One of the oddest things about these neo-Suffragists was the simplicity with which they accepted aid—the absence in the responsible ones of conventional gratitude. This became matter for both surprise and instruction to the outsider. It no doubt had the effect of chilling and alienating the 'philanthropist on the make.' Even to the less ungenerous, not bargainers for approbation or for influence, even in their case the deep-rooted suspicion we have been taught to cultivate for one another, makes the gift of good faith so difficult that it can be given freely only to people like these, people who plainly and daily suffered for their creed, who stood to lose all the things most of us strive for, people who valued neither comfort, nor money, nor the world's good word. That they took help, and even sacrifice, as a matter of course, seemed in them mere modesty and sound good sense; tantamount to saying, 'I am not so silly or self-centred as to suppose you do this for me. You do it, of course, for the Cause. The Cause is yours—is all Women's. You serve humanity. Who am I that I should thank you?'

This attitude extended even to acts that were in truth prompted less by concern for the larger issue than by sheer personal interest.

Vida Levering's first experience of this 'new attitude' came one late afternoon while on her way to leave cards on some people in Grosvenor Road. Driving through Pimlico about half-past six, she lifted up her eyes at the sound of many voices and beheld a mob of men and boys in the act of pursuing a little group of women, who were fleeing up a side street away from the river. The natural shrinking and disgust of 'the sheltered woman' showed in the face of the occupant of the brougham as she leaned forward and said to the coachman—

'Not this way! Don't you see there's some disturbance? Turn back.'

The man obeyed. The little crowd had halted. It looked as if the thief, or drunken woman, or what not, had been surrounded and overwhelmed. The end of the street abutted on Pimlico Pier. Two or three knots of people were still standing about, talking and looking up the street at the little crowd of shouting, gesticulating rowdies. A woman with a perambulator, making up her mind at just the wrong moment to cross the road, found herself almost under the feet of the Fox-Moore horses. The coachman pulled up sharply, and before he had driven on, the lady's eyes had fallen on an inscription in white chalk on the flagstone—

'VOTES FOR WOMEN.
'Meeting here to-night at a quarter to six.'

The occupant of the carriage turned her head sharply in the direction of the 'disturbance,' and then—

'After all, I must go up that street. Drive fast till you get near those people. Quick!'

'Up there, miss?'

'Yes, yes. Make haste!' For the crowd was moving on, and still no sign of a policeman.

By the time the brougham caught up with them, the little huddle of folk had nearly reached the top of the street. In the middle of the mÊlÉe a familiar face. Ernestine Blunt!

'Oh, Henderson!'—Miss Levering put her head out of the window—'that girl! the young one! She's being mobbed.'

'Yes, miss.'

'But something must be done! Hail a policeman.'

'Yes, miss.'

'Do you see a policeman?'

'No, miss.'

'Well, stop a moment,' for even at this slowest gait the brougham had passed the storm centre.

The lady hanging out of the window looked back and saw that Ernestine's face, very pink as to cheeks, very bright as to eyes, was turned quite unruffled on the rabble.

'Can't you see the meeting's over?' she called out. 'You boys go home now and think about what we've told you.'

The reply to that was a laugh and a concerted 'rush' that all but carried the girl and her companions off their feet. To Henderson's petrifaction, the door of the brougham was hastily opened and then slammed to, leaving Miss Levering in the road, saying to him over her shoulder—

'Wait just round the corner, unless I call.'

With which she hurried across the street, her eyes on the little face that, in spite of its fresh colouring, looked so pathetically tired. Making her way round the outer fringe of the crowd, Vida saw on the other side—near where Ernestine and her sore-beset companions stood with their backs to the wall—an opening in the dingy ranks. Fleet of foot, she gained it, thrust an arm between the huddled women, and, taking the foolhardy girl by the sleeve, said, sotto voce—

'Come! Come with me!'

Ernestine raised her eyes, fixed them for one calm instant on Vida Levering's face, and then, turning round, said—

'Where's Mrs. Brown?'

'Never mind Mrs. Brown!' whispered the strange lady, drawing off as the rowdy young men came surging round that side.

There was another rush and a yell, and Vida fled. When next she turned to look, it was to see two women making a sudden dash for liberty. They had escaped through the rowdy ranks, and they tore across the street, running for their lives and calling for help as they ran.

Vida, a shade or two paler, stood transfixed. What was going to happen? But there was the imperturbable Ernestine holding the forsaken position, still the centre of the pushing, shouting little mob who had jeered frantically as the other women fled.

It was too much. Not Ernestine's isolation alone, the something childish in the brilliant face would have enlisted a less sympathetic observer. A single moment's wavering and the lady made for the place where the besiegers massed less thick. She was near enough now to call out over the rowdies' heads—

'Come. Why do you stay there?'

Faces turned to look at her; while Ernestine shouted back the cryptic sentence—

'It wasn't my bus!'

Bus? Had danger robbed her of her reason? The boys were cheering now and looking past Miss Levering: she turned, bewildered, to see 'Mrs. Brown' and a sister reformer mounting the top of a sober London Road car. They had been running for that, then—and not for life! Miss Levering raised her hand and her voice as she looked back at Ernestine—

'I've got a trap. Come!'

'Where?'

Ernestine stepped out from the vociferating, jostling crowd and followed the new face as simply as though she had been waiting for just that summons. The awful moment was when, with a shout, the tail of rowdies followed after. Miss Levering had not bargained for that. Her agitated glance left the unsavoury horde at her heels and went nervously up and down the street. It was plainly not only, nor even chiefly, the hooligans she feared, but the amazÉd eye of some acquaintance. Bad enough to meet Henderson's!

'Jump in!' she said hastily to the girl, and then, 'Go on!' she called out desperately, flying in after Ernestine and slamming the door. 'Drive fast!' She thrust her head through the window to add, 'Anywhere!' And she sank back. 'How dreadful that was!'

'What was?' said the rescued one, glancing out of the carriage with an air of suddenly renewed interest.

'Why, the attack of those hooligans on a handful of defenceless women.'

'Oh, they weren't attacking us.'

'What were they doing?'

'Oh, just running after us and screaming a little.'

'But I saw them—pushing and jostling and——'

'Oh, it was all quite good-natured.'

'You mean you weren't frightened?'

'There's nothing to be frightened at.' She was actually saying it in a soothing, 'motherly' sort of way, calculated to steady the lady's nerves—reassuring the rescuer.

Vida's eye fell on the festoon of braid falling from the dark cloth skirt.

'Well, the polite attentions of your friends seem to have rather damaged your gown.'

Over a big leather portfolio that she held clasped in her arms, Ernestine, too, looked down at the torn frock.

'That foolish trimming—it's always getting stepped on.'

Miss Levering's search had produced a pin.

'No; I'll just pull it off.'

Ernestine did so, and proceeded to drop a yard of it out of the window. Miss Levering began to laugh.

'Which way are we going?' says Miss Blunt, looking out. 'I have to be at Battersea at——'

'What were you doing at Pimlico Pier?'

'Holding a meeting for the Government employees—the people who work for the Army and Navy Clothing Department.'

'Oh. And you live at Battersea?'

'No; but I have a meeting there to-night. We had a very good one at the Docks, too.' Her eyes sparkled.

'A Suffrage meeting?'

'Yes; one of the best we've had——'

'When was that?'

'During the dinner hour. The men stood with their pails and ate while they listened. They were quite nice and understanding, those men.'

'What day was that?'

'This morning.'

'And the Battersea meeting?'

'That's not for another hour; but I have to be there first—to arrange.'

'When do you dine?'

'Oh, I'll get something either before the meeting or after—whenever there's time.'

'Isn't it a pity not to get your food regularly? Won't you last longer if you do?'

'Oh, I shall last.' She sat contentedly, hugging her big portfolio.

The lady glanced at the carriage clock. 'In the house where I live, dinner is a sort of sacred rite. If you are two seconds late you are disgraced, so I'm afraid I can't——'

'There's the bus I was waiting for!' Ernestine thrust her head out. 'Stop, will you!' she commanded the astonished Henderson. 'Good-bye.' She nodded, jumped out, shut the door, steadied her hat, and was gone.

It was so an acquaintance began that was destined to make a difference to more than one life. Those days of the summer that Miss Claxton spent indoctrinating the women of Wales, and that Mrs. Chisholm utilized in 'organizing Scotland,' were dedicated by Ernestine and her friends to stirring up London and the various dim and populous worlds of the suburbs.

Much oftener than even Mrs. Fox-Moore knew, her sister, instead of being in the houses where she was supposed to be, and doing the things she was expected to be doing, might have been seen in highly unexpected haunts prosecuting her acquaintance with cockney crowds, never learning Ernestine's fearlessness of them, and yet in some way fascinated almost as much as she was repelled. At first she would sit in a hansom at safe distance from the turmoil that was usually created by the expounders of what to the populace was a 'rum new doctrine' invented by Ernestine. Miss Levering would lean over the apron of the cab hearing only scraps, till the final, 'Now, all who are in favour of Justice, hold up their hands.' As the crowd broke and dissolved, the lady in the hansom would throw open the doors, and standing up in front of the dashboard, she would hail and carry off the arch-agitator, while the crowd surged round. Several times this programme had been carried out, when one afternoon, after seeing the girl and her big leather portfolio safe in the cab, and the cab safe out of the crowd, Vida heaved a sigh of relief.

'There! Now tell me, what did you do yesterday?'—meaning, How in the world did you manage without me to take care of you?

'Yesterday? We had a meeting down at the Woolwich Arsenal. And we distributed handbills for two hours. And we had a debate in the evening at the New Reform Club.'

'Oh, you didn't hold a meeting here in the afternoon?'

'Yes we did. I forgot that.' She seemed also to have forgotten that her new friend had been prevented from appearing to carry her off.

Miss Levering smiled down at her. 'What a funny little person you are. Do you know who I am?'

'No.'

'It hasn't ever occurred to you to ask?'

The face turned to her with a half roguish smile. 'Oh, I thought you looked all right.'

'I'm the person who had the interview with your friend, Miss Claxton.' As no recollection showed in the face, 'At Queen Anne's Gate,' she added.

'I don't think I knew about that,' said Ernestine, absently. Then alert, disdainful, 'Fancy the member for Wrotton saying—— Yes, we went to see him this morning.'

'Oh, that is very exciting! What was he like?'

'Quite a feeble sort of person, I thought.'

'Really!' laughed Miss Levering.

'He talked such nonsense to us about that old Plural Voting Bill. His idea seemed to be to get us to promise to behave nicely while the overworked House of Commons considered the iniquity of some men having more than one vote—they hadn't a minute this session to consider the much greater iniquity of no women having any vote at all! Of course he said he had been a great friend to Woman Suffrage, until he got shocked with our tactics.' She smiled broadly. 'We asked him what he'd ever done to show his friendship.'

'Well?'

'He didn't seem to know the answer to that. What strikes me most about men is their being so illogical.'

Lady John Ulland had been openly surprised, even enthusiastically grateful, at discovering before this that Vida Levering was ready to help her with some of the unornamental duties that fall to the lot of the 'great ladies' of England.

'I don't know what that discontented creature, her sister, means by saying Vida is so unsympathetic about charity work.'

Neither could Lady John's neighbour, the Bishop, understand Mrs. Fox-Moore's reproach. Had not his young kinswoman's charity concerts helped to rebuild the chantry?

'Such a nice creature!' was Lord John's contribution. Then, showing the profundity of his friendly interest, 'Why doesn't she find some nice fella to marry her?'

'People don't marry so early nowadays,' his wife reassured him.

Lord Borrodaile, to whom Vida still talked freely, he alone had some understanding of the changed face life was coming to wear for her. When he found that laughing at her failed of the desired effect, he offered touching testimony to his affection for her by trying to understand. It was no small thing for a man like Borrodaile, who, for the rest, found it no easier than others of his class rightly to interpret the modern scene as looked down upon from the narrow lancet of the mediÆval tower which was his mind.

When she got him to smile at her report of the humours of the populace, he did so against his will, shaking his long Van Dyke head, and saying—

'It spoils the fun for me to think of your being there. I have a quite unconquerable distrust of eccentricity.'

'There's nothing the least original about my mixing with "The People," as my sister would call them. The women of my world would often go slumming. The only difference between me and them may be that I, perhaps, shall go a little farther, that's all.'

'Well, I devoutly hope you won't!' he said, with unusual emphasis. 'Let the proletariat attend to the affairs of the proletariat. They don't need a woman like you.'

'They not only need—what's more, they are getting, all kinds! It's that, more than anything else, that shows their strength. The miracle it is, to see the way they all work together! Women, the poorest and most ignorant (except of hardship), working shoulder to shoulder with women of substance and position. Oh, yes, they are winning over that sort, teachers and university graduates—a whole group who would be called Intellectuals if they were men—all doing what men have said women could never do—pulling together. And, oh! that reminds me,' she said suddenly, smiling as one who has thought of a capital joke at her companion's expense: 'it's my duty to warn you. I went with your daughter to lunch at her Country Club, and they were all discussing the Suffrage! A good dozen! And Sophia—well, Sophia came out in a new light. I want you, please, to believe I've never talked to her.'

'Oh,' said Borrodaile, with an unconscious arrogance, 'Sophia doesn't wait to be talked to. She takes her own line. Politics are a tradition with our women. I found her reading the parliamentary debates when she was fourteen.'

'And your boys, are they equally——?'

He sighed. 'The world has got very topsy-turvy. All my girls are boys—and all my boys are girls.'

'Well, Sophia can take care of the Country Club! I remember how we scoffed when she organized it.'

'It's had precisely the effect I expected. Takes her away from her own home, where she ought to be——'

'Who wants her at home?'

Unblushingly he answered, 'I do.'

'Why, you're never there yourself.' He blinked. 'When you aren't in your garden you're——'

'Here?' he laughed.

'I don't myself,' she went on, 'I don't belong to any clubs——'

'I should hope not, indeed! Where should I go for tea and for news of the workings of the Zeitgeist?' he mocked.

'But I begin to see what women's clubs are for.'

'They're for the dowdy, unattached females to meet and gossip in, to hold feeble little debates in, to listen to pettifogging little lectures, and imagine they're dans le mouvement.'

'They are to accustom women to thinking and acting together. While you and I have been laughing at them, they've been building up a huge machinery of organization, ready to the hand of the chief engineer who is to come.'

'Horrible thought!'

'Well, horrible or not, I don't despise clubs any more. They're largely responsible for the new corporate spirit among women.'

He pulled himself out of the cavernous comfort of his chair, and stood glooming in front of the screen that hid the fireless grate.

'Clubs, societies, leagues, they're all devices for robbing people of their freedom. It's no use to talk to me. I'm one of the few individualists left in the world. I never wanted in my life to belong to any body.' Her pealing laughter made him explain, smiling, 'To any corporation, was what I meant.'

'No, no. You got it right the first time! The reason that, in spite of my late perversities, you don't cast me off is because I'm one of the few women who don't make claims.'

'It is the claim of the community that I resent. I want to keep clear of all complication. I want to be really free. I could never have pledged myself to any Church or any party.'

'Perhaps'—she smiled at him—'perhaps that's why you are a beautiful and ineffectual angel.'

'The reason I never did is because I care about liberty—the thing itself. You are in danger, I see, of being enamoured of the name. In thought women are always half a century or so behind. What patriot's voice is heard in Europe or America to-day? Where is the modern Kossuth, Garibaldi? What poet goes out in these times to die at Missolonghi? Just as men are finding out the vanity of the old dreams, the women seem to be seizing on them. The mass of intelligent men have no longing for political power. If a sort of public prominence is thrust on men'—he shrugged as if his shoulders chafed under some burden—'in their hearts they curse their lot. I suppose it's all so new to the woman she is amused. She even—I'm told'—his lifted hand, with the closed fingers suddenly flung open, advertised the difficulty a sane person found in crediting the uncanny rumour—'I'm told that women even like public dinners.'

'Well, you do.'

'I?'

'You go—to all the most interesting ones.'

'Part of my burden! Unlike your new friends, there's nothing I hate so much, unless it is having to make a speech.'

'Well, now, shall I stop "playing at ma'ams" and just say that when I hear a man like you explaining in that superior way how immensely he doesn't care, I seem to see that that is precisely the worst indictment against your class. If special privilege breeds that——'

It merely amused him to see that she was forgetting herself. He sat down again. He stretched out his long legs and interlaced his fingers across his bulging shirt front. His air of delicate mockery supplied the whip.

'If,' Vida went on with shining eyes, 'if to be able to care and to work and to sacrifice, if to get those impulses out of life, you must carry your share of the world's burden, then no intelligent creature can be sorry the day is coming when all men will have to——' She took breath, a little frightened to see where she was going.

'Have to——?' he encouraged her, lazily smiling.

'Have to work, or else not eat.'

'Even under your hard rule I wouldn't have to work much. My appetite is mercifully small.'

'It would grow if you sweated for your bread.'

'Help! help!' he said, not above his usual tone, but slowly he turned his fine head as the door opened. He fixed the amused grey-green eyes on old Mr. Fox-Moore: 'A small and inoffensive pillar of the Upper House is in the act of being abolished.'

'What, is she talking politics? She never favours me with her views,' said Fox-Moore, with his chimpanzee smile.

When Borrodaile had said good-bye, Vida followed him to the top of the stairs.

'It's rather on my mind that I—I've not been very nice to you.'

'"I would not hear thine enemy say so."'

'Yes, I've been rather horrid. I went and Trafalgar-Squared you, when I ought to have amused you.'

'But you have amused me!' His eyes shone mischievously.

'Oh, very well.' She took the gibe in good part, offering her hand again.

'Good-bye, my dear,' he said gently. 'It's great fun having you in the world!' He spoke as though he had personally arranged this provision against dulness for his latter end.

The next evening he came up to her at a party to ask why she had absented herself from a dinner the night before where he expected to find her.

'Oh, I telephoned in the morning they weren't to expect me.'

'What were you doing, I should like to know?'

'No, you wouldn't like to know. But you couldn't have helped laughing if you'd seen me.'

'Where?'

'Wandering about the purlieus of Battersea.'

'Bless me! Who with?'

'Why, with that notorious Suffragette, Miss Ernestine Blunt. Oh, you'd have stared even harder if you'd seen us, I promise you! She with a leather portfolio under one arm—a most business-like apparatus, and a dinner-bell in one hand.'

'A dinner bell!' He put his hand to his brow as one who feels reason reeling.

'Yes, holding fast to the clapper so that we shouldn't affright the isle out of season. I, if you please, carrying an armful of propagandist literature.'

'Good Lord! Where do you say these orgies take place?'

'Near the Fire Station on the far side of Battersea Park.'

'I think you are in great need of somebody to look after you,' he laughed, but no one who knew him could mistake his seriousness. 'Come over here.' He found a sofa a little apart from the crush. 'Who goes with you on these raids?'

'Why, Ernestine—or rather, I go with her.'

'But who takes care of you?'

'Ernestine.'

'Who knows you're doing this kind of thing?'

'Ernestine—and you. It's a secret.'

'Well, if I'm the only sane person who knows—it's something of a responsibility.'

'I won't tell you about it if it oppresses you.'

'On the contrary, I insist on your telling me.'

Vida smiled reflectively. 'The mode of procedure strikes one as highly original. It is simple beyond anything in the world. They select an open space at the convergence of several thoroughfares—if possible, near an omnibus centre. For these smaller meetings they don't go to the length of hiring a lorry. Do you know what a lorry is?'

'I regret to say my education in that direction leaves something to be desired.'

'Last week I was equally ignorant. To-day I can tell you all about it. A lorry is a cart or a big van with the top off. But such elegancies are for the parks. In Battersea, you go into some modest little restaurant, and you say, "Will you lend me a chair?" This is a surprise for the Battersea restaurateur.'

'Naturally—poor man!'

'Exactly. He refuses. But he also asks questions. He is amazed. He is against the franchise for women. "You'll never get the vote!" "Well, we must have something," says Ernestine. "I'm sure it isn't against your principles to lend a woman a chair." She lays hands on one. "I never said you could have one of my——" "But you meant to, didn't you? Isn't a chair one of the things men have always been ready to offer us? Thank you. I'll take good care of it and bring it back quite safe." Out marches Ernestine with the enemy's property. She carries the chair into the road and plants it in front of the Fire Station. Usually there are two or three "helpers." Sometimes Ernestine, if you please, carries the meeting entirely on her own shoulders—those same shoulders being about so wide. Yes, she's quite a little thing. If there are helpers she sends them up and down the street sowing a fresh crop of handbills. When Ernestine is ready to begin she stands up on that chair, in the open street and, as if she were doing the most natural thing in the world, she begins ringing that dinner bell. Naturally people stop and stare and draw nearer. Ernestine tells me that Battersea has got so used now to the ding-dong and to associating it with "our meeting," that as far off as they hear it the inhabitants say, "It's the Suffragettes! Come along!" and from one street and another the people emerge laughing and running. Of course as soon as there is a little crowd that attracts more, and so the snowball grows. Sometimes the traffic is impeded. Oh, it's a much odder world than I had suspected!' For a moment laughter interrupted the narrative. '"The Salvation Army doesn't quite approve of us," Ernestine says, "and the Socialists don't love us either! We always take their audiences away from them—poor things," says Ernestine, with a sympathetic air. "You do!" I say, because'—Vida nodded at Lord Borrodaile—'you must know Ernestine is a beguiler.'

'Oh, a beguiler. I didn't suppose——'

'No, it's against the tradition, I know, but it's true. She herself, however, doesn't seem to realize her beguilingness. "It isn't any one in particular they come to hear," she says, "it's just that a woman making a speech is so much more interesting than a man making a speech." It surprises you? So it did me.'

'Nothing surprises me!' said Borrodaile, with a wave of his long hands.

'Last night she was wonderful, our Ernestine! Even I, who am used to her, I was stirred. I was even thrilled. She had that crowd in the hollow of her hand! When she wound up, "The motion is carried. The meeting is over!" and climbed down off her perch, the mob cheered and pressed round her so close that I had to give up trying to join her. I extricated myself and crossed the street. She is so little that, unless she's on a chair, she is swallowed up. For a long time I couldn't see her. I didn't know whether she was taking the names and addresses of the people who want to join the Union, or whether she had slipped away and gone home, till I saw practically the whole crowd moving off after her up the street. I followed for some distance on the off-side. She went calmly on her way, a tiny figure in a long grey coat between two helpers, the Lancashire cotton-spinner and the Cockney working woman, with that immense tail of boys and men (and a few women) all following after—quite quiet and well-behaved—just following, because it didn't occur to them to do anything else. In a way she was still exercising her hold over her meeting. I saw, presently, there was one person in front of her—a great big fellow—he looked like a carter—he was carrying home the chair!'

They both laughed.

'Well, she's found a thick-and-thin advocate in you apparently,' said Borrodaile.

'Ah! if only you could see her! trudging along, apparently quite oblivious of her quaint following, dinner bell in one hand, leather case piled high with "tracts" on the other arm, some of the leaflets sliding off, tumbling on to the pavement.' Vida laughed as she recalled the scene. 'Then dozens of hands darting out to help her to recover her precious property! After the chair had been returned the crowd thinned, and I crossed over to her.'

'You in that mÊlÉe!' Borrodaile ejaculated. 'Well, Ernestine hadn't the quaintness all to herself.'

'No. Oh, no,' Vida agreed. 'I thought of you, and how you'd look if you had come on us suddenly. After the crowd had melted and the helpers had vanished into the night, we went on together—all the way, from the Battersea Fire Station to Sloane Square, did Ernestine and I walk, talking reform last night. You laugh? So do I; but not at Ernestine. She's a most wonderful person. I sometimes ask myself if the world will ever know half how wonderful. You, for instance, you haven't, after all I've said, you haven't an idea!'

'Oh, I don't doubt—I don't think I ever doubted that women have a facility in speech—no, no, I'm not gibing! I don't even doubt they can, as you say, sway and control crowds. But I maintain it is very bad for the women.'

'How is it bad?'

'How can it fail to be! All that horrible publicity. All that concentrating of crude popular interest on themselves! Believe me, nobody who watches a public career carefully but sees the demoralizing effect the limelight has even on men's characters. And I suppose you'll admit that men are less delicately organized than women.'

'I can only say I've seen the sort of thing you mean in our world, where a good many women have only themselves to think about. I've looked in vain for those evil effects among the Suffrage women. It almost seems, on the contrary, as if there were something ennobling in working for a public cause.'

'Personally, I can't say I've observed it—not among the political women of my acquaintance!'

'But you only know the old kind. Yes, the kind whose idea of influence is to make men fall in love with them, whose idea of working is to put on a smart gown and smile their prettiest. No, I agree that isn't necessarily ennobling!'

'I see, it's the new taste in manners and the new arts of persuasion that make the ideal women and'—with an ironic little bow—'the impassioned convert.'

'I'm bound to admit,' she said stoutly, 'that I think the Suffrage movement in England has the advantage of being engineered by a very remarkable set of women. Not in ability alone, but in dignity of character. People will never know, I sometimes think, how much the movement has owed to being taken in hand by just these particular women. I don't pretend they're the average. They're very far above the average. And what the world will owe to them I very much doubt if even the future will know. But I seem to be the only one who minds.' She laughed. 'I could take my oath they never give the matter a thought. One thing——' She leaned forward and then checked herself. 'No, I've talked about them enough!'

She opened her fan and looked about the crowded room.

'Say what you were going to. I'm reconciled. I see what's coming.'

'What's coming?'

'Yes. Go on.'

She looked at him a little perplexed over the top of her fan.

'I was only going to say that what struck me particularly in that girl, for instance, is her inaccessibility to flattery. I've watched her with men.'

'Of course! She knew you were watching her. She no doubt thinks the eyes of the world are upon her.'

'On the contrary, it's her unselfconsciousness that's the most surprising thing about her. Or, no! It's something more interesting even than that. She is conscious, in a way, of the hold she has on the public. But it hasn't any of the deteriorating effect you were deprecating. I've been moved once or twice to congratulate her. She takes it as unmoved as a child. It's just as if you said to a little thing of three, "What a clever baby you are!" or, "You've got the most beautiful eyes in the world." The child would realize that you meant well, that you were being pleasant, but it wouldn't think about either its cleverness or its eyes. It's like that with Ernestine. When I said to her, "You made an astoundingly good speech to-night. The best I've heard even you make," she looked at me with a sort of half-absent-minded, half-wondering expression, without a glimmer of personal vanity. When I was so ill-advised as not to drop the subject, when I ventured to say something more about that great gift of hers, she interrupted me with a little laugh, "It's a sign of grace in you not to get tired of our speeches," she said. "I suppose we repeat ourselves a good deal. You see that's just what we've got to do. We've got to hammer it in." But the fact is that she doesn't repeat herself, that she's always fresh and stimulating, because—I suppose it's because she's always thinking of the Great Impersonal Object, and talking about it out of her own eager heart. Ernestine? She's as unhackneyed as a spring morning!'

'Oh, very well. I'll go.'

'Go? Where?' for he still sat there.

'Why, to hear your paragon. I've seen that was what you were leading up to.'

'N—no. I don't think I want you to go.'

'Oh, yes, you do. I knew you'd make me sooner or later.'

'No, don't be afraid.' She stood up.

'I'm not afraid. I'm eager,' he laughed.

She shook her head. 'No, I'll never take you.'

'Why not?'

'Because—it isn't all Ernestine and skittles. And because you'd make me keenly alive again to all sorts of things that I see now don't matter—things that have lost some of their power to trouble me, but that I should feel for you.'

'What sort of——'

'Oh, oddities, uglinesses—things that abound, I'm told, at all men's meetings, and that yet, somehow, we'd like to eliminate from women's quite on the old angel theory. No, I won't take you!'