"People of London!" faltered the lady who had just stepped upon the sugar-box at the edge of the pavement.

The people of London, who happened just then to be a very little girl carrying a very large baby, stared in some astonishment. Another lady, who had been distributing handbills farther along the street, came back and prompted the speaker encouragingly.

"Go on; that's splendid!" she said with friendly warmth.

The woman on the sugar-box, who had never stood on a sugar-box before, smiled wanly. "Why do they never have earthquakes except in countries where people don't want them?" she sighed. Her friend being engaged at the moment in pressing a handbill upon the little girl, who obligingly gripped the baby with one hand and her chin in order to take it, there came no response to the appeal of the orator in the gutter; and she pulled herself together and made a fresh start.

"People of London!" she repeated amiably. "We have come here to tell you about 'Votes for——'"

"Why, it's these 'ere Suffragites!" suddenly yelled the people of London, shifting the baby on to the other arm; and the debutante on the sugar-box broke down and laughed deprecatingly.

"I really must wait for some more people," she protested.

"You needn't," said her more experienced companion. "They always come along fast enough as soon as they see some one like you standing on a sugar-box."

"That doesn't surprise me," remarked the inexperienced one, thinking regretfully of a happy past in which the chief aim of a well-ordered life had been to avoid doing anything that would attract attention.

"Here they come," continued the lady with the handbills. "Just keep them going while I get rid of these, there's a dear! It doesn't matter what you say," she added consolingly, as she went towards two approaching women with outstretched hand and an ingratiating smile.

"Ah! ce sont les suffragettes!" exclaimed one of these unexpectedly. "Nous sommes des suffragistes franÇaises, nous aussi! Vive le fÉminisme!"

"Oh, how perfectly delightful!" said the English suffragist, beaming on them. "Do stop and listen. Nous allons avoir un—oh, bother! What is 'meeting'?—un rendez-vous, mesdames!"

"Tiens!" gasped the French suffragists, as well they might. At this moment the speaker, her mind a blank concerning all the carefully prepared sentences she had been learning by heart for days, could be heard announcing that she would now call upon the other lady to address the meeting; and the crowd, increasing every minute, cheered inconsequently.

"Well, there ain't much of her, but give 'er a chaunce!" remarked a wit, as the second speaker mounted the sugar-box.

A small boy hitched up his trousers and moved off. "I shall turn into a woman if I stay here," he observed.

"No such luck for you, my boy!" came the quick retort from the rickety platform, and the impressionable crowd grinned with appreciation.

The speaker pounced upon her opportunity and began to sketch the history of Reform. She used long words purposely, so they made an instant show of listening, it being out of the question, of course, to allow that any woman, least of all a Suffragette, could talk over their heads. The astonishing statement that women in the past had enjoyed a certain measure of political power, was, however, too much for one youth.

"Where did you git that from?" he shouted.

"My friend has forgotten his history," said the speaker indulgently. "It is an historical fact——"

The interrupter turned his back contemptuously on the sugar-box, and addressed the audience in a loud and overpowering voice. "Look at 'er!" he adjured them, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "History, she says! Believin' what she's towld in a book. Ain't that jest like a woman?"

Having thus disposed of the facts of history, he went on to deal more largely with the question as a whole. "Pack o' women!" he snorted. "Why don't they stay at 'ome and mind the baby? Why don't they cook the old man's dinner? Why don't they——?"

"This gentleman evidently thinks it is question time," struck in the real speaker with undisturbed composure. "Perhaps, when he reaches the age that will entitle him to use a vote, he will know more about the procedure of a political meeting——"

"Well, you ain't got a vote yourself, anyhow!" said the incensed youth, turning round amid the laughter of the crowd to face the woman on the sugar-box, which, of course, was exactly what she wanted him to do.

"Ah, I was wrong," she smiled back at him. "I see you do know something about the present political situation. If you will kindly keep your questions till I have finished speaking, I shall be very happy to——"

"Yuss!" agreed a supporter. "Stow it, Jim, till the lidy's had 'er say."

"But I don't want to hear no bloomin' Suffragette," grumbled the youth, angrily conscious that the crowd was no longer with him.

"Then git out!" advised the crowd; and the speaker's voice was drowned for a minute or so in the altercation that followed.

"What's it all about?" asked one woman of another, at the edge of the crowd.

The other, encircling a large bundle with her arms, shook her head.

"I dunno," she said; "but I loves to 'ear 'em talk."

The woman on the sugar-box was just giving the obvious reply to another interrupter, who wanted to know how a woman could find time to vote if she had a husband and six children to look after.

"How does a man find time to vote, if he has a wife and six children to support?" she demanded; and the woman with the bundle nodded approvingly.

"Now she's talkin' sense, and I likes sense," she remarked to her companion. "I don't 'old with women bein' Prime Ministers, but I likes sense."

The hostile youth, growing tired of being made the sport of the crowd, moved off with the remark that he would like "to see 'em all drowned"; and the speaker profited by a temporary lull and began to talk of economics. She held her audience now without difficulty, telling them things about the labour market that they knew to be true; and a kind of tense hush was over the crowd round the sugar-box, when a well-dressed woman came strolling along the pavement on her way home from the Park. "Why, I do believe that is a real live Suffragette! How chic!" she exclaimed with an amused smile.

The Suffragette caught the remark, and determined to catch the woman who made it. In a minute or two the amused smile was gone, and another comment floated up to the sugar-box.

"Jack, are you there? You must come and listen to this—you positively must! I—I had no idea they were like that!"

The woman in the French hat was won, but the crowd was again temporarily lost, and wild din reigned for the next few moments while supporters yelled for silence and opponents sang songs. At the first semblance of a pause, the Suffragette broke in again, the smile still predominating.

"I can see how anxious you are to help the Suffragettes," she said sweetly; and once more she carried the joking, irresponsible crowd along with her. "You women who are here, come to our demonstration in Hyde Park next Sunday——"

"Hold on, young woman, who's going to cook the Sunday dinner for the kids?" interposed a voice.

"Your wife will cook it before she starts," was the ready rejoinder. "Or, better still, she can cook it overnight, and you can bring it with you and eat it in the Park——"

"What price roast pork and greens in Hyde Park?" demanded a sporting-looking gentleman in a terrific waistcoat.

"It won't hurt you to have cold pork and salad just for once," said the resourceful speaker. "Only think how the children will love a picnic, and a picnic like ours, too, with eighty women-speakers at the end of it! You know how dull picnics generally are when there is nothing more to eat——"

"Eighty of 'em! How about Holloway?" jeered the man in the waistcoat.

She turned on him swiftly. "If you had your vote taken from you to-morrow, wouldn't you have the pluck to go to prison to get it back?" she asked, suddenly in deadly earnest.

Any crowd loves a fighter, and this one howled with delight. The lady in the French hat noticed that listening women, who had hitherto shown no open approval of what was said, nodded furtively and caught their breath when the speaker fired up in defence of women.

"Why, they go to prison because they like it, don't they?" observed the amused man who answered to the name of Jack. He had not intended this for an audible interruption, but nothing escaped the ear of the woman on the sugar-box.

"If you think a woman's ordinary life outside prison is as dreary as all that, don't you think it's time you gave her the power to improve her conditions, so that she needn't go to Holloway for a pleasant change?" she shot back at him, hot with scorn; and again listening women flushed with nervous pleasure. "Some of our comrades are coming out of prison next Saturday," the speaker went on rapidly; "and if you want to give them a welcome, as I know you do"—here she paused to allow time for yells of derision and references to skilly—"come and walk in our procession from Holloway gates."

"What! And be taken for gaol-birds too? Not much!" roared the man of sporting appearance.

"We'll come, miss; we'll be there!" suddenly called the woman with the bundle; and curiously enough, the crowd respected that and stopped jeering. But the speaker of a hundred open-air meetings, knowing her crowd better than it knew itself, saw that it had had enough, and called for questions. These were swiftly disposed of, being principally of the wash-tub order, already answered in her speech; and observing serenely that she concluded everybody was now converted, the Suffragette came down from her perch.

She and her companion were instantly swallowed up in the jostling, chattering crowd, and the well-dressed woman appealed to Jack.

"Do help them to get out of this," she said, clutching anxiously at his arm. "They'll be crushed to death, I know they will!"

"Eh, what? My dear girl, they're much better able to take care of themselves than I am," observed Jack tranquilly. "Besides, they're not being crushed to death. You couldn't crush a Suffragette if you tried."

A sudden swirl of the stream swept them face to face with the two suffragists, who, still distributing handbills to right and left of them as they came, were composedly wedging a way for themselves through the dispersing people.

"I—I think you're splendid; and so does Jack!" cried their new supporter, flinging mere accuracy to the winds. "And I'm coming to Holloway Gates on Saturday and to Hyde Park on Sunday—and so is Jack!"

"Eh what?" said Jack mildly.