect to be trodden on. We've come to think it's time women should give up the door-mat attitude. That's why we've determined on a policy of independence. We see how well independence has worked for the Irish party—we see what a power in the House even the little Labour party is, with only thirty members. Some say those thirty Labour members lead the great Liberal majority by the nose——'

'Hear! hear!'

'Rot!'

They began to cheer Lothian Scott. Some one tossed Mr. Chamberlain's name into the air. Like a paper balloon it was kept afloat by vigorous puffings of the human breath. ''Ray fur Joe!' 'Three cheers for Joe!'—and it looked as if Ernestine had lost them.

'Listen!' She held out her hands for silence, but the tumult only grew. 'Just a moment. I want to tell you men—here's a friend of yours—he's a new-comer, but he looks just your kind! Give him a hearing.' She strained her voice to overtop the din. 'He's a Liberal.'

'Hooray!'

'Yes, I thought you'd listen to a Liberal. He's asking that old question, Why did we wait till the Liberals came in? Why didn't we worry the Conservatives when they were in power? The answer to that is that the Woman's Suffrage cause was then still in the stage of mild constitutional propaganda. Women were still occupied in being ladylike and trying to get justice by deserving it. Now wait a moment.' She stemmed another torrent. 'Be quiet, while I tell you something. You men have taught us that women can get a great deal by coaxing, often far more than we deserve! But justice isn't one of the things that's ever got that way. Justice has to be fought for. Justice has to be won.'

Howls and uproar.

'You men——' (it began to be apparent that whenever the roaring got so loud that it threatened to drown her, she said, 'You men—' very loud, and then gave her voice a rest while the din died down that they might hear what else the irrepressible Ernestine had to say upon that absorbing topic). 'You men discovered years ago that you weren't going to get justice just by deserving it, or even by being men, so when you got tired of asking politely for the franchise, you took to smashing windows and burning down Custom Houses, and overturning Bishops' carriages; while we, why, we haven't so much as upset a curate off a bicycle!'

Others might laugh, not Ernestine.

'You men,' she went on, 'got up riots in the streets—real riots where people lost their lives. It may have to come to that with us. But the Government may as well know that if women's political freedom has to be bought with blood, we can pay that price, too.'

Above a volley of boos and groans she went on, 'But we are opposed to violence, and it will be our last resort. We are leaving none of the more civilized ways untried. We publish a great amount of literature—I hope you are all buying some of it—you can't understand our movement unless you do! We organize branch unions and we hire halls—we've got the Somerset Hall to-night, and we hope you'll all come and bring your friends. We have very interesting debates, and we answer questions, politely!' she made her point to laughter. 'We don't leave any stone unturned. Because there are people who don't buy our literature, and who don't realize how interesting the Somerset Hall debates are, we go into the public places where the idle and the foolish, like that man just over there!—where they may point and laugh and make their poor little jokes. But let me tell you we never hold a meeting where we don't win friends to our cause. A lot of you who are jeering and interrupting now are going to be among our best friends. All the intelligent ones are going to be on our side.'

Above the laughter, a rich groggy voice was heard, 'Them that's against yer are all drunk, miss' (hiccup). 'D—don't mind 'em!'

Ernestine just gave them time to appreciate that, and then went on—

'Men and women were never meant to fight except side by side. You've been told by one of the other speakers how the men suffer by the women more and more underselling them in the Labour market——'

'Don't need no tellin'.'

'Bloody black-legs!'

'Do you know how that has come about? I'll tell you. It's come about through your keeping the women out of your Unions. You never would have done that if they'd had votes. You saw the important people ignored them. You thought it was safe for you to do the same. But I tell you it isn't ever safe to ignore the women!'

High over the groans and laughter the voice went on, 'You men have got to realize that if our battle against the common enemy is to be won, you've got to bring the women into line.'

'What's to become of chivalry?'

'What has become of chivalry?' she retorted; and no one seemed to have an answer ready, but the crowd fell silent, like people determined to puzzle out a conundrum.

'Don't you know that there are girls and women in this very city who are working early and late for rich men, and who are expected by those same employers to live on six shillings a week? Perhaps I'm wrong in saying the men expect the women to live on that. It may be they know that no girl can—it may be the men know how that struggle ends. But do they care? Do they bother about chivalry? Yet they and all of you are dreadfully exercised for fear having a vote would unsex women. We are too delicate—women are such fragile flowers.' The little face was ablaze with scorn. 'I saw some of those fragile flowers last week—and I'll tell you where. Not a very good place for gardening. It was a back street in Liverpool. The "flowers"' (oh, the contempt with which she loaded the innocent word!)—'the flowers looked pretty dusty—but they weren't quite dead. I stood and looked at them! hundreds of worn women coming down steep stairs and pouring out into the street. What had they all been doing there in that—garden, I was going to say!—that big grimy building? They had been making cigars!—spending the best years of their lives, spending all their youth in that grim dirty street making cigars for men. Whose chivalry prevents that? Why were they coming out at that hour of the day? Because their poor little wages were going to be lowered, and with the courage of despair they were going on strike. No chivalry prevents men from getting women at the very lowest possible wage—(I want you to notice the low wage is the main consideration in all this)—men get these women, that they say are so tender and delicate, to undertake the almost intolerable toil of the rope-walk. They get women to make bricks. Girls are driven—when they are not driven to worse—they are driven to being lodging-house slaveys or over-worked scullions. That's all right! Women are graciously permitted to sweat over other people's washing, when they should be caring for their own babies. In Birmingham'—she raised the clear voice and bent her flushed face over the crowd—'in Birmingham those same "fragile flowers" make bicycles to keep alive! At Cradley Heath we make chains. At the pit brows we sort coal. But a vote would soil our hands! You may wear out women's lives in factories, you may sweat them in the slums, you may drive them to the streets. You do. But a vote would unsex them.'

Her full throat choked. She pressed her clenched fist against her chest and seemed to admonish herself that emotion wasn't her line.

'If you are intelligent you know as well as I do that women are exploited the length and the breadth of the land. And yet you come talking about chivalry! Now, I'll just tell you men something for your future guidance.' She leaned far out over the crowd and won a watchful silence. 'That talk about chivalry makes women sick.' In the midst of the roar, she cried, 'Yes, they mayn't always show it, for women have had to learn to conceal their deepest feelings, but depend on it that's how they feel.'

Then, apparently thinking she'd been serious enough, 'There might be some sense in talking to us about chivalry if you paid our taxes for us,' she said; while the people recovered their spirits in roaring with delight at the coolness of that suggestion.

'If you forgave us our crimes because we are women! If you gave annuities to the eighty-two women out of every hundred in this country who are slaving to earn their bread—many of them having to provide for their children; some of them having to feed sick husbands or old parents. But chivalry doesn't carry you men as far as that! No! No further than the door! You'll hold that open for a lady and then expect her to grovel before such an exhibition of chivalry! We don't need it, thank you! We can open doors for ourselves.'

She had quite recovered her self-possession, and it looked, as she faced the wind and the raindrops, as if she were going to wind up in first-class fighting form. The umbrellas went down before a gleam of returning sun. An aged woman in rusty black, who late in the proceedings had timidly adventured a little way into the crowd, stood there lost and wondering. She had peered about during the last part of Miss Blunt's speech with faded incredulous eyes, listened to a sentence or two, and then, turning with a pathetic little nervous laugh of apology, consulted the faces of the Lords of Creation. When the speaker was warned that a policeman had his eye on her, the little old woman's instant solicitude showed that the dauntless Suffragist had both touched and frightened her. She craned forward with a fluttering anxiety till she could see for herself. Yes! A stern-looking policeman coming slow and majestic through the crowd. Was he going to hale the girl off to Holloway? No; he came to a standstill near some rowdy boys, and he stared straight before him—herculean, impassive, the very image of conscious authority. Whenever Ernestine said anything particularly dreadful, the old lady craned her neck to see how the policeman was taking it. When Ernestine fell to drubbing the Government, the old lady, in her agitation greatly daring, squeezed up a little nearer as if half of a mind to try to placate that august image of the Power that was being flouted. But it ended only in trembling and furtive watching, till Ernestine's reckless scorn at the idea of chivalry moved the ancient dame faintly to admonish the girl, as a nurse might speak to a wilful child. 'Dear! Dear!'—and then furtively trying to soothe the great policeman she twittered at his elbow, 'No! No! she don't mean it!'

When Ernestine declared that women could open doors for themselves, some one called out—

'When do you expect to be a K.C.?'

'Oh, quite soon,' she answered cheerfully, with her wind-blown hat rakishly over one ear, while the boys jeered.

'Well,' said the policeman, 'she's pawsed 'er law examination!' As some of the rowdiest boys, naturally surprised at this interjection, looked round, he rubbed it in. 'Did better than the men,' he assured them.

Was it possible that this dread myrmidon of the law was vaunting the prowess of the small rebel?

Miss Levering moved nearer. 'Is that so? Did I understand you——'

With a surly face he glanced round at her. Not for this lady's benefit had the admission been made.

'So they say!' he observed, with an assumption of indifference, quite other than the tone in which he had betrayed where his sympathies, in spite of himself, really were. Well, well, there were all kinds, even of people who looked so much alike as policemen.

Now the crowd, with him and Miss Levering as sole exceptions, were dissolved again in laughter. What had that girl been saying?

'Yes, we're spectres at the Liberal feast; and we're becoming inconveniently numerous. We've got friends everywhere. Up and down the country we go organizing——'

''Ow do you go—in a pram?' At which the crowd rocked with delight.

The only person who hadn't heard the sally, you would say, was the orator. On she went—

'Organizing branches and carrying forward the work of propaganda. You people in London stroll about with your hands in your pockets and your hats on the back of your heads, and with never a notion of what's going on in the world that thinks and works. That's the world that's making the future. Some of you understand it so little you think all that we tell you is a joke—just as the governing class used to laugh at the idea of a Labour Party in conservative England. While those people were laughing, the Labour men were at work. They talked and wrote; they lectured, and printed, and distributed, and organized, and one fine day there was a General Election! To everybody's astonishment, thirty Labour men were returned to Parliament! Just that same sort of thing is going on now among women. We have our people at work everywhere. And let me tell you, the most wonderful part of it all is to discover how little teaching we have to do. How ready the women are, all over the three kingdoms.'

'Rot!'

'The women are against it.'

'Read the letters in the papers.'

'Why don't more women come to hear you if they're so in favour?'

'The converted don't need to come. It's you who need to come!' Above roars of derision: 'You felt that or, of course, you wouldn't be here. Men are so reasonable! As to the women who write letters to the papers to say they're against the Suffrage, they are very ignorant, those ladies, or else it may be they write their foolish letters to please their menfolk. Some of them, I know, think the end and aim of woman is to please. I don't blame them; it's the penalty of belonging to the parasite class. But those women are a poor little handful. They write letters to prove that they "don't count," and they prove it.' She waved them away with one slim hand. 'That's one reason we don't bother much with holding drawing-room meetings. The older Suffragists have been holding drawing-room meetings for forty years!' She brought it out to shouts. 'But we go to the mill gates! That's where we hold our meetings! We hold them at the pit-brow; we hold them everywhere that men and women are working and suffering and hoping for a better time.'

With that Miss Ernestine sat down. They applauded her lustily; they revelled in laughing praise, yielding to a glow that they imagined to be pure magnanimity.

'Are there any questions?' Miss Claxton, with her eyes still screwed up to meet the returning sun and the volley of interrogatory, appeared at the side of the cart. 'Now, one at a time, please. What? I can't hear when you all talk together. Write it down and hand it to me. Now, you people who are nearer—what? Very well! Here's a man who wants to know whether if women had the vote wouldn't it make dissension in the house, when husband and wife held different views?' She had smiled and nodded, as though in this question she welcomed an old friend, but instead of answering it she turned to the opposite side and looked out over the clamourers on the left. They were engaged for the most part in inquiring about her matrimonial prospects, and why she had carried that dog-whip. Something in her face made them fall silent, for it was both good-humoured and expectant, even intent. 'I'm waiting,' she said, after a little pause. 'At every meeting we hold there's usually another question put at the same time as that first one about the quarrels that will come of husbands and wives holding different opinions. As though the quarrelsome ones had been waiting for women's suffrage before they fell out! When the man on my right asks, "Wouldn't they quarrel?" there's almost always another man on my left who says, "If women were enfranchised we wouldn't be an inch forrader, because the wife would vote as her husband told her to. The man's vote would simply be duplicated, and things would be exactly as they were." Neither objector seems to see that the one scruple cancels the other. But to the question put this afternoon, I'll just say this.' She bent forward, and she held up her hand. 'To the end of time there'll be people who won't rest till they've found something to quarrel about. And to the end of time there'll be wives who follow blindly where their husbands lead. And to the end of time there'll be husbands who are influenced by their wives. What's more, all this has gone on ever since there were husbands, and it will go on as long as there are any left, and it's got no more to do with women's voting than it has with their making cream tarts. No, not half as much!' she laughed. 'Now, where's that question that you were going to write?'

Some one handed up a wisp of white paper. Miss Claxton opened it, and upon the subject presented she embarked with the promising beginning, 'Your economics are pretty wobbly, my friend,' and proceeded to clear the matter up and incidentally to flatten out the man. One wondered that under such auspices 'Question Time' was as popular as it obviously was. There is no doubt a fearful joy in adventuring yourself in certain danger before the public eye. Besides the excitement of taking a personal share in the game, there is always the hope that it may have been reserved to you to stump the speaker and to shine before the multitude.

A gentleman who had vainly been trying to get her to hear him, again asked something in a hesitating way, stumbling and going back to recast the form of his question.

He was evidently quite in earnest, but either unaccustomed to the sound of his own voice or unnerved to find himself bandying words in Hyde Park with a Suffragette. So when he stuck fast in the act of fashioning his phrases, Miss Claxton bent in the direction whence the voice issued, and said, briskly obliging—

'You needn't go on. I know the rest. What this gentleman is trying to ask is——'

And although no denial on his part reached the public ear, it was not hard to imagine him seething with indignation, down there helpless in his crowded corner, while the facile speaker propounded as well as demolished his objection to her and all her works.

'Yes; one last question. Let us have it.'

'How can you pretend that women want the vote? Why, there are hardly any here.'

'More women would join us openly but for fear of their fellow-cowards. Thousands upon thousands of women feel a sympathy with this movement they dare not show.'

'Lots of women don't want the vote.'

'What women don't want it? Are you worrying about a handful who think because they have been trained to like subservience everybody else ought to like subservience, too? The very existence of a movement like this is a thorn in their sleek sides. We are a reproach and a menace to such women. But this isn't a movement to compel anybody to vote. It is to give the right to those who do want it—to those signatories of the second largest petition ever laid on the table of the House of Commons—to the 96,000 textile workers—to the women who went last month in deputation to the Prime Minister, and who represented over half a million belonging to Trades Unions and organized societies. To—perhaps more than all, to the unorganized women, those whose voices are never heard in public. They, as Mrs. Bewley told you—they are beginning to want it. The women who are made to work over hours—they want the vote. To compel them to work over hours is illegal. But who troubles to see that laws are fairly interpreted for the unrepresented? I know a factory where a notice went up yesterday to say that the women employed there will be required to work twelve hours a day for the next few weeks. Instead of starting at eight, they must begin at six, and work till seven. The hours in this particular case are illegal—as the employer will find out!' she threw in with a flash, and one saw by that illumination the avenue through which his enlightenment would come. 'But in many shops where women work, twelve hours a day is legal. Much of women's employment is absolutely unrestricted, except that they may not be worked on Sunday. And while all that is going on, comfortable gentlemen sit in armchairs and write alarmist articles about the falling birth-rate and the horrible amount of infant mortality. A Government calling itself Liberal goes pettifogging on about side issues, while women are debased and babies die. Here and there we find a man who realizes that the main concern of the State should be its children, and that you can't get worthy citizens where the mothers are sickly and enslaved. The question of statecraft, rightly considered, always reaches back to the mother. That State is most prosperous that most considers her. No State that forgets her can survive. The future is rooted in the well-being of women. If you rob the women, your children and your children's children pay. Men haven't realized it—your boasted logic has never yet reached so far. Of all the community, the women who give the next generation birth, and who form its character during the most impressionable years of its life—of all the community, these mothers now or mothers to be ought to be set free from the monstrous burden that lies on the shoulders of millions of women. Those of you who want to see women free, hold up your hands.'

A strange, orchid-like growth sprang up in the air. Hands gloved and ungloved, hands of many shades and sizes, hands grimy and hands ringed.

Something curious to the unaccustomed eye, these curling, clutching, digitated members raised above their usual range and common avocations, suddenly endowed with speech, and holding forth there in the silent upper air for the whole human economy.

'Now, down.' The pallid growth vanished. 'Those against the freedom of women.' Again hands, hands. Far too many to suit the promoters of the meeting. But Miss Claxton announced, 'The ayes are in the majority. The meeting is with us.'

'She can't even count!' The air was full of the taunting phrase—'Can't count!'

'Yes,' said Miss Claxton, wheeling round again upon the people, as some of her companions began to get down out of the cart. 'Yes, she can count, and she can see when men don't play fair. Each one in that group held up two hands when the last vote was taken.' She made a great deal of this incident, and elevated it into a principle. 'It is entirely characteristic of the means men will stoop to use in opposing the Women's Cause.'

To hoots and groans and laughter the tam-o'-shanter disappeared.

'Rank Socialists every one of 'em!' was one of the verdicts that flew about.

'They ought all to be locked up.'

'A danger to the public peace.'

A man circulating about on the edge of the crowd was calling out, ''Andsome souvenir. Scented paper 'andkerchief! With full programme of Great Suffragette Meeting in 'Yde Park!'

As the crowd thinned, some of the roughs pressing forward were trying to 'rush' the speakers. The police hastened to the rescue. It looked as if there would be trouble. Vida and her maid escaped towards the Marble Arch.

''Andsome scented 'andkerchief! Suffragette Programme!' The raucous voice followed them, and not the voice alone. Through the air was wafted the cheap and stifling scent of patchouli.



CHAPTER X

Jean Dunbarton received Mr. Geoffrey Stonor upon his entrance into Mrs. Freddy's drawing-room with a charming little air of fluttered responsibility.

'Mrs. Freddy and I have been lunching with the Whyteleafes. She had to go afterwards to say good-bye to some people who are leaving for abroad. So Mrs. Freddy asked me to turn over my Girls' Club to your cousin Sophia——'

'Are you given to good works, too?' he interrupted. 'What a terribly philanthropic age it is!'

Jean smiled as she went on with her explanation. 'Although it wasn't her Sunday, Sophia, like an angel, has gone to the club. And I'm here to explain. Mrs. Freddy said if she wasn't back on the stroke——'

'Oh, I dare say I'm a trifle early.'

It was a theory that presented fewer difficulties than that he should be kept waiting.

'I was to beg you to give her a few minutes' grace in any case.'

Instead of finding a seat, he stood looking down at the charming face. His indifference to Mrs Freddy's precise programme lent his eyes a misleading look of absent-mindedness, which dashed the girl's obvious excitement over the encounter.

'I see,' he had said slowly. What he saw was a graceful creature of medium height, with a clear colour and grey-blue eyes fixed on him with an interest as eager as it was frank. What the grey-blue eyes saw was probably some glorified version of Stonor's straight, firm features, a little blunt, which lacked that semblance of animation given by colour, and seemed to scorn to make up for it by any mobility of expression. The grey eyes, set somewhat too prominently, were heavy when not interested, and the claim to good looks which nobody had dreamed of denying seemed to rest mainly upon the lower part of his face. The lips, over-full, perhaps, were firmly moulded, but the best lines were those curves from the ear to the quite beautiful chin. The gloss on the straight light-brown hair may have stood to the barber's credit, but only health could keep so much grace still in the carriage of a figure heavier than should be in a man of forty—one who, without a struggle, had declined from polo unto golf. There was no denying that the old expression of incipient sullenness, fleeting or suppressed, was deepening into the main characteristic of his face, though it was held that he, as little as any man, had cause to present that aspect to a world content to be his oyster. Yet, as no doubt he had long ago learned, it was that very expression which was the cause of much of the general concern people seemed to feel to placate, to amuse, to dispel the menace of that cloud. The girl saw it, and her heart failed her.

'Mrs. Freddy said if I told you the children were in the garden expecting you, you wouldn't have the heart to go away directly.'

'She is right. I haven't the heart.' And in that lifting of his cloud, the girl's own face shone an instant.

'I should have felt it a terrible responsibility if you were to go.' She spoke as if the gladness that was not to be repressed called for some explanation. 'Mrs. Freddy says that she and Mr. Freddy see so little of you nowadays. That was why she made such a point of my coming and trying to—to——'

'You needed a great deal of urging then?' He betrayed the half-amused, half-ironic surprise of the man accustomed to find people ready enough, as a rule, to clutch at excuse for a tete-a-tete. Although she had flushed with mingled embarrassment and excitement, he proceeded to increase her perturbation by suggesting, 'Mrs. Freddy had to overcome your dislike for the mission.'

'Dislike? Oh, no!'

'What then?'

'My—well——' She lifted her eyes, and dared to look him full in the face as she said, 'I suppose you know you are rather alarming.'

'Am I?' he smiled.

People less interested in him than Jean were grateful to Geoffrey Stonor when he smiled. They felt relieved from some intangible responsibility for the order of the universe.

The girl brightened wonderfully. 'Oh, yes, very alarming indeed,' she assured him cheerfully.

'How do you make that out?'

'I don't need to "make it out." It's so very plain.' Then a little hastily, as if afraid of having said something that sounded like impious fault-finding, 'Anybody's alarming who is so—so much talked about, and so—well, like you, you understand.'

'I don't understand,' he objected mendaciously—'not a little bit.'

'I think you must,' she said, with her candid air. 'Though I had made up my mind that I wouldn't be afraid of you any more since our week-end at Ulland.'

'Ah, that's better!'

There was nothing in the words, but in the gentleness with which he brought them out, so much that the girl turned her eyes away and played with the handle of her parasol.

'Have you been reading any more poetry?' he said.

'No.'

'No? Why not?'

She shook her head. 'It doesn't sound the same.'

'What! I spoilt it for you?'

She laughed, and again she shook her head, but with something shy, half-frightened in her look. Nervously she dashed at a diversion.

'I'm afraid I was a little misleading about the children. They aren't in the garden yet. Shall we go up and see them having tea?'

'Oh, no, it would be bad for their little digestions to hurry them.'

He sat down. Her face gave him as much credit as though he had done some fine self-abnegating deed.

They spoke of that Sunday walk in the valley below the Ulland links, and the crossing of a swollen little stream on a rotting and rickety log.

'I had to go,' she explained apologetically. 'Hermione had gone on and forgotten the puppy hadn't learnt to follow. I was afraid he'd lose himself.'

'It was a dangerous place to go across,' he said, as if to justify some past opinion.

Her eyes were a little mischievous. 'I never thought you'd come.'

'Why?' he demanded.

'Oh, because I thought you'd be too——' His slow look quickened as if to surprise in her some reflection upon his too solid flesh—or might it even be upon the weight of years? But the uncritical admiration in her face must have reassured him before the words, 'I thought you'd be too grand. It was delightful to find you weren't.'

He kept his eyes on her. 'Are you always so happy?'

'Oh, I hope not. That would be rather too inhuman, wouldn't it?'

'Too celestial, perhaps!' He laughed—but he was looking into the blue of her eyes as if through them he too had caught a glimpse of Paradise. 'I remember thinking at Ulland,' he said more slowly again, 'I had never seen any one quite so happy.'

'I was happy at Ulland. But I'm not happy now.'

'Then your looks belie you.'

'No, I am very sad. I have to go away from this delightful London to Scotland. I shall be away for weeks. It's too dismal.'

'Why do you go?'

'My grandfather makes me. He hates London. And his dreary old house on a horrible windy hill—he simply loves that!'

'And you don't love it at all. I see.' He seemed to be thinking out something.

Compunction visited the face before him. 'I didn't mean to say I didn't love it at all. It's like those people you care to be with for a little while, but if you must go being with them for ever you come to hate them—almost.'

They sat silent for a moment, then with slow reflectiveness, like one who thinks aloud, he said—

'I have to go to Scotland next week.'

'Do you! What part?'

'I go to Inverness-shire.'

'Why, that's where we are! Near——'

'Why shouldn't I drop down upon you some day?'

'Oh, will you? That would be——' She seemed to save herself from some gulf of betrayal. 'There are walks about my grandfather's more beautiful than anything you ever saw—or perhaps I ought to say more beautiful than anything I ever saw.'

'Nicer walks than at Ulland?'

'Oh, no comparison! One is a bridle-path all along a wonderful brown trout stream that goes racing down our hill. There's a moor on one side, and a wood on the other, and a peat bog at the bottom.'

'We might perhaps stop short of the bog.'

'Yes, we'd stop at old McTaggart's. He's the head-keeper and a real friend. McTaggart "has the Gaelic." But he hasn't much else, so perhaps you'd prefer his wife.'

'Why should I prefer his wife?'

Jean's face was full of laughter. Stonor's plan of going to Scotland had singularly altered the character of that country. Its very inhabitants were now perceived to be enlivening even to talk about; to know—the gamekeeper's wife alone—would repay the journey thither.

'I assure you Mrs. McTaggart is a travelled, experienced person.'

He shook his head while he humoured her. 'I'm not sure travel or experience is what we chiefly prize—in ladies.'

'Oh, isn't it? I didn't know, you see. I didn't know how dreadfully you might miss the terribly clever people you're accustomed to in London.'

'It's because of the terribly clever people we are glad to go away.'

He waxed so eloquent in his admiration of the womanly woman (who seemed by implication to have steered clear of Mrs. McTaggart's pitfalls), that Jean asked with dancing eyes—

'Are you consoling me for not being clever?'

'Are you sure you aren't?'

'Oh, dear, yes. No possible shadow of doubt about it.'

'Then,' he laughed, 'I'm coming to Inverness-shire! I'll even go so far as to call on the McTaggarts if you'll undertake that she won't instruct me about foreign lands.'

'No such irrelevance! She'd tell you about London. She was here for six whole months. And she got something out of it I don't believe even you have. A Certificate of Merit.'

'No. London certainly never gave me one.'

'You see! Mrs. McTaggart lived the life of the Metropolis with such success that she passed an examination before she left. The subject was: "Incidents in the Life of Abraham." It says so on the certificate. She has it framed and hung in the parlour.'

He smiled. 'I admit few can point to such fruits of Metropolitan Ausbildung. But I think I shall prefer the burnside—or even the bog.'

'No; the moors. They're best of all.' She sat looking straight before her, with her heart's deep well overflowing at her eyes. As if she felt vaguely that some sober reason must be found for seeing those same moors in this glorified light all of a sudden, she went on, 'I'll show you a special place where white heather grows, and the rabbits tumble about as tame as kittens. It's miles away from the sea, but the gulls come sunning themselves and walking about like pigeons. I used to hide up there when I was little and naughty. Nobody ever found the place out except an old gaberlunzie, and I gave him tuppence not to tell.'

'Yes, show me that place.' His face was wonderfully attractive so!

'And we'll take The Earthly—William Morris—along, won't we?'

'I thought you'd given up reading poetry.'

'Yes—to myself. I used to think I knew about poetry, yes, better than anybody but the poets. There are people as arrogant as that.'

'Why, it's worse than Mrs. McTaggart!'

The girl was grave, even tremulous. 'But, no! I never had a notion of what poetry really was till down at Ulland you took my book away from me, and read aloud——'

* * * * *

Mr. Freddy let himself and Lord Borrodaile in at the front door so closely on the heels of Mrs. Freddy that the servant who had closed the door behind her had not yet vanished into the lower regions. At a word from that functionary, Mr. Freddy left his brother depositing hat and stick with the usual deliberation, and himself ran upstairs two steps at a time. He caught up with his wife just outside the drawing-room door, as she paused to take off her veil in front of that mirror which Mrs. Freddy said should be placed between the front door and the drawing-room in every house in the land for the reassurance of the timid feminine creature. She was known to add privately that it was not ignored by men—and that those who came often, contracted a habit of hurrying upstairs close at the servant's heels, in order to have two seconds to spare for furtive consultation, while he went on to open the drawing-room door. She had observed this pantomime more than once, leaning over the banisters, herself on the way downstairs.