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The Convert

by Elizabeth Robins · English · Gutenberg #26420 · 654,140 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Convert

Author: Elizabeth Robins


        
Release date: August 24, 2008 [eBook #26420]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26420

Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONVERT ***


E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell and the Project Gutenberg Online
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THE CONVERT

       *       *       *       *       *

Transcriber's note:

   Lists of Macmillan titles from this spot have been moved to
   the end of the text. Following the moved section, the reader
   will find a list of corrections made to the text.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE CONVERT

by

ELIZABETH ROBINS

Author of "A Dark Lantern," "The Magnetic North," Etc.







New York
The MacMillan Company
1913

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1907, by the MacMillan Company.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1907. Reprinted
March, 1910; March, 1912; August, 1913.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




THE CONVERT




CHAPTER I


The tall young lady who arrived fifteen minutes before the Freddy
Tunbridges' dinner-hour, was not taken into the great empty
drawing-room, but, as though she were not to be of the party expected
that night, straight upstairs she went behind the footman, and then up
more stairs behind a maid. The smart, white-capped domestic paused, and
her floating muslin streamers cut short their aerial gyrations subsiding
against her straight black back as she knocked at the night-nursery
door. It was opened by a middle-aged head nurse of impressive demeanour.
She stood there an instant eyeing the intruder with the kind of
overbearing hauteur that in these days does duty as the peculiar
hall-mark of the upper servant, being seldom encountered in England
among even the older generation of the so-called governing class.

'It's too late to see the baby, miss. He's asleep.'

'Yes, I know; but the others are expecting me, aren't they?'

Question hardly necessary, perhaps, with the air full of cries from
beyond the screen: 'Yes, yes.' 'We're waiting!' 'Mummy promised'--cut
short by the nurse saying sharply, 'Not so much noise, Miss Sara.' But
the presiding genius of the Tunbridge nursery opened the door a little
wider and stood aside. Handsome compensation for her studied coldness
was offered in the shrill shrieks of joy with which a little girl and a
very small boy celebrated the lady's entrance. She, for her part, joined
the austere nurse in saying, 'Sh! sh!' and in simulating consternation
at the spectacle behind the screen, Miss Sara jumping up and down in the
middle of her bed with wild brown hair swirling madly about a laughing
but mutinous face. The visitor, hurrying forward, received the impetuous
little girl in her arms, while the nurse described her own sentiments
of horror and detestation of such performances, and hinted vaguely at
Retribution that might with safety be looked for no later than the
morrow. Nobody listened. Miss Levering nodded smiling across Sara's
nightgowned figure to the little boy hanging over the side of the
neighbouring cot. But he kept remonstrating, 'You always go to her
first.'

The lady drew a flat, shiny wooden box out of the inside pocket of her
cloak. The little girl seized it rapturously.

'Oh, did you only bring Sara's bock?' wailed the smaller Tunbridge. 'I
told you expecially we wanted _two_ bocks.'

'I've got two pockets and I've got two bocks. Let me give him his, Sara
darling.'

But 'Sara darling' dropped her own 'bock' the better to cling round the
neck of the giver.

Naturally Master Cecil sounded the horn of indignation.

'Hush!' commanded his sister. 'Don't you know his little lordship never
did that?' And to emphasize this satirical appeal to a higher standard
of manners, Sara loosened her tight-locked arms an instant; but still
holding to the visitor with one hand, she picked up the pillow and
deftly hurled it at the neighbouring cot, extinguishing the little boy.
Through the general recriminations that ensued, the culprit cried with
shrill rapture, 'Lady Gladys never pillow-fought! Lady Gladys was a
little lady and never did _any_thing!' The merry eyes shamelessly
invited Miss Levering to mock at Dampney's former charges. But the
visitor detached herself from Miss Sara, and wishing apparently to
ingratiate herself with the offended majesty of the nurse, Miss Levering
said gravely over her shoulder, 'Now, lie down, Sara, and be a good
girl.' Sara's reply to that was to (what she called) 'diddle up and
down' on her knees and emit shrill squeals of some pleasurable emotion
not defined. This, too, in spite of the fact that Dampney had picked up
the pillow and was advancing upon Miss Sara with an expression
calculated to shake the stoutest heart. It obviously shook the
visitor's. 'Listen, Sara! If you don't be quiet and let nurse cover you
up, she won't want me to stay.' Miss Levering actually got up off the
little boy's bed, and stood as though ready to carry the obnoxious
suggestion into instant effect.

Sara darted under the bedclothes like a rabbit into its burrow. The
rigid woman, without words, restored the tousled pillow to the head of
the bed, extracted Miss Sara from her hiding-place with one hand,
smoothed out the rebellious legs with the other, covered the child
firmly over, and tucked the bedclothes in.

'What's the use of all that? Mother always does it over again.'

'You know very well she's been and done it once already.'

'She's coming again if father doesn't need her.'

'There's a whole big dinner-party needing her, so you needn't think she
can come twice to say good-night to a Jumping-Jack like you.'

'You ought to say a Jumping-Jill,' amended Sara.

During this interchange Master Cecil was complaining to the visitor--

'I can't see you with that thing all round your head.'

'Yes, take it off!' his sister agreed; and when the lady had unwound her
lace scarf--'Now the coat! And you have to sit on my bed this time. It's
my turn.'

As the visitor divested herself of the long ermine-lined garment, 'Oh,
you _are_ pretty to-night!' observed the gallant young gentleman over
the way, seeming not to have heard that these effects don't appeal to
little boys.

Sara silently craned her neck. Even the high and mighty Mrs. Dampney, in
the surreptitious way of the superior servant, without seeming to look,
was covertly taking in the vision that the cloak had hitherto obscured.
The little girl followed with critical eyes the movement of the tall
figure, the graceful fall of the clinging black lace gown embroidered in
yellow irises, the easy bend of the small waist in its jewelled belt of
yellow. The growing approval in the little face culminated in an
ecstatic 'Oh-h-h! let me see what's on your neck! That's new, isn't it?'

'No--very old.'

'I didn't know there were yellow diamonds,' said Sara.

'There are; but these are sapphires.'

'And the little stones round?'

'Yes, they're diamonds.'

'The hanging-down thing is _such_ a pretty shape!'

'Yes, the fleur-de-lys is a pretty shape. It's the flower of France, you
know--just as the thistle is the----'

'There, now!' A penetrating whisper came from the other bed. 'She's
_gone_.'

'It's you who've been keeping her here, you know.' Miss Levering bent
her neat, dark head over the little girl, and the gleaming jewels swung
forward.

'Yes,' said Cecil, in a tone of grandfatherly disgust; 'yelling like a
wild Indian.'

'Well, you _cried_,' said his sister--'just because a feather pillow hit
you.' Her eye never once left the glittering gaud.

'You see, Cecil is younger than you,' Miss Levering reminded her.

'Yes,' said Sara, with conscious superiority--'a whole year and eight
months. But even when I was young _I_ had sense.'

Miss Levering laughed. 'You're a horrid little Pharisee--and as wild as
a young colt.' Contrary to received canons, the visitor seemed to find
something reassuring in the latter reflection, for she kissed the small,
self-righteous face.

'You just ought to have seen Sara this morning!' Cecil chuckled, with a
generous admiration in family achievements. 'We waked up early, and Sara
said, "Let's go mountaineering." So we did. All over the rocks and
presserpittses.' He waved his hand comprehensively at the rugged scenery
of the night-nursery.

'Of course we had to pile up the chairs and things,' his sister
explained.

'And the coal scuttle.'

'And we made snow mountains out of the pillows. When the chairs wobbled,
the coal and the pillows kept falling about; it was quite a real
avalanche,' Sara said conversationally.

'I should think so,' agreed the guest.

'Yes; and it was glorious when Sara excaped to the top of the wardrobe.'

'To the w----' Miss Levering gasped.

'Yes. We were having the most perfectly fascinating time----' Sara took
up the tale.

But Cecil suddenly sat bolt upright, his little face quite pink with
excitement at recollection of these Alpine exploits.

'Yes, Sara had come down off the wardrobe--she'd been sitting on the
carved piece--she says that's the Schreckhorn!--but she'd come down off
it, and we was just jumping about all those mountains like two
shamrocks----'

'Like what?'

'--when _she_ came in.'

'Yes,' agreed Sara. 'Just when we're happiest _she_ always comes
interfiddling.'

'Oh, Sara mine, I rather like you!' said Miss Levering, laying her
laughing face against the tousled hair.

'Now! Now!' cried Cecil, suddenly beating with his two fists on the
counterpane as though he'd seen as much valuable time wasted as he felt
it incumbent upon him to tolerate. 'Go on where you left off.'

'No, it's _my_ visit this time.' Sara held fast to her friend. 'It's for
me to say what we're going to talk about.'

'It's got to be alligators!' said Cecil, waving his arms.

'It _shan't_ be alligators! I want to know more about Doris.'

'Doris!' Cecil's tone implied that the human intelligence could no lower
sink.

'Yes. I expect you like her better than you do us.'

'Don't you think I ought to like my niece best?'

'No'--from Cecil.

'You said we belonged to you, too,' observed Miss Sara.

'Of course.'

'And all aunts,' she pursued, 'don't like their nieces so _dreadfully_.'

'Don't they?' inquired Miss Levering, with an elaborate air of
innocence.

'You didn't say how-do-you-do to me,' said Cecil, with the air of one
who makes a useful discovery.

'_What?_'

'Why, she went to you the minute I threw the pillow.'

'That was just to save me from being dead. It isn't a proper
how-do-you-do when she doesn't hug you.'

'I'll hug you when I go.'

But a better plan than that occurred to Cecil. He flung down the covers
with the decision of one called to set about some urgent business.

'Cecil! I simply won't have you catching cold!'

Before the words were out of Miss Levering's mouth he had tumbled out of
bed and leapt into her lap. He clasped his arms round her neck with an
air of rapturous devotion, but what he said was--

'Go on 'bout the alligator.'

'No, no. Go 'way!' protested Sara, pushing him with hands and feet.

'Sh! You really will have nurse back!'

That horrid thought coerced the prudent Sara to endurance of the
interloping brother. And now of his own accord Cecil had taken his arms
from round his friend's neck.

'That's horrid!' he said. 'I don't like that hard thing. Take it off.'

'Let me.' Sara sat up with alacrity. 'Let me.'

But Miss Levering undid the sapphire necklace herself. 'If you'll be
very careful, Sara, I'll let you hold it.' It was as if she well knew
the deft little hands she had delivered the ornament to, and knew
equally well that in her present mood, absorption in the beauty of it
would keep the woman-child still.

'There, that's better!' Cecil replaced his arms firmly where the
necklace had been.

Miss Levering pulled up her long cloak from the bottom of the bed and
wrapped the little boy in the warm lining. The comfort of the
arrangement was so great, and it implied so little necessity for
'hanging on,' that Cecil loosed his arms and lay curled up against his
friend.

She held him close, adapting her lithe slimness to the easy supporting
and enfolding of the childish figure. The little girl was absorbed in
the necklace after her strenuous hour; the boy, content for a moment,
having gained his point, just to lie at his ease; the woman rested her
cheek on his ruffled hair and looked straight before her.

As she sat there holding him, something came into her face, guiltless
though it was of any traceable change, without the verifiable movement
of a muscle, something none the less that would have minded the beholder
uneasily to search the eyes for tears, and, finding no tears there, to
feel no greater sense of reassurance.

So motionless she sat that presently the child turned up his rosy face,
and seeing the brooding look, it was plain he had the sense of being
somehow left behind. He put up his hand to her cheek, and rubbed it
softly with his own.

'I don't like you like that. Tell me about----'

'Like what?' said the lady.

'Like--I don't know.' Then, with a sudden inspiration, 'Uncle Ronald
says you're like the Sphinx. Who are they?'

'Who are who?'

'Why, the Sfinks. Have they got a boy? Is the little Sfink as old as me?
Oh, you only laugh, just like Uncle Ronald. He asked us why we liked
you, and we told him.'

'You've never told me.'

'Oh, didn't we? Well, it's because you aren't beady.'

'Beady?'

'Yes. We hate all beady ladies, don't we, Sara?'

'Yes; but it's my turn.' However, she said it half-heartedly as she
stopped drawing the shining jewels lightly through her slim fingers, and
began gently to swing the fleur-de-lys back and forth like a pendulum
that glanced bewitchingly in the light.

Miss Levering knew that the next phase would be to try it on, but for
the moment Sara had still half an ear for general conversation.

'We hate them to have hard things on their shoulders!' Cecil explained.

'On their shoulders?' Miss Levering asked.

'Here, just in the way of our heads.'

'Yes, bead-trimming on their dresses,' explained the little girl.

'Hard stuff that scratches when they hold you tight.' Cecil cuddled his
impudent round face luxuriously on the soft lace-covered shoulder of the
visitor, and laughed up in her face.

'Aunts are very beady,' said Sara, absent-mindedly, as she tried the
effect of the glitter against her night-gown.

'Grandmothers are worse,' amended Cecil. 'They're beady and bu-gly,
too.'

'What's bewgly?'

'Well, it's what my grandmother called them when I pulled some of them
off. Not proper bugles, you know, what you "too! too! too!" make music
with when you're fighting the enemy. My grandmother thinks bugles are
little shiny black things only about that long'--he measured less than
an inch on his minute forefinger--'with long holes through so they can
sew them on their clothes.'

'On their caps, too,' said Sara; 'only they're usurally white when
they're on caps.'

'Here's your mother coming! Now, what will she say to you, Cecil?'

They turned their eyes to the door, strangely unwelcoming for Laura
Tunbridge's children, and their young faces betrayed no surprise when
the very different figure of Nurse Dampney emerged from behind the tall
chintz screen that protected the cots from any draught through the
opening door. Cecil, with an action of settled despair, turned from the
spectacle, and buried his face for one last moment of comfort in Vida
Levering's shoulder; while Sara, with a baleful glance, muttered--

'I knew it was that old interfiddler.'

'Now, Master Cecil----'

'Yes, nurse.' Miss Levering carried him back to his cot.

'Mrs. Tunbridge has sent up, miss, to know if you've come. They're
waiting dinner.'

'Not really! Is it a quarter past already?'

'More like twenty minutes, miss.'

The lady caught up her necklace, cut short her good-byes, and fled
downstairs, clasping the shining thing round her neck as she went--a
swaying figure in soft flying draperies and gleaming, upraised arms.

She entered the drawing-room with a quiet deliberation greater even than
common. It was the effect that haste and contrition frequently wrought
in her--one of the things that made folk call her 'too self-contained,'
even 'a trifle supercilious.'

But when other young women, recognizing some not easily definable charm
in this new-comer into London life, tried to copy the effect alluded to,
it was found to be less imitable than it looked.




CHAPTER II


There were already a dozen or so persons in the gold-and-white
drawing-room, yet the moment Vida Levering entered, she knew from the
questing glance Mrs. Freddy sent past her children's visitor, that even
now the party was not complete.

Other eyes turned that way as the servant announced 'Miss Levering.' It
is seldom that in this particular stratum of London life anything so
uncontrolled and uncontrollable as a 'sensation' is permitted to chequer
the even distribution of subdued good humour that reigns so modestly in
the drawing-rooms of the Tunbridge world. If any one is so ill-advised
as to bring to these gatherings anything resembling a sensation, even if
it is of the less challengeable sort of striking personal beauty, the
general aim of the company is to pretend either that they see nothing
unusual in the conjunction, or that they, for their part, are impervious
to such impacts. Vida Levering's beauty was not strictly of the
_eclatant_ type. If it did--as could not be denied--arrest the eye, its
refusal to let attention go was mitigated by something in the quietness,
the disarming softness, with which the hold was maintained. Men making
her acquaintance frequently went through four distinct phases in their
feeling about her. The first was the common natural one, the instant
stirring of the pulses that beauty of any sort produces in persons
having the eye that sees. The second stage was a rousing of the instinct
to be 'on guard,' which feminine beauty not infrequently breeds in the
breasts of men. Not on guard so much against the thing itself, or even
against ready submission to it, but against allowing onlookers to be
witness of such submission. Even the very young man knows either by
experience or hearsay, that women have concentrated upon their faculty
for turning this particular weapon to account, all the skill they would
have divided among other resources had there been others. Yet the charm
is something too delicious even to desire to escape from--the impulse
centres in a determination to _seem_ untouched, immune.

The third stage in this declension from pleasure through caution to
reassurance is induced by something so gentle, so unemphatic in the Vida
Levering aspect, so much what the man thinks 'feminine,' that even the
wariest male is reassured. He comes to be almost as easy before this
particular type of allurement as he would be with the frankly plain
'good sort'; only there is all about him the exquisite aroma of a subtle
charm which he may almost persuade himself that he alone perceives,
since this softly gracious creature seems so little to insist upon
it--seems, indeed, to be herself unaware of its presence. Whereupon the
man conceives a new idea of his own perspicacity in detecting a thing at
once so agreeable and so little advertised. He may, with a woman of this
kind, go long upon the third 'tack'--may, indeed, never know it was she
who gently 'shunted' him, still unenlightened, and left him
side-tracked, but cherishing to the end of time the soothing conviction
that he 'might an' if he would.' To the more robust order of man will
come a day of awakening, when he rubs his eyes and retreats hurriedly
with a sense of good faith injured--nay, of hopes positively betrayed.
If she were '_that_ sort,' why not hang out some signal? It wasn't
playing fair.

And so without anything so crude as a sensation, but with a retinue of
covert looks following in her train, she made her way to the young
hostess, and was there joined by two men and a middle-aged woman, who
plainly had been a beauty, and though 'gone to fat,' as the vulgar say,
had yet kept her complexion. With an air of genial authority, the
pink-cheeked Lady John Ulland proceeded to appropriate the new-comer in
the midst of a general hum of conversation, whose key to the sensitive
ear had become a little heightened since the last arrival. The women
grew more insistently vivacious in proportion as the men's minds seemed
to wander from matters they had discussed contentedly enough before.

Mrs. Freddy Tunbridge was a very popular person. It was agreed that
nobody willingly missed one of her parties. There were those who said
this was not so much because of her and Mr. Freddy, though they were
eminently likeable people; not merely because you met 'everybody' there,
and not even because of the excellence of their dinners. Notoriously
this last fact fails to appeal very powerfully to the majority of women,
and it is they, not men, who make the social reputation of the hostess.
There was in this particular case a theory, held even by those who did
not care especially about Mrs. Freddy, that hers was an 'amusing,' above
all, perhaps, a 'becoming,' house. People had a pleasant consciousness
of looking uncommon well in her pretty drawing-room. Others said it
wasn't the room, it was the lighting, which certainly was most
discerningly done--not dim, and yet so far from glaring that quite plain
people enjoyed there a brief unwonted hour of good looks. Only a limited
amount of electricity was used, and that little was carefully masked and
modulated, while the two great chandeliers each of them held aloft a
very forest of wax candles. It was known, too, that the spell was in no
danger of being rudely broken. The same tender but festive radiance
would bathe the hospitable board of the great oak dining-room below.

And why were they not processing thither?

'Is it my sister who is late?' Miss Levering asked, turning her slim
neck in that deliberate way of hers to look about the room.

'No; your sister is over there, talking to---- Oh--a----' Mrs. Freddy,
having looked round to refresh her memory, was fain to slur over the
fact that Mrs. Fox-Moore was in the corner by the pierced screen, not
talking to any one, but, on the contrary, staring dark-visaged, gloomy,
sibylline, at a leaflet advertising a charity concert, a document
conspicuously left by Mrs. Freddy on a little table. On her way to
rescue Mrs. Fox-Moore from her desert island of utter loneliness, Mrs.
Freddy saw Sir William Haycroft, the newly-made Cabinet Minister, rather
pointedly making his escape from a tall, keen-looking, handsome woman
wearing eye-glasses and iron-grey hair dressed commandingly.

Without a qualm Mrs. Freddy abandoned Mrs. Fox-Moore to prolonged exile,
in order to soothe the ruffled minister.

'I think,' she said, pausing in front of the great man and delicately
offering him an opportunity to make any predilection known--'I think you
know every one here.'

Haycroft muttered in his beard--but his eyes had lit upon the new face.

'Who's that?' he said; but his tone added, 'Not that it matters.'

'You don't know her? Well, that's a proof of how you've neglected your
friends since the new Government came in. But you really mean it--that
nobody has introduced you to Miss Levering yet? What _is_ Freddy
thinking about!'

'Dinner!' replied a voice at her elbow with characteristic laconism, and
Freddy Tunbridge pulled out his watch.

'Oh, give them five minutes more,' said his wife, indulgently.

'That's not a daughter of old Sir Hervey?' pursued the other man, his
eyes still on the young woman talking to Lady John and the foreign
ambassador.

'Yes; go on,' said Mrs. Freddy, with as cloudless a brow as though she
had no need to manufacture conversation while the dinner was being kept
waiting. 'Go on! They _all_ do it.'

'Do what?' demanded the great man, suspiciously.

'"Why haven't they seen her before" comes next. Then the next time you
and I meet in the country or find ourselves alone in a crush, you'll be
saying, "What's her story? Why hasn't a woman like that married?" They
all do! You don't believe me? Just wait! Freddy shall take you over,
and----' Was Mrs. Freddy beaming at the prospective success of her new
friend, or was her vanity flattered by reflecting upon her own
perspicacity? Unavoidable as it was in a way that Mrs. Graham Townley
should be taken down to dinner by the new minister--nevertheless the
antidote had been cleverly provided for. 'Freddy dear--why, I thought he
was---- Oh, there he is!' Seeing her hungry husband safely anchored in
front of the iris gown, instantly she abandoned the idea of disturbing
him. 'After all,' she said, turning again to Haycroft, who had stood the
image of stolid unimpressionableness--'after all, Freddy's right. Since
she's going to sit beside you at dinner, it's a good reason for not
making you known to each other before. Or perhaps you never experience
that awful feeling of being talked out by the time you go down, and not
having a single thing left----' She saw that the great man was not going
to vouchsafe any contribution to her small attempt to keep the ball
rolling; so without giving him the chance to mark her failure by a
silence, however brief, she chattered on. 'Though with Vida you're not
likely to find yourself in that predicament. Is he, Ronald?' With the
instinct of the well-trained female to draw into her circle any odd man
hovering about on the periphery, Mrs. Freddy appealed to her
brother-in-law. Lord Borrodaile turned in her direction his long sallow
face--a face that would have been saturnine but for its touch of
whimsicality and a singularly charming smile. 'My brother-in-law will
bear me out,' Mrs. Freddy went on, quite as though breaking off a
heated argument.

Lord Borrodaile sauntered up and offered a long thin hand to Haycroft
('the fella who's bringing the country to the dogs,' as Mrs. Freddy knew
right well was his conviction).

Steering wide of politics, 'I gather,' he said, with his air of amiable
boredom, 'that you were discussing what used in the days of my youth to
be called a lady's "conversational powers."'

'I forbid you to apply such deadly phrases to my friend,' Mrs. Freddy
denounced him. '_Your_ friend, too!'

'I'll prove my title to the distinction by proclaiming that she has the
subtlest art a woman can possess.'

'Ah, _that's_ more like it!' said Mrs. Freddy, gaily. 'What is the
subtlest art?'

'The art of being silent without being dull.'

If there was any sting in this for the lady nearest him, she gave no
sign of making the personal application.

'Now I expressly forbid your encouraging Vida in silence! Most men like
to be amused. You know perfectly well _you_ do!'

'Ah, yes,' he said languidly, catching Haycroft's eye and almost making
terms with him upon a common ground of masculine understanding. 'Yes,
yes. It is well known what children we are. Pleased with a rattle!'
Then, as if fearing he might be going too far, he smiled that disarming
smile of his, and said good-humouredly, 'I know now why you are called a
good hostess.'

'Why?' asked the lady a little anxiously, for his compliments were not
always soothing.

A motion towards the watch-pocket. 'No one, to look at you, would
suppose that your spirit was racked between the clock and the door.'

'Oh,' she said, relieved, 'if they come in five minutes or so, you'll
see! The dinner won't be a penny the worse. Jules is such a wizard. All
I mind is seeing Freddy fussed.' She turned with an engaging smile to
her minister again. 'Freddy has the most angelic temper except when he's
hungry--bless him! Now that he's talking to Vida Levering, Freddy'll
forget whether it's before dinner or after.'

'What! what!' said a brisk old gentleman, with a face like a peculiarly
wicked monkey. He abandoned Mrs. Townley with enthusiasm in order to
say to his hostess, 'Show me the witch who can work that spell!'

'Oh, dear, I'm afraid,' said Mrs. Freddy, prettily, 'I'm dreadfully
afraid that means you're starving! Does it make you morose as it does
Freddy?' she asked, with an air of comic terror. 'Then we won't wait.'
She tossed out one arm with a funny little movement that sent her thin
draperies floating as though towards the bell.

'My dear lady!' the old gentleman arrested her. 'I hunger, it is true,
but only for knowledge.' In a silent but rather horrible laugh he
wrinkled up his aged nose, which was quite enough wrinkled and
sufficiently 'up' already. 'Who _is_ the witch?'

'Why, we were talking about a member of your family.' She turned again
to the new minister. 'Mr. Fox-Moore--Sir--oh! how absurd! I was going to
introduce two pillars of the State to one another. I _must_ be anxious
about those late people, after all.'

'As a matter of fact you and I never have met,' said Haycroft, cordially
taking old Mr. Fox-Moore's hand. 'Beside you permanent officials we
ephemerae, the sport of parties----'

'Ah, _that's_ all right!' Mrs. Freddy's head, poised an instant on one
side, seemed to say.

'Who is it? Who is late?' demanded Mrs. Graham Townley, whose entrance
into the conversation produced the effect of the sudden opening of
window and door on a windy day. People shrink a little in the draught,
and all light, frivolous things are blown out of the way. English people
stand this sort of thing very much as they stand the actual draughts in
their cold houses. They feel it to be good for them on the whole. Mrs.
Graham Townley was acknowledged to be a person of much character. Though
her interest in public affairs was bounded only by the limits of the
Empire, she had found time to reform the administration of a great
London hospital. Also she was related to a great many people. In the
ultra smart set she of course had no _raison d'etre_, but in the older
society it was held meet that these things be. So that when she put her
question, not only was she not ignored, but each one felt it a serious
thing for anybody to be so late that Mrs. Graham Townley instead of
button-holing some one with, 'What, now, should you say is the extent of
the Pan-Islamic influence in Egypt?' should be reduced to asking, 'Who
are we waiting for?'

'It's certain to be a man,' said Lady John Ulland, as calmly convinced
as one who states a natural law.

'Why?' asked her niece, the charming girl in rose colour.

'No woman would dare to come in so late as this. She'd have turned back
and telephoned that the horses had run away with her or something of the
sort.'

'Dick Farnborough won't turn back.'

'Oh, Mr. Farnborough's the culprit!' said a smartly dressed woman, with
a nervous, rather angry air, though the ropes of fine pearls she wore
might, some would think, have soothed the most savage breast.

'Yes, Dick and Captain Beeching!' said Mrs. Freddy; 'and I shall give
them just two minutes more!'

'Aunt Ellen _said_ it couldn't be a woman,' remarked the girl in pink,
as one struck with such perspicacity.

'Well, I wouldn't ask them again to _my_ house,' said the discontented
person with the pearls.

'Yes, she would,' Lady John said aside to Borrodaile. 'She has a
daughter, and so have most of the London hostesses, and the young
villains know it.'

'Oh, yes; sometimes they never turn up at all,' said the pink niece.

'After accepting!' ejaculated Lady Whyteleafe of the pearls.

'Oh, yes; sometimes they don't even answer.'

'I never heard of such impudence.'

'I have, twice this year,' said Mrs. Graham Townley, with that effect of
breaking by main force into a conversation instead of being drawn into
it. 'Twice in this last year I've sat with an empty place on one side of
me at a dinner-party. On each occasion it was a young member of
parliament who never turned up and never sent an apology.'

'The same man both times?' asked Lord Borrodaile.

'Yes; different houses, but the same man.'

'He _knew_!' whispered Borrodaile in Lady John's ear.

'Dick Farnborough has been complaining that since he smashed his motor
all existence has become disorganized. I always feel'--the hostess
addressed herself to the minister and the pearls--'don't you, that one
ought to stretch a point for people who have to go about in cabs?'

As Haycroft began a disquisition on the changes in social life initiated
by the use of the motor-car, Mrs. Freddy floated away.

Borrodaile, looking after her, remarked, 'It's humane of my
sister-in-law to think of making allowances. Most of us gratify the
dormant cruelty in human nature by keeping an eagle eye on the wretched
late ones when at last they _do_ slink in. Don't you know'--he turned to
Lady John--'that look of half-resentful interest?'

'Perfectly. Every one wants to see whether these particular culprits
wear their rue with a difference.'

'Or whether,' Borrodaile went on, 'whether, like the majority, they
merely look abject and flustered, and whisper agitated lies. Personally
I have known it to be the most interesting moment of the evening.'

What brought Mrs. Fox-Moore's plight forcibly home to Mrs. Freddy was
seeing Vida leave her own animated group to join her sister. Mrs. Freddy
made her way across the room, stopping a moment to say to Freddy as she
passed--

'_Do_ go and make conversation to Lady Whyteleafe.'

'Which is Lady Whyteleafe?' drawled Freddy.

'Oh, you _always_ forget her! What _am_ I to do with you? She's the
woman with the pearls.'

'Not that cross-looking----'

'Sh! Yes, darling, that's the one. She's only looking like that because
you aren't talking to her;' and Mrs. Freddy overtook Vida just as she
reached the Desert Island where Mrs. Fox-Moore stood, looking seaward
for a sail.

A few moments later, after ringing for dinner, Mrs. Freddy paused an
instant, taking in the fact that Lady Whyteleafe hadn't been made as
happy by Mr. Tunbridge's attentions as his wife had prophesied. No, the
angry woman with the pearls, so far from being intent upon Freddy's
remarks, was levelling at Mrs. Freddy the critical eye that says, 'Now I
shall see if I can determine just how miserably conscious you are that
dinner's unpardonably late, everybody starving, and since you've only
just rung, that you have at least eight minutes still to fill up before
you'll hear that you are "served."' Lady Whyteleafe leaned against the
back of the little periwinkle damask sofa, and waited to see Mrs.
Freddy carry off these last minutes of suspense by an affectation of
great good spirits.

But the lady under the social microscope knew a trick worth two of that.
She could turn more than one mishap to account.

'Oh, Freddy! Oh, Lady Whyteleafe! I've just gone and said the most
awful, dreadful, appalling thing! Oh, I should like to creep under the
sofa and die!'

'What's up?' demanded Mr. Freddy, with an air of relief at being
reinforced.

'I've been talking to Vida Levering and that funereal sister of hers.'

'Oh, Mrs. Fox-Moore!' said Lady Whyteleafe, obviously disappointed.
'She's a step-sister, isn't she?'

'Yes, yes. Oh, I wish she'd never stepped over my threshold!'

'Why?' said Mr. Freddy, sticking in his eyeglass.

'Don't, Freddy. Don't look at her. Oh, I wish I were dead!'

'What _have_ you been doing? She looks as if she wished _she_ were
dead.'

'That's nothing. She always looks like that,' Lady Whyteleafe assured
the pair.

'Yes, and she makes it a great favour to come. "I seldom go into
society," she writes in her stiff little notes; and you're reminded that
way, without her actually setting it down, that she devotes herself to
good works.'

'Perhaps she doesn't know what else to do with all that money,' said the
lady of the pearls.

'_She_ hasn't got a penny piece.'

'Oh, is it all his? I thought the Leverings were rather well off.'

'Yes, but the money came through the second wife, Vida's mother. Oh, I
hate that Fox-Moore woman!' Mrs. Freddy laughed ruefully. 'And I'm sure
her husband is a great deal too good for her. But how _could_ I have
done it!'

'You haven't told us yet.'

'They asked me who was late, and I said Dick Farnborough, and that I
hoped he hadn't forgotten, for I had Hermione Heriot here on purpose to
meet him. And I told Vida about the Heriots trying to marry Hermione to
that old Colonel Redding.'

'Oh, can't they bring it off?' said Lady Whyteleafe.

'I've been afraid they would. "It's so dreadful," I said, "to see a
fresh young girl tied to a worn-out old man."'

'_Oh!_' remarked Lady Whyteleafe, genuinely shocked. 'And you said that
to----'

Mrs. Freddy nodded with melancholy significance. 'Even when Vida said,
"It seems to do well enough sometimes," _still_ I never never remembered
the Fox-Moore story! And I went on about it being a miracle when it
turned out even tolerably--and, oh, Heaven forgive me! I grew eloquent!'

'It's your passion for making speeches,' said Mr. Freddy.

At which, accountably to Lady Whyteleafe, Mrs. Freddy blushed and
stumbled in this particular 'speech.'

'I know, I know,' she said, carrying it off with an air of comic
contrition. 'I even said, "There's a modesty in nature that it isn't
wise to overstep" (I'd forgotten some people think speech-making comes
under that head). "It's been realized," I said--yes, rushing on my
doom!--"it's been realized up to now only in the usual one-sided
way--discouraging boys from marrying women old enough to be their
mothers. But dear, blundering, fatuous man"'--she smiled into her
husband's pleasantly mocking face--'"_he_ thinks," I said, "at _any_ age
he's a fit mate for a fresh young creature in her teens. If they only
knew--the dreadful old ogres!" Yes, I said that. I piled it on--oh, I
stuck at nothing! "The men think an ugly old woman monopolizes all the
opportunities humanity offers for repulsiveness. But there's nothing on
the face of the earth as hideous," I said, "as an ugly old man. Doesn't
it stand to reason? He's bound to go greater lengths than any woman can
aspire to. There's more of him to _be_ ugly, isn't there? I appealed to
them--everything about him is bigger, coarser--he's much less human,"
says I, "and _much_ more like a dreadful old monkey." I raised my
wretched eyes, and there, not three feet away, was the aged husband of
the Fox-Moore woman ogling Hermione Heriot! Oh, let me die!' Mrs. Freddy
leaned against the blue-grey sofa for a moment and half closed her
pretty eyes. The next instant she was running gaily across the room to
welcome Richard Farnborough and Captain Beeching.

       *       *       *       *       *

'I always know,' said Lord Borrodaile, glancing over the banisters as he
and Vida went down--'I always know the kind of party it's going to be
when I see--certain people. Don't you?'

'I know who you mean,' Vida whispered back, her eyes on Mrs. Graham
Townley's aggressively high-piled hair towering over the bald pate of
the minister, as, side by side, they disappeared through the dining-room
door. 'Why _does_ Laura have her?'

'Well, she's immensely intelligent, they _say_,' he sighed.

'That's why I wonder,' laughed Vida. '_We_ are rather frivolous, I'm
afraid.'

'To tell the truth, I wondered, too. I even sounded my sister-in-law.'

'Well?'

'She said it was her Day of Reckoning. "I never ask the woman," she
said, "except to a scratch party like this."'

'"Scratch party"--with you and me here!'

'Ah, we are the leaven. We make the compound possible.'

'Still, I don't think she ought to call it "scratch" when she's got an
Ambassador and a Cabinet Minister----'

'Just the party to ask a scratch Cabinet Minister to,' he insisted,
stopping between the two cards inscribed respectively with their names.
'As for the Ambassador, he's an old friend of ours--knows his London
well--knows we are the most tolerant society on the face of the earth.'

In spite of her companion's affectation of a smiling quarrelsomeness,
Vida unfolded her table-napkin with the air of one looking forward to
her _tete-a-tete_ with the man who had brought her down. But Lord
Borrodaile was a person most women liked talking to, and hardly had she
begun to relish that combination in the man of careless pleasantry and
pungent criticism, when Vida caught an agonized glance from her hostess,
which said plainly, 'Rescue the man on your right,'--and lo! Miss
Levering became aware that already, before the poor jaded politician had
swallowed his soup, Mrs. Townley had fallen to catechising him about the
new Bill--a theme talked threadbare by newspaperdom and all political
England. But Mrs. Townley, albeit not exactly old, was one of those
old-fashioned women who take what used to be called 'an intelligent
interest in politics.' You may pick her out in any drawing-room from the
fact that politicians shun her like the plague. Rich, childless, lonely,
with more wits than occupation, practically shelved at a time when her
intellectual life is most alert--the Mrs. Townleys of the world do, it
must be admitted, labour under the delusion that men fighting the battle
of public life, go out to dine for the express purpose of telling the
intelligent female 'all about it.' She is a staunch believer not so much
in women's influence as in woman's. And there is no doubt in her mind
which woman's. If among her smart relations who ask her to their houses
and go to hers (from that sentiment of the solidarity of the family so
powerful in English life), if amongst these she succeeds from time to
time in inducing two or three public officials, or even private members,
to prove how good a cook she keeps, she thinks she is exercising an
influence on the politics of her time. Her form of conversation consists
in plying her victim with questions. Not here one there one, to keep the
ball rolling, but a steady and pitiless fire of 'Do you think?' and
'_Why_ do you?'

Obedient to her hostess's wireless telegram, Miss Levering bent her
head, and said to Mrs. Townley's neighbour--

'I know I ought not to talk to you till after the _entree_.'

'Pray do!' said Sir William, with a sudden glint in his little eyes; and
then with a burnt-child air of caution, 'Unless----' he began.

'Oh, you make conditions!' said Miss Levering, laughing.

'Only one. Promise not'--he lowered his voice--'promise not to say
"Bill."'

'I won't even go so far as to say "William."'

He laughed as obligingly as though the jest had been a good one. A
little ashamed, its maker hastened to leave it behind.

'There's nothing I should quite so much hate talking about as
politics--saving your presence.'

'Ah!'

'I was thinking of something _much_ more important.'

Even her rallying tone did not wholly reassure the poor man.

'More important?' he repeated.

'Yes; I long to know (and I long to be forgiven for asking), what Order
that is you are wearing, and what you did to get it.'

Haycroft breathed freely. He talked for the next ten minutes about the
bauble, making a humorous translation of its Latin 'posy,' and
describing in the same vein the service to a foreign state that had won
him the recognition. He wouldn't have worn the thing to-night except out
of compliment to the ambassador from the Power in question. They were
going on together to the reception at the Foreign Office. As to the
Order, Haycroft seemed to feel he owed it to himself to smile at all
such toys, but he did not disdain to amuse the pretty lady with the one
in question, any more than being humane (and even genial sitting before
Mrs. Freddy's menu), he would have refused to show the whirring wheels
of his watch to a nice child. The two got on so well that the anxious
look quite faded out of Mrs. Freddy's face, and she devoted herself
gaily to the distinguished foreigner at her side. But Haycroft at a
party was, like so many Englishmen, as the lilies of the field. They
toil not, neither do they spin. The man Vida had rescued from Mrs.
Graham Townley was, when in the society of women, so accustomed to
seeing them take on themselves the onus of entertainment, was himself so
unused to being at the smallest trouble, that when the 'Order' was
exhausted, had Vida not invented another topic, there would have been an
absolute cessation of all converse till Mrs. Graham Townley had again
caught him up like a big reluctant fish on the hook of interrogation. At
a reproachful aside from Lord Borrodaile, Miss Levering broke off in the
middle of her second subject to substitute, 'But I am monopolizing you
disgracefully,' and she half turned away from the eminent politician
into whose slightly flushed face and humid eyes had come something like
animation.

'Not at all. Not at all. Go on.'

'No, I've gone far enough. Do you realize that we left "Orders" and
"Honours" half an hour ago, and ever since we've been talking scandal?'

'Criticizing life,' he amended--'a pursuit worthy of two philosophers.'

'I did it--' said the lady, with an air of half-amused discontent with
herself; 'you know why I did it.'

He met her eye, and the faint motion that indicated the woman on his
other side. 'Terrible person,' he whispered. 'She goes out to dine as a
soldier goes into action.'

For the next few minutes they made common cause in heaping ridicule on
'the political woman.'

'But, after all'--Vida pulled herself up--'it may be only a case of
sour grapes on my part. I'm afraid _my_ conversation is inclined to be
frivolous.'

He turned and gave her her reward--the feeling smile that says, '_Thank
God!_' But, strangely, it did not reflect itself in the woman's face.
Something quite different there, lurking under the soft gaiety. Was
it consciousness of this being the second time during the evening
that she had employed the too common vaunt of the woman of that particular
world? Did some ironic echo reach her of that same boast (often as
mirthless and as pitiful as the painted smile on the cruder face), the
'I'm afraid I'm rather frivolous' of the well-to-do woman, whose
frivolity--invaluable asset!--is beginning to show wear?

'Well, to return to our mutton,' he said; and, as his companion seemed
suddenly to be overtaken by some unaccountable qualm, 'What a desert
life would be,' he added encouragingly, 'if we couldn't talk to the
discreet about the indiscreet.'

'I wonder if there wouldn't be still more oases in the desert,' she said
idly, 'if there were a new law made----'

He glanced at her with veiled apprehension in the pause.

'You being so Liberal,' she went on with faint mockery, 'you're the very
one to introduce the measure' (he shrank visibly, and seemed about to
remind her of her pledge). 'It shall ordain,' she went on, 'that those
who have found satisfactory husbands or wives are to rest content with
their good fortune, and not be so greedy as to insist on having the
children, too.'

'Oh!' His gravity relaxed.

'But, on the other hand, all the lonely women, the widows and spinsters,
who haven't got anything else, _they_ shall have the children.'

'I won't go so far as that,' he laughed, boundlessly relieved that the
conversation was not taking the strenuous turn he for a moment feared.
'But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll support a measure that shall make
an allowance of _one_ child to every single woman the proper and
accepted arrangement. No questions asked, and no disgrace.'

'Disgrace!' she echoed, smiling. 'On the contrary, it should be the
woman's title to honour! She should be given a beautiful Order like
yours for service to the State.'

'Ah, yes! But, what then would we talk about?'

She had turned away definitely this time.

'Well,' said Borrodaile, a little mocking, 'what is it?'

'I don't know,' she answered. 'I don't know _what_ it is that seizes
hold of me after I've been chattering like this for an hour or more.'

Borrodaile bent his head, and glanced past Vida to the abandoned
minister.

'Console me by saying a slight weariness.'

'More like loathing.'

'Not of _both_ your neighbours, I hope.'

He lost the low 'Of myself.' 'But there's one person,' she said, with
something like enthusiasm--'one person that I respect and admire.'

'Oh!' He glanced about the board with an air of lazy interest. 'Which
one?'

'I don't know her name. I mean the woman who dares to sit quite silent
and eat her dinner without looking like a lost soul.'

'I've been saying you could do that.'

She shook her head. 'No, I've been engaged for the last hour in proving
I haven't the courage. It's just come over me,' she said, her eyes in
their turn making a tour of the table, and coming back to Borrodaile
with the look of having caught up a bran-new topic on the way--'it's
just come over me, what we're all doing.'

'Are we all doing the same thing?'

'All the men are doing one thing. And all the women another.'

His idly curious look travelled up and down, and returned to her
unenlightened.

'All the women,' she said, 'are trying with might and main to amuse the
men, and all the men are more or less permitting the women to succeed.'

'I'm sorry,' he said, laughing, 'to hear of your being so over-worked.'

'Oh, _you_ make it easy. And yet'--she caught the gratitude away from
her voice--'I suppose I should have said something like that, even if
I'd been talking to my other neighbour.'

Borrodaile's look went again from one couple to another, for, as usual
in England, the talk was all _tete-a-tete_. The result of his inspection
seemed not to lend itself to her mood.

'I can't speak for others, but for myself, I'm always conscious of
wanting to be agreeable when I'm with you. I'm sorry'--he was speaking
in the usual half-genial, half-jeering tone--'very sorry, if I succeed
so ill.'

'I've already admitted that with _me_ you succeed to admiration. But you
only try because it's easy.'

'Oh!' he laughed.

'You rather like talking to me, you know. Now, can you lay your hand on
your heart----'

'And deny it? Never!'

'Can you lay your hand on your heart, and say you've tried as hard to
entertain your other neighbour as I have to keep mine going?'

'Ah, well, we men aren't as good at it. After all, it's rather the
woman's "part," isn't it?'

'The art of pleasing? I suppose it is--but it's rather a Geisha view of
life, don't you think?'

'Not at all; rightly viewed, it's a woman's privilege--her natural
function.'

'Then the brutes are nobler than we.'

Wondering, he glanced at her. The face was wholly reassuring, but he
said, with a faint uneasiness--

'If it weren't you, I'd say that sounds a little bitter.'

'Oh, no,' she laughed. 'I was only thinking about the lion's mane and
the male bird's crest, and what the natural history bores say they're
for.'




CHAPTER III


The darkness and the quiet of Vida Levering's bedroom were rudely
dispelled at a punctual eight each morning by the entrance of a gaunt
middle-aged female.

It was this person's unvarying custom to fling back the heavy curtains,
as though it gratified some strong recurrent need in her, to hear brass
rings run squealing along a bar; as if she counted that day lost which
was not well begun--by shooting the blinds up with a clatter and a bang!

The harsh ceremonial served as a sort of setting of the pace, or a
metaphorical shaking of a bony fist in the face of the day, as much as
to say, 'If I admit you here you'll have to toe the mark!'

It might be taken as proof of sound nerves that the lady in the bed
offered no remonstrance at being jarred awake in this ungentle fashion.

Fourteen years before, when Vida Levering was only eighteen, she had
tried to make something like a conventional maid out of the faithful
Northumbrian. Rachel Wark had entered Lady Levering's service just
before Vida's birth, and had helped to nurse her mistress through a
mortal illness ten years later. After Sir Hervey Levering lost his wife,
Wark became in time housekeeper and general factotum to the family. This
arrangement held without a break until, as before hinted, Miss Vida,
full of the hopeful idealism of early youth, had tried and ignominiously
failed in her attempt to teach the woman gentler manners.

For Wark's characteristic retort had been to pack her box and go to
spend sixteen months among her kinsfolk, where energy was accounted a
virtue, and smooth ways held in suspicion. At the end of that time,
seeming to judge the lesson she wished to impart had been sufficiently
digested, Wark wrote to Miss Vida proposing to come back. For some
months she waited for the answer. It came at last from Biarritz, where
it appeared the young lady was spending the winter with her father.
After an exchange of letters Wark joined them there. In the twelve
years since her return to the family, she had by degrees adapted herself
to the task of looking after her young lady. The adaptation was not all
on one side. Many of Vida's friends wondered that she could put up with
a lady's maid who could do so few of the things commonly expected of
that accomplished class.

'I don't want dressmaking going on in the house,' contentedly Vida told
off her maid's negative qualifications, 'and I hate having anybody do my
hair for me. Wark packs quite beautifully, and then I _do_ like some one
about me--that I like.'

In the early days what she had 'liked' most about the woman was that
Wark had known and been attached to Lady Levering. There was no one else
with whom Vida could talk about her mother.

By the time death overtook Sir Hervey two winters ago in Rome, Wark had
become so essential a part of Vida's little entourage, that one of the
excuses offered by that lady for not going to live with her half-sister
in London had been--'Wark doesn't always get on with other servants.'
For several years Miss Levering's friends had been speaking of her as
one fallen a victim to that passion for Italy that makes it an abiding
place dearer than home to so many English-born. But the half-sister,
Mrs. Fox-Moore, had not been misled either by that theory or by the
difficulty as to pleasing Wark with the Queen Anne's Gate servants.
'It's not that Vida loves Italy so much as that, for some reason, she
doesn't love England at all.' Nevertheless, Mrs. Fox-Moore after some
months had persuaded her to 'bring Wark and try us.'

The experiment, now over a year old, seemed to have turned out well. If
Vida really did not love her native land, she seemed to enjoy well
enough what she called smiling 'the St. Martin's Summer' of her success
in London society.

       *       *       *       *       *

She turned over in her bed on this particular May morning, stretching
out her long figure, and then letting it sink luxuriously back into
relaxed quiescence with a conscious joy in prolonging those last ten
minutes when sleep is slowly, softly, one after another, withdrawing her
thousand veils.

Vaguely, as she lay there with face half buried in her pillow, vaguely
she was aware that Wark was making even more noise than common.

When the woman had bustled in and bustled out several times, and
deposited the shoes with a 'dump,' she reappeared with the delicate
porcelain tray that bore the early tea. On the little table close to
where the dark head lay half hidden, Wark set the fragile burden
down--did it with an emphasis that made cup and saucer shiver and run
for support towards the round-bellied pot.

Vida opened her heavy-lidded eyes. 'Really, Wark, you know, nobody on
earth would let you wake them in the morning except me.' She sat up and
pulled the pillow higher. 'Give me the tray here,' she said sleepily.

Wark obeyed. She had said nothing to Vida's reproof. She stood now by
the bedside without a trace of either contrition or resentment in the
wooden face that seemed, in recompense for never having been young, to
be able successfully to defy the 'antique pencil.' Time had made but one
or two faint ineffectual scratches there, as one who tries, and then
abandons, an unpromising surface. The lack of record in the face lent it
something almost cryptic. If there were no laughter-wrought lines about
the eyes, neither was there mark of grief or self-repression near the
mouth. She would, you felt, defy Time as successfully as she defied
lesser foes. Even the lank, straw-coloured hair hardly showed the
streaks of yellow-white that offered their unemphatic clue to Wark's
age.

The sensitive face of the woman in the bed--even now with something of
the peace of sleep still shadowing its brilliancy--gave by contrast an
impression of vividness and eager sympathies. The mistress, too, looked
younger than her years. She did not seem to wonder at the dull presence
that seemed to be held there, prisoner-like, behind the brass bars at
the foot of the bed. Wark sometimes gave herself this five minutes'
_tete-a-tete_ with her mistress before the business of the day began and
all their intercourse was swamped in clothes.

'I meant to pin a paper on the door to say I wasn't to be called till
ten,' said the lady, as though keeping up the little pretence of not
being pleased.

'Didn't you sleep well, 'm?' The maid managed wholly to denude the
question of its usual grace of solicitude.

'Yes; but it was so late when I began. We didn't get back till nearly
three.'

'I didn't get much sleep, either.' It was an unheard-of admission from
Wark.

'Oh!' said Vida, lazily sipping her tea. 'Bad conscience?'

'No,' she said slowly, 'no.'

As the woman raised her light eyes, Miss Levering saw, to her
astonishment, that the lids were red. Wark, too, seemed uncomfortably
aware of something unusual in her face, for she turned it away, and
busied herself in smoothing down the near corner of the bath blanket.

'What kept _you_ awake?' Miss Levering asked.

'Well, I suppose I'd better tell you while the other people aren't
round. I want a day or two to go into the country.'

'Into the country?' No such request had been heard for a round dozen of
years.

'I've got some business to see to.'

'At home? In Northumberland?'

'No.'

The tone seemed so little to promise anything in the nature of a
confidence that Miss Levering merely said--

'Oh, very well. When do you want to go?'

'I could go to-morrow if----' She stopped, and looked down at the hem of
her long white apron.

Something unwonted in the wooden face prompted Miss Levering to say--

'What do you want to do in the country?'

'To see about a place that's been offered me.'

'A _place_, Wark!'

'Yes; post of housekeeper. That's what I really am, you know.'

Miss Levering looked at her, and set down the half-finished cup without
opening her lips. If the speech had come from any other than Wark, it
would have been easy to believe it merely the prelude to complaint of a
fellow-servant or plea for a rise in wages. But if Wark objected to a
fellow-servant, her own view of the matter had always been that the
other one should go. Her mistress knew quite well that in the mouth of
the woman standing there with red eyes at the foot of the bed, such an
announcement as had just been made, meant more. And the consciousness
seemed to bring with it a sense of acute discomfort not unmixed with
anger. For there was a threat of something worse than an infliction of
mere inconvenience. It was a species of desertion. It was almost
treachery. They had lived together all the younger woman's life, except
for those two years that followed on the girl's attempt to make a
conventional servant out of a creature who couldn't be that, but who had
it in her to be more.

They had been too long together for Wark not to divine
something--through all the lady's self-possession--of her sense of being
abandoned.

'It's having to tell you that that kept me awake.'

The wave of dull colour that mounted up to the bushy, straw-coloured
eyebrows seemed on the way to have overflowed into her eyes. They grew
redder than before, and slowly they filled.

'You don't like living here in this house.' Vida caught at the old
complication.

'I've got used to it,' the woman said baldly. Then, after a little
pause, during which she made a barely audible rasping to clear her
throat, 'I don't like leaving you, miss. I always remember how, that
time before--the only time I was ever away from you since you was a
baby--how different I found you when I came back.'

'Different, Wark?'

'Yes, miss. It seemed like you'd turned into somebody else.'

'Most people change--develope--in those years just before twenty.'

'Not like you did, miss. You gave me a deal of trouble when you was
little, but it nearly broke my heart to come back and find you so
quieted down and wise-like.'

A flash of tears glimmered in the mistress's eyes, though her lips were
smiling.

'Of course,' the maid went on, 'though you never told me about it, I
know you had things to bear while I was away, or else you wouldn't have
gone away from your home that time--a mere child--and tried to teach for
a living.'

'It _was_ absurd of me! But whosever fault it was, it wasn't yours.'

'Yes, miss, in a way it was. I owed it to your mother not to have left
you. I've never told you how I blamed myself when I heard--and I didn't
wonder at you. It _was_ hard when your mother was hardly cold to see
your father----'

'Yes; now that's enough, Wark. You know we never speak of that.'

'No, we've never spoken about it. And, of course, you won't need me any
more like you did then. But it's looking back and remembering--it's that
that's making it so hard to leave you now. But----'

'Well?'

'My friends have been talking to me.'

'About----'

'Yes, this post.' Then, almost angrily, 'I didn't try for it. It's come
after me. My cousin knows the man.'

'The man who wants you to go to him as housekeeper?' Vida wrinkled her
brows. Wark hadn't said 'gentleman,' who alone in her employer's
experience had any need of a housekeeper. 'You mean you don't know him
yourself?'

'Not yet, 'm. I know he's a market gardener, and he wants his house
looked after.'

'What if he does? A market gardener won't be able to pay the wages
I----'

'The wages aren't much to begin with--but he's getting along--except for
the housekeeping. That's in a bad way.'

'What if it is? I never heard such nonsense. You don't want to leave me,
Wark, for a market gardener you've never so much as seen;' and Miss
Levering covered her discomfort by a little smiling.

'My cousin's seen him many a time. She likes him.'

'Let your cousin go, then, and keep his house for him.'

'My cousin has her own house to keep, and she's got a young baby.'

'Oh, the woman who brought her child here once?'

'Yes, 'm, the child you gave the coral beads to. My cousin has written
and talked about it ever since.'

'About the beads?'

'About the market gardener. And the way his house is--Ever since we came
back to England she's been going on at me about it. I told her all along
I couldn't leave you, but she's always said (since that day you walked
about with the baby and gave him the beads to play with, and wouldn't
let her make him cry by taking them away)--ever since then my cousin
has said you'd understand.'

'What would I understand?'

Wark laid her hand on the nearest of the shining bars of brass, and
slowly she polished it with her open palm. She obviously found it
difficult to go on with her defence.

'I wanted my cousin to come and explain to you.'

Here was Wark in a new light indeed! If she really wanted any creature
on the earth to speak for her. As she stood there in stolid
embarrassment polishing the shiny bar, Miss Levering clutched the tray
to steady it, and with the other hand she pulled the pillow higher. One
had to sit bolt upright, it seemed, and give this matter one's entire
attention.

'I don't want to talk to your cousin about your affairs. We are old
friends, Wark. Tell me yourself.'

She forced her eyes to meet her mistress's. 'He told my cousin: "Just
you find me a good housekeeper," he said, "and if I like her," he said,
"she won't be my housekeeper long."'

'Wark! _You!_ You aren't thinking of marrying?'

'If he's what my cousin says----'

'A man you've never seen? Oh, my _dear_ Wark! Well, I shall hope and
pray he won't think your housekeeping good enough.'

'He will! From what my cousin says, he's had a run of worthless huzzies.
I don't expect he'll find much fault with _my_ housekeeping after what
he's been through.'

Vida looked wondering at the triumphant face of the woman.

'And so you're ready to leave me after all these years?'

'No, miss, I'm not to say "ready," but I think I'll have to go.'

'My poor old Wark'--the lady leaned over the tray--'I could almost think
you are in love with this man you've only heard about!'

'No, miss, I'm not to say in love.'

'I believe you are! For what other reason would you have for leaving
me?'

The woman looked as if she could show cause had she a mind. But she said
nothing.

'You know,' Vida pursued--'you know quite well you don't need to marry
for a home.'

'No, 'm; I'm quite comfortable, of course, with you. But time goes on. I
don't get younger.'

'None of us do that, Wark.'

'That's just the trouble, miss. It ain't only _me_.'

Vida looked at her, more perplexed than ever by the curious regard in
the hard-featured countenance. For there was something very like dumb
reproach in Wark's face.

'Still,' said Miss Levering, 'you know, even if none of us do get
younger, we are not any of us (to judge by appearances) on the brink of
the grave. Even if I should be smashed up in a motor accident--I know
you're always expecting that--even if I were killed to-morrow, still
you'd find I hadn't forgotten you, Wark.'

'It isn't that, miss. It isn't death I'm afraid of.'

There was a pause--the longest that yet had come.

'What _are_ you afraid of?' Miss Levering asked.

'It's--you see, I've been looking these twelve years to see you
married.'

'Me? What's that got to do with----'

'Yes, miss. You see, I've counted a good while on looking after children
again some day. But if you won't get married----'

Vida flung her hair back with a burst of not very merry laughter.

'If I won't, you must! But _why_ in the world? I'd no idea you were so
romantic. Why must there be a wedding in the family, Wark?'

'So there can be children, miss,' said the woman, stolidly.

'Well, there is a child. There's Doris.'

'Poor Miss Doris!' The woman shook her head. 'But she's got a good
nurse. I say it, though she calls advice interfering. And Miss Doris has
got a mother' (plain that Wark was again in the market garden). 'Yes,
_she's_ got a mother! and a sort of a father, and she's got a governess,
and a servant to carry her about. I sometimes think what Miss Doris
needs most is a little letting alone. Leastways, she don't need _me_.
No, nor _you_, miss.'

'And you've given me up?' the mistress probed.

Wark raised her red eyes. 'Of course, miss, if I'm wrong----' Her
knuckly hand slid down from the brass bar, and she came round to the
side of the bed with an unmistakable eagerness in her face. 'If you're
going to get married, I don't see as I _could_ leave ye.'

The lady's lips twitched with an instant's silent laughter, but there
was something else than laughter in her eyes.

'Oh, I _can_ buy you off, can I? If I give you my word--if to save you
from need to try the great experiment, I'll sacrifice _my_self----'

'I wouldn't like to see you make a sacrifice, miss,' Wark said, with
perfect gravity. 'But'--as though reconsidering--'you wouldn't feel it
so much, I dare say, after the child was there.'

They looked at one another.

'If it's children you yearn for, my poor Wark, you've waited too long,
I'm afraid.'

'Oh, no, miss.' She spoke with a fatuous confidence.

'Why, you must be fifty.'

'Fifty-three, miss. But'--she met her mistress's eye
unflinching--'Bunting--he's the market gardener--he's been married
before. He's got three girls and two boys.'

'Heavens!' Vida fell back against the pillow. 'What a handful!'

'Oh, no, 'm. My cousin says they're nice children.' It would have been
funny if it hadn't somehow been pathetic to see how instantly she was on
the defensive. '"Healthy and hearty," my cousin says, all but the little
one. She hardly thinks they'll raise _him_.'

'Well, I wish your market gardener had confined himself to raising
onions and cabbages. If he hadn't those children I don't believe you'd
dream of----'

'Well, of course not, miss. But it seems like those children need some
one to look after them more than--more than----'

'Than I do? That ought to be true.'

'One of 'em is little more than a baby.' The wooden woman offered it as
an apology.

'Take the tray,' said Vida.

From the look on her face you would say she knew she had lost the
faithfullest of servants, and that five little children somewhere in a
market garden had won, if not a mother, at least a doughty champion.




CHAPTER IV


No matter how late either Vida Levering or her half-sister had gone to
bed the night before, they breakfasted, as they did so many other
things, at the hour held to be most advantageous for Doris.

Mr. Fox-Moore was sometimes there and often not. On those mornings when
his health or his exertions the night previous did not prevent his
appearance, there was little conversation at the Fox-Moore breakfast
table, except such as was initiated by the only child of the marriage, a
fragile girl of ten. Little Doris, owing to some obscure threat of
hip-disease, made much of her progress about the house in a footman's
arms. But hardly, so borne, would she reach the threshold of the
breakfast room before her thin little voice might be heard calling out,
'_Fa_-ther! _Fa_-ther!'

Those who held they had every ground for disliking the old man would
have been surprised to watch him during the half hour that ensued,
ministering to the rather querulous little creature, adapting his tone
and view to her comprehension, with an art that plainly took its
inspiration from affection. If Doris were not well enough to come down,
Mr. Fox-Moore read his letters and glanced at 'the' paper, directing his
few remarks to his sister-in-law, whom he sometimes treated in such a
way as would have given a stranger the impression, in spite of the
lady's lack of response, that there was some secret understanding
between the two.

A great many years before, Donald Fox-Moore had tumbled into a
Government office, the affairs of which he had ultimately got into such
excellent running order, that, with a few hours' supervision from the
chief each week, his clerks were easily able to maintain the high
reputation of that particular department of the public service. What Mr.
Fox-Moore did with the rest of his time was little known. A good deal of
it was spent with a much younger bachelor brother near Brighton. At
least, this was the family legend. In spite of his undoubted affection
for his child, little of his leisure was wasted at home. When people
looked at the sallow, smileless face of his wife they didn't blame him.

Sometimes, when a general sense of tension and anxiety betrayed his
presence somewhere in the great dreary house, and the master yet forbore
to descend for the early meal, he would rejoice the heart of his little
daughter by having her brought to his room to make tea and share his
breakfast.

On these occasions a sense of such unexpected surcease from care
prevailed in the dining-room as called for some celebration of the
holiday spirit. It found expression in the inclination of the two women
to linger over their coffee, embracing the only sure opportunity the day
offered for confidential exchange.

One of these occasions was the morning of Wark's warning, which,
however, Vida determined to say nothing about till she was obliged. She
had just handed up her cup for replenishing when the door opened, and,
to the surprise of the ladies, the master of the house appeared on the
threshold.

'Is--is anything the matter?' faltered his wife, half rising.

'Matter? Must something be the matter that I venture into my own
breakfast-room of a morning?'

'No, no. Only I thought, as Doris didn't come, you were breakfasting
upstairs, too.' No notice being taken of this, she at once set about
heating water, for no one expected Mr. Fox-Moore to drink tea made in
the kitchen.

'I thought,' said he, twitching an open newspaper off the table and
folding it up--'I thought I asked to be allowed the privilege of opening
my paper for myself.'

'Your _Times_ hasn't been touched,' said his wife, anxiously occupied
with the spirit-lamp.

He stopped in the act of thrusting the paper in his pocket and shook it.

'What do you call this?'

'That is my _Times_,' she said.

'_Your_ _Times_?'

'I ordered an extra copy, because you dislike so to have yours looked at
till you've finished with it.'

'Dreadful hardship _that_ is!' he said, glancing round, and seeing his
own particular paper neatly folded and lying still on the side table.

'It was no great hardship when you read it before night. When you don't,
it's rather long to wait.'

'To wait for what?'

'For the news of the day.'

'Don't you get the news of the day in the _Morning Post_?'

'I don't get such full Parliamentary reports nor the foreign
correspondence.'

'Good Lord! what next?'

'I think you must blame me,' said Vida, speaking for the first time.
'I'm afraid you'll find it's only since I've been here that Janet has
broken loose and taken in an extra copy.'

'Oh, it's on your account, is it?' he grumbled, but the edge had gone
out of his ill-humour. 'I suppose you _have_ to keep up with politics or
you couldn't keep the ball rolling as you did last night?'

'Yes,' said Vida, with an innocent air. 'It is well known what
superhuman efforts we have to make before we can qualify ourselves to
talk to men.'

'Hm!' grumbled Fox-Moore. 'I never saw _you_ at a loss.'

'You did last night.'

'No, I didn't. I saw you getting on like a house afire with Haycroft and
the beguiling Borrodaile. It's a pity all the decent men are married.'

Mrs. Fox-Moore allowed her own coffee to get cold while she hovered over
the sacred rite of scientific tea-making. Mr. Fox-Moore, talking to Vida
about the Foreign Office reception, to which they had all gone on after
the Tunbridges' dinner, kept watching with a kind of half-absent-minded
scorn his wife's fussily punctilious pains to prepare the brew 'his
way.' When all was ready and the tea steaming on its way to him in the
hands of its harassed maker, he curtly declined it, got up, and left the
room. A moment after, the shutting of the front door announced the
beginning of yet another of the master's absences.

'How can you stand it?' said Vida, under her breath.

'Oh, I don't mind his going away,' said the other, dully.

'No; but his coming back!'

'One of the things I'm grateful to Donald for'--she spoke as if there
were plenty more--'he is very good to you, Vida.' And in her tone there
was criticism of the beneficiary.

'You mean, he's not as rude to me as he is to you?'

'He is even forbearing. And you--you rather frighten me sometimes.'

'I see that.'

'It would be very terrible for _me_ if he took it into his head not to
like you.'

'If he took it into his head to forbid your having me here, you mean.'

'But even when you aren't polite he just laughs. Still, he's not a
patient man.'

'Do you think you have to tell me that?'

'No, dear, only to remind you not to try him too far. For my sake, Vida,
don't ever do that.'

She put out her yellow, parchment-like hand, and her sister closed hers
over it an instant.

'Here's the hot milk,' said Vida. 'Now we'll have some more coffee.'

'Are you coming with me to-day?' Mrs. Fox-Moore asked quite cheerfully
for her as the servant shut the door.

'Oh, is this Friday? N--no.' The younger woman looked at the chill grey
world through the window, and followed up the hesitating negative with a
quite definite, 'I couldn't stand slums to-day.' The two exchanged the
look that means, 'Here we are again up against this recurring
difference.' But there was no ill-humour in either face as their eyes
met.

Between these two daughters of one father existed that sort of haunting
family resemblance often seen between two closely related persons,
despite one being attractive and the other in some way repellent. The
observer traces the same lines in each face, the same intensification of
'the family look' in the smile, and yet knows that the slight disparity
in age fails to account for a difference wide as the poles.

And not alone difference of taste, of environment and experience, not
these alone make up the sum of their unlikeness. You had only to look
from the fresh simplicity of white muslin blouse and olive-coloured
cloth in the one case, to the ungainly expensiveness of the black silk
gown of the married woman, in order to get from the first a sense of
dainty morning freshness, and from Mrs. Fox-Moore not alone a lugubrious
_memento mori_ sort of impression, but that more disquieting reminder of
the ugly and over-elaborate thing life is to many an estimable soul.
Janet Fox-Moore had the art of rubbing this dark fact in till, so to
speak, the black came off. She seemed to achieve it partly by dint of
wearing (instead of any relief of lace or even of linen at her throat) a
hard band of that passementerie secretly so despised of the little
Tunbridges. This device did not so much 'finish off' the neck of Mrs.
Fox-Moore's gowns, as allow the funereal dulness of them to overflow on
to her brown neck. It even cast an added shadow on her sallow cheek. The
figure of the older woman, gaunt and thin enough, announced the further
constriction of the corset. By way of revenge the sharp shoulder-blades
poked the corset out till it defined a ridge in the black silk back. In
front, too, the slab-like figure declined co-operation with the corset,
and withdrew, leaving a hiatus that the silk bodice clothed though it
did not conceal. You could not have told whether the other woman wore
that ancient invention for a figure insufficient or over-exuberant. As
you followed her movements, easy with the ease of a child, while she
walked or stooped or caught up the fragile Doris, or raised her arm to
take a book from the shelf, you got an impression of a physique in
perfect because unconscious harmony with its environment. If, on the
contrary, you watched but so much as the nervous, uncertain hand of the
other woman, you would know here was one who had spent her years in
alternately grasping the nettle and letting it go--reaping only stings
in life's fair fields. Easy for any one seeing her in these days (though
she wasn't thirty-six) to share Mrs. Freddy's incredulous astonishment
at hearing from Haycroft the night before that Janet Levering had been
'the beauty of her family.' Mrs. Freddy's answer had been, 'Oh, don't
make fun of her!' and Haycroft had had to assure her of his seriousness,
while the little hostess still stared uncertain.

'The _lines_ of her face are rather good,' she admitted. 'Oh, but those
yellow and pink eyes, and her general muddiness!'

'Yes, yes,' Sir William had agreed. 'She's changed so that I would never
have known her, but her colouring used to be her strong point. I assure
you she was magnificent--oh, much more striking than the younger
sister!'

The bloodless-looking woman who sat uneasily at her own board clutching
at a thin fragment of cold dry toast that hung cheerlessly awry in the
silver rack, like the last brown leaf to a frosty tree, while she
crunched the toast, spoke dryly of the poor; of how 'interesting many of
them are;' how when you take the trouble to understand them, you no
longer lump them all together in a featureless misery, you realize how
significant and varied are their lives.

'Not half as significant and varied as their smells,' said her
unchastened sister.

'Oh, you sometimes talk as if you had no heart!'

'The trouble is, I have no stomach. When you've lured me into one of
those dingy alleys and that all-pervading greasy smell of poverty comes
flooding into my face--well, simply all my most uncharitable feelings
rise up in revolt. I want to hold my nose and hide my eyes, and call for
the motor-car. Running away isn't fast enough,' she said, with energy
and a sudden spark in her golden-brown eye.

Mrs. Fox-Moore poised the fat silver jug over her own belated cup, and
waited for the thick cream to come out in a slow and grudging gobbet
with a heavy plump into the coffee. As she waited, she gently rebuked
that fastidiousness in her companion that shrank from contact with the
unsavoury and the unfortunate.

'It isn't only my fastidiousness, as you call it, that is offended,'
Vida retorted. 'I am penetrated by the hopelessness of what we're doing.
It salves my conscience, or _yours_----' Hurriedly she added,
'----that's not what you mean to do it for, I _know_, dear--and you're
an angel and I'm a mere cumberer of the earth. But when I'm only just
"cumbering," I feel less a fraud than when I'm pretending to do good.'

'You needn't pretend.'

'I can't do anything else. To go among your poor makes me feel in my
heart that I'm simply flaunting my better fortune.'

'I never saw you flaunting it.'

'Well, I assure you it's when you've got me to go with you on one of
your Whitechapel raids that I feel most strongly how outrageous it is
that, in addition to all my other advantages, I should buy self-approval
by doing some tuppenny-ha'penny service to a toiling, starving
fellow-creature.'

Mrs. Fox-Moore set down her coffee-cup. 'You mustn't suppose----' she
began.

'No, no,' Vida cut her short. 'I don't doubt _your_ motives. I know too
well how ready you are to sacrifice yourself. But it does fill me with a
kind of rage to see some of those smug Settlement workers, the people
that plume themselves on leaving luxurious homes. They don't say how
hideously bored they were in them. They are perfectly enchanted at the
excitement and importance they get out of going to live among the poor,
who don't want them----'

'Oh, my dear Vida!'

'Not a little bit! Well, the _wily_ paupers do, perhaps, for what they
can get out of our sort.'

Mrs. Fox-Moore cast down her eyes as though convicted by the
recollection of some concrete example.

'We're only scratching at the surface,' Vida, said--'such an ugly
surface, too! And the more we scratch, the uglier things come to light.'

'You make too much of that disappointment at Christmas.'

'I wasn't even thinking of the hundredth time you've been
disillusioned.' Vida threw down her table napkin, and stood up. 'I was
thinking of people like our young parson cousin.'

'George----'

Vida made a shrug of half-impatient, half-humorous assent. 'Leaves the
Bishop's Palace and comes to London. He, too, wants "to live for the
poor." Never for an instant one of them. Always the patron--the person
something may be got out of--or, at all events, hoped from.'

She seemed to be about to leave the room, but as her sister answered
with some feeling, 'No, no, they love and respect him!' Vida paused, and
brought up by the fire that the sudden cold made comforting.

'George is a different man since he's found his vocation,' Mrs.
Fox-Moore insisted. 'You read it in his face.'

'Oh, if all you mean is that _he's_ happier, why not? He's able to look
on himself as a benefactor. He's tasting the intoxication of the King
among Beggars.'

'You are grossly unfair, Vida.'

'So he thinks when I challenge him: "What good, what earthly good, is
all this unless an anodyne--for you--is good?"'

'It seems to me a very real good that George Nuneaton and his kind
should go into the dark places and brighten hopeless lives with a little
Christian kindness--sometimes with a little timely counsel.'

'Yes, yes,' said the voice by the fire; 'and a little good music--don't
forget the good music.'

'An object-lesson in practical religion, isn't that something?'

'Practical! Good Heaven! A handful of complacent, expensively educated
young people playing at reform. The poor wanting work, wanting decent
housing--wanting _bread_--and offered a little cultivated
companionship.'

'Vida, what have you been reading?'

'Reading? I've been visiting George at his Settlement. I've been
intruding myself on the privacy of the poor once a week with you--and
I'm done with it! Personally I don't get enough out of it to reconcile
me to their getting so little.'

'You're burning,' observed the toneless voice from the head of the
table.

'Yes, I believe I was a little hot,' Vida laughed as she drew her
smoking skirt away from the fire. But she still stood close to the
cheerful blaze, one foot on the fender, the green cloth skirt drawn up,
leaving the more delicate fabric of her silk petticoat to meet the fiery
ordeal. 'If it annoys you to hear me say that's my view of charity, why,
don't make me talk about it;' but the face she turned for an instant
over her shoulder was far gentler than her words. 'And don't in
future'--she was again looking down into the fire, and she spoke slowly
as one who delivers a reluctant ultimatum--'don't ask me to help, except
with money. _That_ doesn't cost so much.'

'I am disappointed.' Nothing further, but the sound of a chair moved
back, eloquent somehow of a discouragement deeper than words conveyed.

Vida turned swiftly, and, coming back to her sister, laid an arm about
her shoulder.

'I'm a perfect monster! But you know, my dear, you rather goaded me into
saying all this by looking such a martyr when I've tried to get out of
going----'

'Very well, I won't ask you again.' But the toneless rejoinder was
innocent of rancour. Janet Fox-Moore gave the impression of being too
chilled, too drained of the generous life-forces, even for anger.

'Besides,' said Vida, hurriedly, 'I'd nearly forgotten; there's the
final practising at eleven.'

'_I'd_ forgotten your charity concert was so near!' As Mrs. Fox-Moore
gathered up her letters, she gave way for the first time to a wintry
little smile.

'The concert's mine, I admit, but the charity's the bishop's. What
absurd things we women fill up the holes in our lives with!' Vida said,
as she followed her sister into the hall. 'Do you know the real reason
I'm getting up this foolish concert?'

'Because you like singing, and do it so well that--yes, without your
looks and the indescribable "rest," you'd be a success. I told you that,
when I begged you to come and try London.'

'The reason I'm slaving over the concert--it isn't all musical
enthusiasm. It amuses me to organize it. All the ticklish, difficult,
"bothering" part of getting up a monster thing of this sort, reconciling
malcontents, enlisting the great operatic stars and not losing the great
social lights--it all interests me like a game. I'm afraid the truth is
I like managing things.'

'Perhaps Mrs. Freddy's not so far wrong.'

'Does Mrs. Freddy accuse me of being a "managing woman," horrid
thought?'

'She was talking about you in her enthusiastic way when she was here the
other day. "Vida could administer a state," she said. Yes, _I_ laughed,
too, but Mrs. Freddy shook her head quite seriously, and said, "To think
of a being like Vida--not even a citizen."'

'I'm not a citizen?' exclaimed the lady, laughing down at her sister
over the banisters. 'Does she think because I've lived abroad I've
forfeited my rights of----'

'No, all she means is---- Oh, you know the bee she's got in her bonnet.
She means, as she'll tell you, that "you have no more voice in the
affairs of England than if you were a Hottentot."'

'I can't say I've ever minded that. But it has an odd sound, hasn't
it--to hear one isn't a citizen.'

'Mrs. Freddy forgets----'

'I know! I know what you're going to say,' said the other,
light-heartedly. 'Mrs. Freddy forgets our unique ennobling influence;'
and the tall young woman laughed as she ran up the last half of the long
flight of stairs. At the top she halted a moment, and called down to
Mrs. Fox-Moore, who was examining the cards left the day before,
'Speaking of our powerful influence over our men-folk--Mr. Freddy
wasn't present, was he, when she aired her views?'

'No.'

'I thought not. Her influence over Mr. Freddy is maintained by the
strictest silence on matters he isn't keen about.'




CHAPTER V


Seeing Ulland House for the first time on a fine afternoon in early May
against the jubilant green of its woodland hillside, the beholder, a
little dazzled in that first instant by the warmth of colour burning in
the ancient brick, might adapt the old dean's line and call the
coral-tinted structure rambling down the hillside, 'A rose-red dwelling
half as old as Time.'

Its original architecture had been modified by the generations as they
passed. One lord of Ulland had expressed his fancy on the eastern facade
in gable and sculptured gargoyle; another his fear or his defiance in
the squat and sturdy tower with its cautious slits in lieu of windows.
Yet another Ulland had brought home from eighteenth-century Italy a love
of colonnades and terraced gardens; and one still later had cut down to
the level of the sward the high ground-floor windows, so that where
before had been two doors or three, were now a dozen giving egress to
the gardens.

The legend so often encountered in the history of old English houses was
not neglected here--that it had been a Crusader of this family who had
himself brought home from the Holy Land the Lebanon cedar that spread
wide its level branches on the west, cutting the sunset into even bars.
Tradition also said it was a counsellor of Elizabeth who had set the
dial on the lawn. Even the latest lord had found a way to leave his
impress upon the time. He introduced 'Clock golf' at Ulland. From the
upper windows on the south and west the roving eye was caught by the
great staring face of this new timepiece on the turf--its Roman numerals
showing keen and white upon the vivid green. On the other side of the
cedar, that incorrigible Hedonist, the crumbling dial, told you in Latin
that he only marked the shining hours. But the brand new clock on the
lawn bore neither watchword nor device--seemed even to have dropped its
hands as though in modesty withheld from pointing to hours so little
worthy of record.

Two or three men, on this fine Saturday, had come down from London for
the week-end to disport themselves on the Ulland links, half a mile
beyond the park. After a couple of raw days, the afternoon had turned
out quite unseasonably warm, and though the golfers had come back
earlier than usual, not because of the heat but because one of their
number had a train to catch, they agreed it was distinctly reviving to
find tea served out of doors.

Already Lady John was in her place on the pillared colonnade, behind the
urn. Already, too, one of her pair of pretty nieces was at hand to play
the skilful lieutenant. Hermione Heriot, tactful, charming, twenty-five,
was equally ready to hand bread and butter, or, sitting quietly, to
perform the greater service--that of presenting the fresh-coloured,
discreetly-smiling vision called 'the typical English girl.' Miss Heriot
fulfilled to a nicety the requirements of those who are sensibly
reassured by the spectacle of careful conventionality allied to feminine
charm--a pleasant conversability that may be trusted to soothe and
counted on never to startle. Hermione would almost as soon have stood on
her head in Piccadilly as have said anything original, though to her
private consternation such perilous stuff had been known to harbour an
uneasy instant in her bosom. She carried such inconvenient cargo as
carefully hidden as a conspirator would a bomb under his cloak. It had
grown to be as necessary to her to agree with the views and fashions of
the majority as it was disquieting to her to see these contravened, or
even for a single hour ignored. From the crown of her carefully dressed
head to the tips of her pointed toes she was engaged in testifying her
assent to the prevailing note. Despite all this to recommend her, she
was not Lady John's favourite niece. No doubt about Jean Dunbarton
holding that honour; and, to Hermione's credit, her own love for her
cousin enabled her to accept the situation with a creditable equability.
Jean Dunbarton was due now at any moment, she having already sent over
her luggage with her maid the short two miles from the Bishop's Palace,
where the girl had dined and slept the night before.

The rest of the Ulland House party were arriving by the next train. As
Miss Levering was understood to be one of those expected it will be seen
that a justified faith in the excellence of the Ulland links had not
made Lady John unmindful of the wisdom of including among 'the
week-enders' a nice assortment of pretty women for the amusement of her
golfers in the off hours.

Of this other young lady swinging her golf club as she came across the
lawn with the men--sole petticoat among them--it could not be pretended
that any hostess, let alone one so worldly-wise as Lady John Ulland,
would look to have the above-hinted high and delicate office performed
by so upright and downright--not to say so bony--a young woman, with
face so like a horse, and the stride of a grenadier. Under her short
leather-bound skirt the great brown-booted feet seemed shamelessly to
court attention--as it were out of malice to catch your eye, while
deliberately they trampled on the tenderest traditions clinging still
about the Weaker Sex.

Lady John held in her hand the top of the jade and silver tea-caddy.
Hermione, as well as her aunt, knew that this top held four teaspoonsful
of tea. Lady John filled it once, filled it twice, and turned the
contents out each time into the gaping pot. Then, absent-mindedly, she
paused, eyeing the approaching party,--that genial silver-haired despot,
her husband, walking with Lord Borrodaile, the gawky girl between them,
except when she paused to practise a drive. The fourth person, a short,
compactly knit man, was lounging along several paces behind, but every
now and then energetically shouting out his share in the conversation.
The ground of Lady John's interest in the group seemed to consist in a
half-mechanical counting of noses. Her eyes came back to the tea-table
and she made a third addition to the jade and silver measure.

'We shall be only six for the first brew,' prompted the girl at her
side.

'Paul Filey is mooning somewhere about the garden.'

'Oh!'

'Why do you say it like that?'

Hermione's eyes rested a moment on the golfer who was bringing up the
rear. He was younger than his rather set figure had at a distance
proclaimed him.

'I was only thinking Dick Farnborough can't abide Paul,' said the girl.

'A typical product of the public school is hardly likely to appreciate
an undisciplined creature with a streak of genius in him like Paul
Filey.'

'Oh, I rather love him myself,' said the girl, lightly, 'only as Sophia
says he does talk rather rot at times.'

With her hand on the tea-urn, releasing a stream of boiling water into
the pot, Lady John glanced over the small thickset angel that poised
himself on one podgy foot upon the lid of the urn.

'Sophia's too free with her tongue. It's a mistake. It frightens people
off.'

'Men, you mean?'

'Especially men.'

'I often think,' said the young woman, 'that men--all except Paul--would
be more shocked at Sophia--if--she wasn't who she is.'

'No doubt,' agreed her aunt. 'Still I sympathize with her parents. I
don't see how they'll ever marry her. She might just as well be Miss
Jones--that girl--for all she makes of herself.'

'Yes; I've often thought so, too,' agreed Hermione, apparently conscious
that the very most was made of _her_.

'She hasn't even been taught to walk.' Lady John was still watching the
girl's approach.

'Yet she looks best out of doors,' said Hermione, firmly.

'Oh, yes! She comes into the drawing-room as if she were crossing a
ploughed field!'

'All the same,' said Hermione, under her breath, 'when she _is_ indoors
I'd rather see her walking than sitting.'

'You mean the way she crosses her legs?'

'Yes.'

'But that, too--it seems like so many other things, a question only of
degree. Nobody objects to seeing a pair of neat ankles crossed--it looks
rather nice and early Victorian. Nowadays lots of girls cross their
knees--and nobody says anything. But Sophia crosses her--well, her
_thighs_.'

And the two women laughed understandingly.

A stranger might imagine that the reason for Lady Sophia's presence in
the party was that she, by common consent, played a capital game of
golf--'for a woman.' That fact, however, was rather against her. For
people who can play the beguiling game, _want_ to play it--and want to
play it not merely now and then out of public spirit to make up a
foursome, but constantly and for pure selfish love of it. Woman may, if
she likes, take it as a compliment to her sex that this proclivity--held
to be wholly natural in a man--is called 'rather unfeminine' in a
woman. But it was a defect like the rest, forgiven the Lady Sophia for
her father's sake. Lord Borrodaile, held to be one of the most
delightful of men, was much in request for parties of this description.
One reason for his daughter's being there was that it glossed the fact
that Lady Borrodaile was not--was, indeed, seldom present, and one may
say never missed, in the houses frequented by her husband.

But as he and his friends not only did not belong to, but looked down
upon, the ultra smart set, where the larger freedoms are practised in
lieu of the lesser decencies, Lord Borrodaile lived his life as far
removed from any touch of scandal and irregularity as the most puritanic
of the bourgeoisie. Part and parcel of his fastidiousness, some
said--others, that from his Eton days he had always been a lazy beggar.
As though to show that he did not shrink from reasonable responsibility
towards his female impedimenta, any inquiry as to the absence of Lady
Borrodaile was met by reference to Sophia. In short, where other
attractive husbands brought a boring wife, Lord Borrodaile brought an
undecorative daughter. While to the onlooker nearly every aspect of this
particular young woman would seem destined to offend a beauty-loving,
critical taste like that of Borrodaile, he was probably served, as other
mortals are, by that philosophy of the senses which brings in time a
deafness and a blindness to the unloveliness that we needs must live
beside. Lord Borrodaile was far too intelligent not to see, too, that
when people had got over Lady Sophia's uncompromising exterior, they
found things in her to admire as well as to stand a little in awe of.
Unlike one another as the Borrodailes were, in one respect they
presented to the world an undivided front. From their point of view,
just as laws existed to keep other people in order, so was 'fashion' an
affair for the middle classes. The Borrodailes might dress as dowdily as
they pleased, might speak as uncompromisingly as they felt inclined.
Were they not Borrodailes of Borrodaile? Though open expression of this
spirit grows less common, they would not have denied that it is still
the prevailing temper of the older aristocracy. And so it has hitherto
been true that among its women you find that sort of freedom which is
the prerogative of those called the highest and of those called the
lowest. It is the women of all the grades between these two extremes who
have dared not to be themselves, who ape the manners, echo the
catchwords, and garb themselves in the elaborate ugliness, devised for
the blind meek millions.

As the Lady Sophia, now a little in advance of her companions, came
stalking towards the steps, out from a little path that wound among the
thick-growing laurels issued Paul Filey. He raised his eyes, and
hurriedly thrust a small book into his pocket. The young lady paused,
but only apparently to pat, or rather to administer an approving cuff
to, the Bedlington terrier lying near the lower step.

'Well,' she said over her shoulder to Filey, 'our side gave a good
account of itself that last round.'

'I was sure it would as soon as my malign influence was removed.'

'Yes; from the moment I took on Dick Farnborough, the situation assumed
a new aspect. You'll _never_ play a good game, you know, if you go
quoting Baudelaire on the links.'

'Poor Paul!' his hostess murmured to her niece, 'I always tremble when I
see him exposed to Sophia's ruthless handling.'

'Yes,' whispered Hermione. 'She says she's sure he thinks of himself as
a prose Shelley; and for some reason that infuriates Sophia.'

With a somewhat forced air of amusement, Mr. Filey was following his
critic up the steps, she still mocking at his 'drives' and the way he
negotiated his bunkers.

Arrived at the top of the little terrace, whose close-shorn turf was
level with the flagged floor of the colonnade, Mr. Filey sought refuge
near Hermione, as the storm-tossed barque, fleeing before the wind, hies
swift to the nearest haven.

Bending over the Bedlington, the Amazon remained on the top step, her
long, rather good figure garbed in stuff which Filey had said was fit
only for horse-blankets, but which was Harris tweed slackly belted by a
broad canvas girdle drawn through a buckle of steel.

'_Will_ you tell me,' he moaned in Hermione's ear, 'why the daughter of
a hundred earls has the manners of a groom, and dresses herself in odds
and ends of the harness room?'

'Sh! Somebody told her once you'd said something of that sort.'

'No!' he said. 'Who?'

'It wasn't I.'

'Of course not. But did she mind? What did she say, eh?'

'She only said, "He got that out of a novel of Miss Broughton's."'

Filey looked a little dashed. 'No! Has Miss Broughton said it, too? Then
there are more of them!' He glanced again at the Amazon. 'Horrible
thought!'

'Don't be so unreasonable. She couldn't play golf in a long skirt and
high heels!'

'Who _wants_ a woman to play golf?'

Hermione gave him his tea with a smile. She knew with an absolute
precision just how perfectly at that moment she herself was presenting
the average man's picture of the ideal type of reposeful womanhood.

As Lord John and the two other men, his companions, came up the steps in
the midst of a discussion--

'If you stop to argue, Mr. Farnborough,' said Lady John, holding out a
cup, 'you won't have time for tea before you catch that train.'

'Oh, thank you!' He hastened to relieve her, while Hermione murmured
regrets that he wasn't staying. 'Lady John didn't ask me,' he confided.
As he saw in Hermione's face a project to intercede for him, he added,
'And now I've promised my mother--we've got a lot of people coming, and
two men short!'

'Two men short! how horrible for her!' She said it half laughing, but
her view of the reality of the dilemma was apparent in her letting the
subject drop.

Farnborough, standing there tea-cup in hand, joined again in the
discussion that was going on about some unnamed politician of the day,
with whose character and destiny the future of England might quite
conceivably be involved.

Before a great while this unnamed person would be succeeding his ailing
and childless brother. There were lamentations in prospect of his too
early translation to the Upper House.

The older men had been speaking of his family, in which the tradition of
public service, generations old, had been revived in the person of this
younger son.

'I have never understood,' Lord John was saying, 'how a man with such
opportunities hasn't done more.'

'A man as able, too,' said Borrodaile, lazily. 'Think of the tribute he
wrung out of Gladstone at the very beginning of his career. Whatever we
may think of the old fox, Gladstone had an eye for men.'

'Be _quiet_, will you!' Lady Sophia administered a little whack to the
Bedlington. 'Sh! Joey! don't you hear they're talking about our cousin?'

'Who?' said Filey, bending over the lady with a peace-offering of cake.

'Why, Geoffrey Stonor,' answered Sophia.

'_Is_ it Stonor they mean?'

'Well, of course.'

'How do you know?' demanded Filey, in the pause.

'Oh, wherever there are two or three gathered together talking politics
and "the coming man"--who has such a frightful lot in him that very
little ever comes out--it's sure to be Geoffrey Stonor they mean, isn't
it, Joey?'

'Perhaps,' said her father, dryly, 'you'll just mention that to him at
dinner to-night.'

'_What!_' said Farnborough, with a keen look in his eyes. 'You don't
mean he's coming here!'

Sophia, too, had looked round at her host with frank interest.

'Comin' to play golf?'

'Well, he mayn't get here in time for a round to-night, but we're rather
expecting him by this four-thirty.'

'What fun!' Lady Sophia's long face had brightened.

'May I stay over till the next train?' Farnborough was whispering to
Lady John as he went round to her on the pretext of more cream. 'Thank
you--then I won't go till the six forty-two.'

'I didn't know,' Lady Sophia was observing in her somewhat crude way,
'that you knew Geoffrey as well as all that.'

'We don't,' said Lord John. 'He's been saying for years he wanted to
come down and try our links, but it's by a fluke that he's coming, after
all.'

'He never comes to see _us_. He's far too busy, ain't he, Joey, even if
we can't see that he accomplishes much?'

'Give him time and you'll see!' said Farnborough, with a wag of his
head.

'Yes,' said Lord John, 'he's still a young man. Barely forty.'

'Barely forty! _They_ believe in prolonging their youth, don't they?'
said Lady Sophia to no one in particular, and with her mouth rather more
full of cake than custom prescribes. 'Good thing it isn't us, ain't it,
Joey?'

'For a politician forty _is_ young,' said Farnborough.

'Oh, don't I know it!' she retorted. 'I was reading the life of Randolph
Churchill the other day, and I came across a paragraph of filial
admiration about the hold Lord Randolph had contrived to get so early in
life over the House of Commons. It occurred to me to wonder just how
much of a boy Lord Randolph was at the time. I was going to count up
when I was saved the trouble by coming to a sentence that said he was
then "an unproved stripling of thirty-two." You shouldn't laugh. It
wasn't meant sarcastic.'

'Unless you're leader of the Opposition, I suppose it's not very easy to
do much while your party's out of power,' hazarded Lady John, 'is it?'

'One of the most interesting things about our coming back will be to
watch Stonor,' said Farnborough.

'After all, they said he did very well with his Under Secretaryship
under the last Government, didn't they?' Again Lady John appealed to the
two elder men.

'Oh, yes,' said Borrodaile. 'Oh, yes.'

'And the way'--Farnborough made up for any lack of enthusiasm--'the way
he handled that Balkan question!'

'All that was pure routine,' Lord John waved it aside. 'But if Stonor
had ever looked upon politics as more than a game, he'd have been a
power long before this.'

'Ah,' said Borrodaile, slowly, 'you go as far as that? I doubt myself if
he has enough of the demagogue in him.'

'But that's just why. The English people are not like the Americans or
the French. The English have a natural distrust of the demagogue. I tell
you if Stonor once believed in anything with might and main, he'd be a
leader of men.'

'Here he is now.'

Farnborough was the first to distinguish the sound of carriage wheels
behind the shrubberies. The others looked up and listened. Yes, the
crunch of gravel. The wall of laurel was too thick to give any glimpse
from this side of the drive that wound round to the main entrance. But
some animating vision nevertheless seemed miraculously to have
penetrated the dense green wall, to the obvious enlivenment of the
company.

'It's rather exciting seeing him at close quarters,' Hermione said to
Filey.

'Yes! He's the only politician I can get up any real enthusiasm for.
He's so many-sided. I saw him yesterday at a Bond Street show looking at
caricatures of himself and all his dearest friends.'

'Really. How did he take the sacrilege?'

'Oh, he was immensely amused at the fellow's impudence. You see, Stonor
could understand the art of the thing as well as the fun--the fierce
economy of line----'

Nobody listened. There were other attempts at conversation, mere decent
pretence at not being absorbed in watching for the appearance of
Geoffrey Stonor.




CHAPTER VI


There was the faint sound of a distant door's opening, and there was a
glimpse of the old butler. But before he could reach the French window
with his announcement, his own colourless presence was masked, wiped
out--not as the company had expected by the apparition of a man, but by
a tall, lightly-moving young woman with golden-brown eyes, and wearing a
golden-brown gown that had touches of wallflower red and gold on the
short jacket. There were only wallflowers in the small leaf-green toque,
and except for the sable boa in her hand (which so suddenly it was too
warm to wear) no single thing about her could at all adequately account
for the air of what, for lack of a better term, may be called accessory
elegance that pervaded the golden-brown vision, taking the low sunlight
on her face and smiling as she stepped through the window.

It was no small tribute to the lady had she but known it, that her
coming was not received nor even felt as an anti-climax.

As she came forward, all about her rose a significant Babel: 'Here's
Miss Levering!' 'It's Vida!' 'Oh, how do you _do_!'--the frou-frou of
swishing skirts, the scrape of chairs pushed back over stone flags, and
the greeting of the host and hostess, cordial to the point of
affection--the various handshakings, the discreet winding through the
groups of a footman with a fresh teapot, the Bedlington's first attack
of barking merged in tail-wagging upon pleased recognition of a friend;
and a final settling down again about the tea-table with the air full of
scraps of talk and unfinished questions.

'You didn't see anything of my brother and his wife?' asked Lord
Borrodaile.

'Oh, yes,' his host suddenly remembered. 'I thought the Freddys were
coming by that four-thirty as well as----'

'No--nobody but me.' She threw her many-tailed boa on the back of the
chair that Paul Filey had drawn up for her between the hostess and the
place where Borrodaile had been sitting.

'There are two more good trains before dinner----' began Lord John.

'Oh, didn't I tell you,' said his wife, as she gave the cup just filled
for the new-comer into the nearest of the outstretched hands--'didn't I
tell you I had a note from Mrs. Freddy by the afternoon post? They
aren't coming.'

Out of a little chorus of regret, came Borrodaile's slightly mocking,
'Anything wrong with the precious children?'

'She didn't mention the children--nor much of anything else--just a
hurried line.'

'The children were as merry as grigs yesterday,' said Vida, looking at
their uncle across the table. 'I went on to the Freddys' after the Royal
Academy. No!' she put her cup down suddenly. 'Nobody is to ask me how I
like my own picture! The Tunbridge children----'

'That thing Hoyle has done of you,' said Lord Borrodaile, deliberately,
'is a very brilliant and a very misleading performance.'

'Thank you.'

Filey and Lord John, in spite of her interdiction, were pursuing the
subject of the much-discussed portrait.

'It certainly is one aspect of you----'

'Don't you think his Velasquez-like use of black and white----'

'The tiny Tunbridges, as I was saying,' she went on imperturbably, 'were
having a teafight when I got there. I say "fight" advisedly.'

'Then I'll warrant,' said their uncle, 'that Sara was the aggressor.'

'She was.'

'You saw Mrs. Freddy?' asked Lady John, with an interest half amused,
half cynical, in her eyes.

'For a moment.'

'She doesn't confess it, I suppose,' the hostess went on, 'but I imagine
she is rather perturbed;' and Lady John glanced at Borrodaile with her
good-humoured, worldly-wise smile.

'Poor Mrs. Freddy!' said Vida. 'You see, she's taken it all quite
seriously--this Suffrage nonsense.'

'Yes;' Mrs. Freddy's brother-in-law had met Lady John's look with the
same significant smile as that lady's own--'Yes, she's naturally feeling
rather crestfallen--perhaps she'll _see_ now!'

'Mrs. Freddy crestfallen, what about?' said Farnborough. But he was much
preoccupied at that moment in supplying Lady Sophia with bits of toast
the exact size for balancing on the Bedlington's nose. For the benefit
of his end of the table Paul Filey had begun to describe the new one-man
show of caricatures of famous people just opened in Bond Street. The
'mordant genius,' as he called it, of this new man--an American
Jew--offered an irresistible opportunity for phrase-making. And still on
the other side of the tea urn the Ullands were discussing with
Borrodaile and Miss Levering the absent lady whose 'case' was obviously
a matter of concern to her friends.

'Well, let us hope,' Lord John was saying as sternly as his urbanity
permitted--'let us hope this exhibition in the House will be a lesson to
her.'

'_She_ wasn't concerned in it!' Vida quickly defended her.

'Nevertheless we are all hoping,' said Lady John, 'that it has come just
in time to prevent her from going over the edge.'

'Over the edge!' Farnborough pricked up his ears at last in good
earnest, feeling that the conversation on the other side had grown too
interesting for him to be out of it any longer. 'Over what edge?'

'The edge of the Woman Suffrage precipice,' said Lady John.

'You call it a precipice?' Vida Levering raised her dark brows in a
little smile.

'Don't you?' demanded her hostess.

'I should say mud-puddle.'

'From the point of view of the artist'--Paul Filey had begun laying down
some new law, but turning an abrupt corner, he followed the wandering
attention of his audience--'from the point of view of the artist,' he
repeated, 'it would be interesting to know what the phenomenon is, that
Lady John took for a precipice and that Miss Levering says is a
mud-puddle.'

'Oh,' said Lord John, thinking it well to generalize and spare Mrs.
Freddy further rending, 'we've been talking about this public
demonstration of the unfitness of women for public affairs.'

'Give me some more toast dice!' Sophia said to Farnborough. 'You haven't
seen Joey's new accomplishment. They're only discussing that idiotic
scene the women made the other night.'

'Oh, in the gallery of the House of Commons?'

'Yes, wasn't it disgustin'?' said Paul Filey, facing about suddenly with
an air of cheerful surprise at having at last hit on something that he
and Lady Sophia could heartily agree about.

'Perfectly revolting!' said Hermione Heriot, not to be out of it. For it
is well known that, next to a great enthusiasm shared, nothing so draws
human creatures together as a good bout of cursing in common. So with
emphasis Miss Heriot repeated, 'Perfectly revolting!'

Her reward was to see Paul turn away from Sophia and say, in a tone
whose fervour might be called marked--

'I'm glad to hear you say so!'

She consolidated her position by asking sweetly, 'Does it need saying?'

'Not by people like you. But it _does_ need saying when it comes to
people we know----'

'Like Mrs. Freddy. Yes.'

That unfortunate little lady seemed to be 'getting it' on all sides.
Even her brother-in-law, who was known to be in reality a great ally of
hers--even Lord Borrodaile was chuckling as though at some reflection
distinctly diverting.

'Poor Laura! She was being unmercifully chaffed about it last night.'

'I don't myself consider it any longer a subject for chaff,' said Lord
John.

'No,' agreed his wife; '_I_ felt that before this last outbreak. At the
time of the first disturbance--where was it?--in some town in the North
several weeks ago----'

'Yes,' said Vida Levering; 'I almost think that was even worse!'

'Conceive the sublime impertinence,' said Lady John, 'of an ignorant
little factory girl presuming to stand up in public and interrupt a
speech by a minister of the Crown!'

'I don't know what we're coming to, I'm sure!' said Borrodaile, with a
detached air.

'Oh, _that_ girl--beyond a doubt,' said his host, with conviction--'that
girl was touched.'

'Oh, beyond a doubt!' echoed Mr. Farnborough.

'There's something about this particular form of feminine folly----'
began Lord John.

But he wasn't listened to--for several people were talking at once.

After receiving a few preliminary kicks, the subject had fallen, as a
football might, plump into the very midst of a group of school-boys. Its
sudden presence there stirred even the sluggish to unwonted feats. Every
one must have his kick at this Suffrage Ball, and manners were for the
nonce in abeyance.

In the midst of an obscuring dust of discussion, floated fragments of
condemnation: 'Sexless creatures!' 'The Shrieking Sisterhood!' etc., in
which the kindest phrase was Lord John's repeated, 'Touched, you know,'
as he tapped his forehead--'not really responsible, poor wretches.
Touched.'

'Still, everybody doesn't know that. It must give men a quite horrid
idea of women,' said Hermione, delicately.

'No'--Lord Borrodaile spoke with a wise forbearance--'we don't confound
a handful of half-insane females with the whole sex.'

Dick Farnborough was in the middle of a spirited account of that earlier
outbreak in the North--

'She was yelling like a Red Indian, and the policeman carried her out
scratching and spitting----'

'Ugh!' Hermione exchanged looks of horror with Paul Filey.

'Oh, yes,' said Lady John, with disgust, 'we saw all that in the
papers.'

Miss Levering, too, had turned her face away--not as Hermione did, to
summon a witness to her detestation, but rather as one avoiding the eyes
of the men.

'You see,' said Farnborough, with gusto, 'there's something about women's
clothes--_especially_ their hats, you know--they--well, they ain't built
for battle.'

'They ought to wear deer-stalkers,' was Lady Sophia's contribution to
the New Movement.

'It is quite true,' Lady John agreed, 'that a woman in a scrimmage can
never be a heroic figure.'

'No, that's just it,' said Farnborough. 'She's just funny, don't you
know!'

'I don't agree with you about the fun,' Borrodaile objected. 'That's why
I'm glad they've had their lesson. I should say there was almost nothing
more degrading than this public spectacle of----' Borrodaile lifted his
high shoulders higher still, with an effect of intense discomfort. 'It
never but once came my way that I remember, but I'm free to own,' he
said, 'there's nothing that shakes my nerves like seeing a woman
struggling and kicking in a policeman's arms.'

But Farnborough was not to be dissuaded from seeing humour in the
situation.

'They say they swept up a peck of hairpins after the battle!'

As though she had had as much of the subject as she could very well
stand, Miss Levering leaned sideways, put an arm behind her, and took
possession of her boa.

'They're just ending the first act of _Siegfried_. How glad I am to be
in your garden instead of Covent Garden!'

Ordinarily there would have been a movement to take the appreciative
guest for a stroll.

Perhaps it was only chance, or the enervating heat, that kept the
company in their chairs listening to Farnborough--

'The cattiest one of the two, there she stood like this, her clothes
half torn off, her hair down her back, her face the colour of a lobster
and the crowd jeering at her----'

'I don't see how you could stand and look on at such a hideous scene,'
said Miss Levering.

'Oh--I--I didn't! I'm only telling you how Wilkinson described it. He
said----'

'How did Major Wilkinson happen to be there?' asked Lady John.

'He'd motored over from Headquarters to move a vote of thanks to the
chairman. He said he'd seen some revolting things in his time, but the
scrimmage of the stewards and the police with those women----!'
Farnborough ended with an expressive gesture.

'If it was as horrible as that for Major Wilkinson to look on at--what
must it have been for those girls?' It was Miss Levering speaking. She
seemed to have abandoned the hope of being taken for a stroll, and was
leaning forward, chin in hand, looking at the fringe of the teacloth.

Richard Farnborough glanced at her as if he resented the note of
wondering pity in the low tone.

'It's never so bad for the lunatic,' he said, 'as for the sane people
looking on.'

'Oh, I don't suppose _they_ mind,' said Hermione--'women like _that_.'

'It's flattery to call them women. They're sexless monstrosities,' said
Paul Filey.

'You know some of them?' Vida raised her head.

'_I?_' Filey's face was nothing less than aghast at the mere suggestion.

'But you've seen them----?'

'Heaven forbid!'

'But I suppose you've gone and listened to them haranguing the crowds.'

'Now _do_ I look like a person who----'

'Well, you see we're all so certain they're such abominations,' said
Vida, 'I thought maybe some of us knew something about them.'

Dick Farnborough was heard saying to Lord John in a tone of cheerful
vigour--

'Locking up is too good for 'em. I'd give 'em a good thrashin'.'

'Spirited fellow!' said Miss Levering, promptly, with an accent that
brought down a laugh on the young gentleman's head.

He joined in it, but with a _naif_ uneasiness. What's the matter with
the woman?--his vaguely bewildered face seemed to inquire. After all,
I'm only agreeing with her.

'Few of us have time, I imagine,' said Filey, 'to go and listen to their
ravings.'

As Filey was quite the idlest of men, without the preoccupation of being
a tolerable sportsman or even a player of games, Miss Levering's little
laugh was echoed by others beside Lady Sophia.

'At all events,' said Vida to Lord Borrodaile, as she stood up, and he
drew her chair out of her way, 'even if we don't know much about these
women, we've spent a happy hour denouncing them.'

'Who's going to have a short round before sundown?' said Lady Sophia,
getting up briskly. '_You_, of course, Mr. Filey. Or are you too
"busy"?'

'Say too thirsty. May I?' He carried his cup round to Lady John, not
seeming to see Hermione's hospitable hand held out for it.

In the general shuffle Farnborough found himself carried off by Sophia
and Lord John.

'Who is our fourth?' said Lady Sophia, suddenly.

'Oh, Borrodaile!' Lord John stopped halfway across the lawn and called
back, 'aren't you coming?'

'It's not a bit of use,' said Sophia. 'You'll see. He's safe to sit
there and talk to Miss Levering till the dressing-bell rings.'

'Isn't she a _nice_ creature!' said Lord John. 'I can't think how a
woman like that hasn't got some nice fella to marry her!'

       *       *       *       *       *

'Would you like to see my yellow garden, Vida?' Lady John asked. 'It's
rather glorious at this moment.'

Obvious from the quick lifting of the eyes that the guest was on the
point of welcoming the proposal, had Filey not swallowed his belated cup
of tea with surprising quickness after saying, 'What's a yellow garden?'
in the unmistakable tone of one bent upon enlarging his experience. Lady
John, with all her antennae out, lost no time in saying to Vida--

'Perhaps you're a little tired. Hermione, you show Mr. Filey the garden.
And maybe, Lord Borrodaile would like to see it, too.'

Although the last-named failed to share the enthusiasm expected in a
gardener, he pulled his long, slackly-put-together figure out of the
chair and joined the young people.

When they were out of earshot, 'What's the matter?' asked Lady John.

'Matter?'

'Yes, what did poor Paul say to make you fall upon him like that?'

'I didn't "fall upon" him, did I?'

'Well, yes, I rather thought you did.'

'Oh, I suppose I--perhaps it did jar on me, just a little, to hear a
cocksure boy----'

'He's not a boy. Paul is over thirty.'

'I was thinking of Dick Farnborough, too--talking about women like that,
before women.'

'Oh, all they meant was----'

'Yes, I know. Of course we _all_ know they aren't accustomed to treating
our sex in general with overmuch respect when there are only men
present--but--do you think it's quite decent that they should be so free
with their contempt of women before us?'

'But, my dear Vida! _That_ sort of woman! Haven't they deserved it?'

'That's just what nobody seems to know. I've sat and listened to
conversations like the one at tea for a week now, and I've said as much
against those women as anybody. Only to-day, somehow, when I heard that
boy--yes, I was conscious I didn't like it.'

'You're behaving exactly as Dr. Johnson did about Garrick. You won't
allow any one to abuse those women but yourself.'

Lady John cleared the whole trivial business away with a laugh.

'Now, be nice to Paul. He's dying to talk to you about his book. Let us
go and join them in the garden. See if you can stand before my yellow
blaze and not feel melted.'

The elder woman and the younger went down the terrace through a little
copse to her ladyship's own area of experimentation. A gate of old
Florentine scrolled iron opened suddenly upon a blaze of yellow in all
the shades from the orange velvet of the wallflower through the shaded
saffron of azalias and a dozen tints of tulip to the palest primrose and
jonquil.

The others were walking round the enclosing grass paths that served as
broad green border, and Filey, who had been in all sorts of queer
places, said the yellow garden made him think of a Mexican serape--'one
of those silk scarves, you know--native weaving made out of the
pineapple fibre.'

But Vida only said, 'Yes. It's a good scheme of colour.'

She sat on the rustic seat while Lady John explained to Lord Borrodaile,
whose gardens were renowned, how she and Simonson treated this and that
plant to get so fine a result. Filey had lost no time in finding a place
for himself by Miss Levering, while Hermione trailed dutifully round the
garden with the others. Occasionally she looked over her shoulder at the
two on the seat by the sunken wall--Vida leaning back in the corner
motionless, absolutely inexpressive; Filey's eager face bent forward. He
was moving his hands in a way he had learned abroad.

'You were rather annoyed with me,' he was saying. 'I saw that.'

The lady did not deny the imputation.

'But you oughtn't to be. Because you see it's only because my ideal of
woman is'--again that motion of the hands--'_what_ it is, that when I
see her stepping down from her pedestal I----' the hands indicated
consternation, followed hard by cataclysmic ruin. 'Of course, lots of
men don't care. I _do_. I care enormously, and so you must forgive me.
Won't you?' He bent nearer.

'Oh, _I've_ nothing to forgive.'

'I know without your telling me, I feel instinctively, _you_ more than
most people--you'd simply loathe the sort of thing we were talking about
at tea--women yelling and fighting men----'

'Yes--yes, don't go all over that.'

'No, of course I won't,' he said soothingly. 'I can feel it to my very
spine, how you shrink from such horrors.'

Miss Levering, raising her eyes suddenly, caught the look Hermione cast
backward as Lady John halted her party a moment near the pansy-strip in
the gorgeous yellow carpet spread out before them.

'Don't you want to sit down?' Vida called out to the girl, drawing aside
her gown.

'What?' said Hermione, though she had heard quite well. Slowly she
retraced her steps down the grass path as if to have the words repeated.

But if Miss Levering's idea had been to change the conversation, she was
disappointed. There was nothing Paul Filey liked better than an
audience, and he had already the impression that Miss Heriot was what he
would have scorned to call anything but 'simpatica.'

'I'm sure you've shown the new garden to dozens already,' Miss Levering
said to the niece of the house. 'Sit down and confess you've had enough
of it!'

'Oh, I don't think,' began Hermione, suavely, 'that one ever gets too
much of a thing like that!'

'There! I'm glad to hear you say so. How can we have too much beauty!'
exclaimed Filey, receiving the new occupant of the seat as a soul worthy
of high fellowship. Then he leaned across Miss Heriot and said to the
lady in the corner, 'I'm making that the theme of my book.'

'Oh, I heard you were writing something.'

'Yes, a sort of plea for the aesthetic basis of society! It's the only
cure for the horrors of modern civilization--for the very thing we were
talking about at tea! What is it but a loss of the sense of beauty
that's to blame?' Elbows on knees, he leaned so far forward that he
could see both faces, and yet his own betrayed the eye turned
inward--the face of the one who quotes. The ladies knew that he was
obliging them with a memorized extract from 'A Plea for the AEsthetic
Basis.' 'Nothing worse can happen to the world than loss of its sense of
Beauty. Men, high and low alike, cling to it still as incarnated in
women.' (Hermione crossed her pointed toes and lowered her long
eyelashes.) 'We have made Woman the object of our deepest adoration! We
have set her high on a throne of gold. We have searched through the
world for jewels to crown her. We have built millions of temples to our
ideal of womanhood and called them homes. We have fought and wrought and
sung for her--and all we ask in return is that she should tend the
sacred fire, so that the light of Beauty might not die out of the
world.' He was not ill-pleased with his period. 'But women'--he leaned
back, and illustrated with the pliant white hands that were ornamented
with outlandish rings--'women are not content with their high and holy
office.'

'_Some_ women,' amended Hermione, softly.

'There are more and more every day who are not content,' he said
sternly; then, for an instant unbending and craning a little forward,
'Of course I don't mean you--_you_ are exceptions--but of women in the
mass! Look at them! They force their way into men's work, they crowd
into the universities--yes, yes' (in vain Hermione tried to reassure him
by 'exceptions')--'Beauty is nothing to them! They fling aside their
delicate, provocative draperies, they cast off their scented sandals.
They pull on brown boots and bicycling skirts! They put man's yoke of
hard linen round their ivory throats, and they scramble off their
jewelled thrones to mount the rostrum and the omnibus!'

'Why? _Why_ do they?' Vida demanded, laughing. 'Nobody ever tells me
why. I can't believe they're as unselfish as _you_ make out.'

'I!'

'You ought to admire them if they voluntarily give up all those
beautiful things--knowing beforehand they'll only win men's scorn. For
you've always warned them!'

He didn't even hear. 'Ah, Ladies, Ladies!' half laughing, but really
very much in earnest, he apostrophized the peccant sex, 'I should like
to ask, are we men to look upon our homes as dusty din-filled camps on
the field of battle, or as holy temples of Peace? Ah!' He leaned back in
his corner, stretched out his long legs, and thrust his restless hands
in his pockets. 'If they knew!'

'Women?' asked Hermione, with the air of one painstakingly brushing up
crumbs of wisdom.

Paul Filey nodded.

'Knew----?'

'They would see that in the ugly scramble they had let fall their
crowns! If they only knew,' he repeated, 'they would go back to their
thrones, and, with the sceptre of beauty in one hand and the orb of
purity in the other, they would teach men to worship them again.'

'And then?' said Miss Levering.

'Then? Why, men will fall on their knees before them.' As Miss Levering
made no rejoinder, 'What greater victory do women want?' he demanded.

For the first time Miss Levering bent her head forward slightly as
though to see how far he was conscious of the fatuity of his climax. But
his flushed face showed a childlike good faith.

'Eh? Will any one tell me what they _want_?'

'Since you need to ask,' said the gently smiling woman in the corner,
'perhaps there's more need to show than I'd quite realized.'

'I don't think you quite followed,' he began, with an air of
forbearance. 'What I mean is----'

Miss Levering jumped up. 'Lord Borrodaile!' He was standing at the
little iron gate waiting for his hostess, who had stopped to speak to
one of the gardeners. 'Wait a moment!' Vida called, and went swiftly
down the grass path. He had turned and was advancing to meet her. 'No,
come away,' she said under her breath, 'come away quickly'--(safe on the
other side of the gate)--'and talk to me! Tell me about old,
half-forgotten pictures or about young rose trees.'

'Is something the matter?'

'I'm ruffled.'

'Who has ruffled you?' His tone was as serene as it was sympathetic.

'Several people.'

'Why, I thought you were never ruffled.'

'I'm not, often.'

They turned down into a little green aisle between two dense thickets of
rhododendrons.

'It's lucky you are here,' she said irrelevantly.

He glanced at her face.

'It's not luck. It's foresight.'

'Oh, you arranged it? Well, I'm glad.'

'So am I,' he answered quietly. 'We get on rather well together,' he
added, after a moment.

She nodded half absently. 'I feel as if I'd known you for years instead
of for months,' she said.

'Yes, I have rather that feeling, too. Except that I'm always a little
nervous when I meet you again after an interval.'

'Nervous,' she frowned. 'Why nervous?'

'I'm always afraid you'll have some news for me.'

'What news?'

'Oh, the usual thing. That a pleasant friendship is going to be
interrupted if not broken by some one's carrying you off. It would be a
pity, you know.'

'Then you don't agree with Lord John.'

'Oh, I suppose you _ought_ to marry,' he said, with smiling impatience,
'and I'm very sure you will! But I shan't like it'--he wound up with an
odd little laugh--'and neither will you.'

'It's an experiment I shall never try.'

He smiled, but as he glanced at her he grew grave. 'I've heard more than
one young woman say that, but you look as if it might really be so.'

'It is so.'

He waited, and then, switching at the wild hyacinths with his stick--

'Of course,' he said, 'I have no right to suppose you are going to give
me your reasons.'

'No. That's why I shall never even consider marrying--so that I shall
not have to set out my reasons.'

He had never seen that look in her face before. He made an effort to put
aside the trouble of it, saying almost lightly--

'I often wonder why people can't be happy as they are!'

'They think of the future, I suppose.'

'There's no such thing as the future.'

'You can't say there's no such thing as growth. If it's only a garden,
it's natural to like to see life unfolding--that's the future.'

'Yes, in spite of resolutions, you'll be trying the great experiment.'
He said it wearily.

'Why should you mind so?' she asked curiously; 'you are not in love with
me.'

'How do you know?'

'Because you give me such a sense of rest.'

'Thank you.' He caught himself up. 'Or perhaps I should thank my grey
hair.'

'Grey hair doesn't bring the thing I mean. I've sometimes wished it did.
But our friendship is an uncommonly peaceful one, don't you think?'

'Yes; I think it is,' he said. 'All the same, you know there's a touch
of magic in it.' But, as though to condone the confession, 'You haven't
told me why you were ruffled.'

'It's nothing. I dare say I was a little tired.'

They had come out into the park. 'I hurried so to catch the train. My
sister's new coachman is stupid about finding short cuts in London, and
we got blocked by a procession--a horrible sort of demonstration, you
know.'

'Oh, the unemployed.'

'Yes. And I got so tired of leaning out of the window and shouting
directions that I left the maid and the luggage to come later. I got out
of the brougham and ran through a slum, or I'd have lost my train. I
nearly lost it anyway, because I saw a queer picture that made me stop.'
She stopped again at the mere memory of it.

'In a second-hand shop?'

He turned his pointed face to her, and the grey-green eyes wore a gleam
of interest that few things could arouse in their cool depths.

'No, not in a shop.' She stopped and leaned against a tree. 'In the
street. It was a middle-aged workman. When I caught sight of his back
and saw his worn clothes--the coat went up in the middle, and had that
despairing sag on both sides--it crossed my mind, here's another of
those miserable, unemployed wastrels obstructing my way! Then he looked
round and I saw--solid content in his face!' She stopped a moment.

'So he _wasn't_ one of the----'

'Well, I wondered. I couldn't see at first what it was he had looked
round at. Then I noticed he had a rope in his hand, and was dragging
something. As the people who had been between us hurried on I saw--I saw
a child, two or three years old, in a flapping, pink sun-bonnet. He was
sitting astride a toy horse. The horse was clumsily made, and had lost
its tail. But it had its head still, and the board it was mounted on had
fat, wooden rollers. The horse was only about that long, and so near the
ground that, for all his advantage in the matter of rollers, still the
little rider's feet touched the pavement. They even trailed and lurched,
as the horse went on, in that funny, spasmodic gait. The child had to
half walk, or, rather, make the motions--you know, without actually
bearing any of even his own weight. The slack-shouldered man did it all.
I crossed to the other side of the street, and stood and watched them
till, as I say, I nearly lost my train. The dingy workman, smoking
imperturbably, dragging the grotesque, almost hidden, horse--the
delighted child in the flapping sun-bonnet--the crisis when they came to
the crossing! The man turned and called out something. The child
declined to budge. I wondered what would happen. So did the man. He
waited a moment, and puffed smoke and considered. The baby dug his heels
in the pavement and shouted. Then I saw the man carefully tilt the toy
horse up by the rope. I stood and watched the successful surmounting of
the obstacle, and the triumphant progress as before--sun-bonnet
flapping, smoke curling. Of course the man was content! He had lost the
battle. You saw that in his lined face. What did it matter? _He held the
future by a string._'

Lord Borrodaile lifted his eyes and looked at her. Without a word the
two walked on.

The first to speak after the silence was the man. He pointed out a
curious effect of the light, and reminded her who had painted it best--

'Corot could do these things!'--and he flung a stone in passing at the
New Impressionists.

At the Lodge Gate they found Lady John with Filey and Hermione.

'We thought if we walked this way we might meet Jean and her bodyguard.
But I mustn't go any further.' Lady John consulted her watch. 'The rest
of you can take your time, but I have to go and receive my other guest.'

Filey and Hermione were still at the gate. The girl had caught sight of
Farnborough being driven by the park road to the station.

'Oh, I do believe it's the new mare they're trying in the dogcart,' said
Hermione. 'Let's wait and see her go by.'

Borrodaile and his companion kept at Lady John's side.

'I'm glad,' said Vida, 'that I shall at last make acquaintance with your
Jean.'

'Yes; it's odd your never having met, especially as she knows your
cousins at Bishopsmead so well.'

'I've been so little in England----'

'Yes, I know. A great business it is,' Lady John explained to Lord
Borrodaile, 'each time to get that crusty old Covenanter, Jean's
grandfather, to allow her to stay at Bishopsmead. So it's the sadder for
them to have her visit cut short.'

'Why is it cut short?' he asked.

'Because the hostess took to her bed yesterday with a chill, and her
temperature was a hundred and one this afternoon.'

'Really?' said Miss Levering. 'I hadn't heard----'

'She is rather bad, I'm afraid. We are taking over another of her
guests. Of course you know him--Geoffrey Stonor.'

'Taking him over?' Miss Levering repeated.

'Yes; he was originally going to Bishopsmead this week-end, but as he's
been promising for ages to come here, it's been arranged that we should
take him off their hands. Of course we're delighted.'

Miss Levering walked on, between her two companions, looking straight in
front of her. As Lady John, with a glance at her watch, quickened the
pace--

'I'm rather unhappy at what you tell me about my cousin,' said Vida.
'She's a delicate creature.' Then, as though acting on a sudden impulse,
Vida paused. 'You mustn't mind, Lady John, but I shall have to go to
her. Can I have a trap of some sort to take me over?'

She put aside the objections with a gentle but unmistakable decision
that made Lady John say--

'I'm sure I've alarmed you more than there was the least need for. But
the carriage shall wait and bring you back just as soon as you've
satisfied yourself.'

'I can't tell, of course, till I've seen Mary. But may my maid be told
not to unpack----'

'Not unpack!'

'In case I have to send for my things.'

'My _dear_!' Lady John stopped short for very vexation. '_Don't_ desert
us! I've been so congratulating myself on having you, since I knew
Geoffrey Stonor was coming.' Again she glanced nervously at her watch.
'He is due in ten minutes! John won't like it if I'm not there.'

As she was about to hurry on, the other slackened pace. She seemed to be
revolving some further plan.

'Why shouldn't'--she turned suddenly--'why shouldn't the dogcart take me
on after dropping Mr. Farnborough at the station? Yes, that will be
simplest. Mr. Farnborough!' she waved to him as the cart came in sight,
'Wait! Good-bye! Forgive my rushing off, won't you?' she called back
over her shoulder, and then with that swift, light step of hers, she
covered by a short cut the little distance that lay between her and the
lodge gate.

'I wish I'd held my tongue,' said Lady John almost angrily as she
hastened in the opposite direction. Already some sense seemed to reach
her of the hopelessness of expecting Vida's return.

'I didn't _dream_ she cared so much for that dull cousin of hers!'

'Do you think she really does?' said Borrodaile, dryly.




CHAPTER VII


About Vida's little enterprise on a certain Sunday a few weeks later was
an air of elaborate mystery. Yet the expedition was no further than to
Trafalgar Square. It was there that those women, the so-called
'Suffragettes,' in the intervals of making worse public disturbances,
were rumoured to be holding open-air meetings--a circumstance distinctly
fortunate for any one who wanted to 'see what they were like,' and who
was yet unwilling to commit herself by doing anything so eccentric as
publicly to seek admission under any roof known to show hospitality to
'such goings on.' In those days, only a year ago, and yet already such
ancient history that the earlier pages are forgotten and scarce credible
if recalled, it took courage to walk past the knots of facetious
loafers, and the unblushing Suffragette poster, into the hall where the
meetings were held. Deliberately to sit down among odd, misguided
persons in rows, to listen to, and by so much to lend public countenance
to 'women of that sort'--the sort that not only wanted to vote (quaint
creatures!), but were not content with merely wanting to--for the
average conventional woman to venture upon a step so compromising, to
risk seeming for a moment to take these crazy brawlers seriously, was to
lay herself open to 'the comic laugh'--most dreaded of all the weapons
in the social armoury. But it was something wholly different to set out
for a Sunday Afternoon Concert, or upon some normal and recognized
philanthropic errand, and on the way find one's self arrested for a few
minutes by seeing a crowd gathered in a public square. Yet it had not
been easy to screw Mrs. Fox-Moore up to thinking even this non-committal
measure a possible one to pursue. 'What would anybody think,' she had
asked Vida, 'to see them lending even the casual support of a presence
(however ironic) to so reprehensible a spectacle!' Had it not been for
very faith in the eccentricity of the proceeding--one wildly unlikely to
be adopted, Mrs. Fox-Moore felt, by any one else of 'their kind'--she
would never have consented to be drawn into Vida's absurd project.

Of course it was absolutely essential to disguise the object of the
outing from Mr. Fox-Moore. Not merely because with the full weight of
his authority he would most assuredly have forbidden it, but because of
a nervous prefiguring on his wife's part of the particular things he
would say, and the particular way he would look in setting his
extinguisher on the enterprise.

Vida, from the first, had never explained or excused herself to him, so
that when he asked at luncheon what she was going to do with this fine
Sunday afternoon, she had simply smiled, and said, 'Oh, I have a tryst
to keep.'

It was her sister who added anxiously, 'Is Wood leading now at the
Queen's Hall Concerts?' And so, without actually committing herself to a
lie, gave the impression that music was to be their quest.

An hour later, while the old man was nursing his gout by the library
window, he saw the ladies getting into a hansom. In spite of the
inconvenience to his afflicted member he got up and opened the window.

'Don't tell me you're doing anything so rational--you two--as going to a
concert.'

'Why do you say that? You know I never like to take the horses out on
Sunday----'

'Rubbish! You think a dashing, irresponsible hansom is more in keeping
with the Factory Girls' Club or some giddy Whitechapel frivolity!'

Mrs. Fox-Moore gave her sister a look of miserable apprehension; but the
younger woman laughed and waved a hand. She knew that, even more than
the hansom, their 'get up' had given them away. It must be confessed she
had felt quite as strongly as her sister that it wouldn't do to be
recognized at a Suffragette meeting. Even as a nameless 'fine lady'
standing out from a mob of the dowdy and the dirty, to be stared at by
eyes however undiscerning, under circumstances so questionable, would be
distinctly distasteful.

So, reversing the order of Nature, the butterfly had retired into a
'grubby' state. In other words, Vida had put on the plainest of her
discarded mourning-gowns. From a small Tuscan straw travelling-toque,
the new maid, greatly wondering at such instructions, had extracted an
old paste buckle and some violets, leaving it 'not fit to be seen.' In
spite of having herself taken these precautions, Vida had broken into
uncontrollable smiles at the apparition of Mrs. Fox-Moore, asking with
pride--

'Will I do? I look quite like a Woman of the People, don't I?'

The unconscious humour of the manifestation filled Miss Levering with an
uneasy merriment every time she turned her eyes that way.

Little as Mr. Fox-Moore thought of his wife's taste, either in clothes
or in amusements, he would have been more mystified than ever he had
been in his life had he seen her hansom, ten minutes later, stop on the
north side of Trafalgar Square, opposite the National Gallery.

'Look out and see,' she said, retiring guiltily into the corner of the
conveyance. 'Are they there?' And it was plain that nothing could more
have relieved Mrs. Fox-Moore at that moment than to hear 'they' were
not.

But Vida, glancing discreetly out of the side window, had said--

'There? I should think they are--and a crowd round them already. Look at
their banners!' and she laughed as she leaned out and read the legend,
'We demand VOTES FOR WOMEN' inscribed in black letters on the white
ground of two pieces of sheeting stretched each between a pair of
upright poles, standing one on either side of the plinth of Nelson's
column. In the very middle, and similarly supported, was a banner of
blood red. Upon this one, in great white letters, appeared the legend--

    'EFFINGHAM, THE ENEMY
             OF
    WOMEN AND THE WORKERS.'

As Vida read it out--

'_What!_' ejaculated her sister. 'They haven't really got that on a
banner!' And so intrigued was she that, like some shy creature dwelling
in a shell, cautiously she protruded her head out of the shiny, black
sheath of the hansom.

But as she did so she met the innocent eye of a passer-by, tired of
craning his neck to look back at the meeting. With precipitation Mrs.
Fox-Moore withdrew into the innermost recesses of the black shell.

'Come, Janet,' said Vida, who had meanwhile jumped out and settled the
fare.

'Did that man know us?' asked the other, lifting up the flap from the
back window of the hansom and peering out.

'No, I don't think so.'

'He stared, Vida. He certainly stared very hard.'

Still she hesitated, clinging to the friendly shelter of the hansom.

'Oh, come on! He only stared because---- He took you for a Suffragette!'
But the indiscretion lit so angry a light in the lady's eye, that Vida
was fain to add, 'No, no, do come--and I'll tell you what he was really
looking at.'

'What?' said Mrs. Fox-Moore, putting out her head again.

'He was struck,' said Vida, biting her lip to repress smiles, 'by the
hat of the Woman of the People.'

But the lady was too entirely satisfied with her hat to mind Vida's
poking fun at it.

'"Effingham, the Enemy!"' Mrs. Fox-Moore read for herself as they
approached the flaunting red banner. 'How perfectly outrageous!'

'How perfectly _silly_!' amended the other, 'when one thinks of that
kind and charming Pillar of Excellence!'

'I told you they were mad as well as bad.'

'I know; and now we're going to watch them prove it. Come on.'

'Why, they've stopped the fountains!' Mrs. Fox-Moore spoke as though
detecting an additional proof of turpitude. 'Those two policemen,' she
went on, in a whisper, 'why are they looking at _us_ like that?'

Vida glanced at the men. Their eyes were certainly fixed on the two
ladies in a curious, direct fashion, not exactly impudent, but still in
a way no policeman had ever looked at either of them before. A coolly
watchful, slightly contemptuous stare, interrupted by one man turning to
say something to the other, at which both grinned. Vida was conscious of
wishing that she had come in her usual clothes--above all, that Janet
had not raked out that 'jumble sale' object she had perched on her head.

The wearer of the incriminatory hat, acting upon some quite unanalyzed
instinct to range herself unmistakably on the side of law and order,
paused as they were passing the two policemen and addressed them with
dignity.

'Is it safe to stop and listen for a few minutes to these people?'

The men looked at Mrs. Fox-Moore with obvious suspicion.

'I cawn't say,' said the one nearest.

'Do you expect any trouble?' she demanded.

There was a silence, and then the other policeman said with a decidedly
snubby air--

'It ain't our business to go _lookin'_ fur trouble;' and he turned his
eyes away.

'Of course not,' said Vida, pleasantly, coming to her sister's rescue.
'All this lady wants to be assured of is that there are enough of you
present to make it safe----'

'If ladies wants to be safe,' said number one, 'they'd better stop in
their 'omes.'

'That's the first rude policeman I ever----' began Mrs. Fox-Moore, as
they went on.

'Well, you know he's only echoing what we all say.'

Vida was looking over the crowd to where on the plinth of the historic
column the little group of women and a solitary man stood out against
the background of the banners. Here they were--these new Furies that
pursued the agreeable men one sat by at dinner--men who, it was well
known, devoted their lives--when they weren't dining--to the welfare of
England. But were these frail, rather depressed-looking women--were they
indeed the ones, outrageously daring, who broke up meetings and bashed
in policemen's helmets? Nothing very daring in their aspect to-day--a
little weary and preoccupied they looked, as they stood up there in twos
and threes, talking to one another in that exposed position of theirs,
while from time to time about their ears like spent bullets flew the
spasmodic laughter and rude comment of the crowd--strangely unconscious,
those 'blatant sensation-mongers,' of the thousand eyes and the sea of
upturned faces!

'Not _quite_ what I expected!' said Mrs. Fox-Moore, with an unmistakable
accent of disappointment. It was plainly her meaning that to a general
reprehensibleness, dulness was now superadded.

'Perhaps these are not the ones,' said Vida, catching at hope.

Mrs. Fox-Moore took heart. 'Suppose we find out,' she suggested.

They had penetrated the fringe of a gathering composed largely of weedy
youths and wastrel old men. A few there were who looked like decent
artizans, but more who bore the unmistakable aspect of the beery
out-of-work. Among the strangely few women, were two or three girls of
the domestic servant or Strand Restaurant cashier class--wearers of the
cheap lace blouse and the wax bead necklace.

Mrs. Fox-Moore, forgetting some of her reluctance now that she was on
the spot, valiantly followed Vida as the younger woman threaded her way
among the constantly increasing crowd. Just in front of where the two
came to a final standstill was a quiet-looking old man with a lot of
unsold Sunday papers under one arm and wearing like an apron the bill of
the _Sunday Times_. Many of the boys and young men were smoking
cigarettes. Some of the older men had pipes. Mrs. Fox-Moore commented on
the inferior taste in tobacco as shown by the lower orders. But she,
too, kept her eyes glued to the figures up there on the plinth.

'They've had to get men to hold up their banners for them,' laughed
Vida, as though she saw a symbolism in the fact, further convicting
these women of folly.

'But there's a well-dressed man--that one who isn't holding up anything
that I can see--what on earth is _he_ doing there?'

'Perhaps he'll be upholding something later.'

'Going to speak, you mean?'

'It may be a debate. Perhaps he's going to present the other side.'

'Well, if he does, I hope he'll tell them plainly what he thinks of
them.'

She said it quite distinctly for the benefit of the people round her.
Both ladies were still obviously self-conscious, occupied with the need
to look completely detached, to advertise: '_I'm_ not one of them! Never
think it!' But it was gradually being borne in upon them that they need
take no further trouble in this connection. Nobody in the crowd noticed
any one except 'those ordinary looking persons,' as Mrs. Fox-Moore
complainingly called them, up there on the plinth--'quite like what one
sees on the tops of omnibuses!' Certainly it was an exercise in
incongruity to compare these quiet, rather depressed looking people with
the vision conjured up by Lord John's 'raving lunatics,' 'worthy of the
straight jacket,' or Paul Filey's 'sexless monstrosities.'

'It's rather like a jest that promised very well at the beginning, only
the teller has forgotten the point. Or else,' Vida added, looking at the
face of one of the women up there--'or else the mistake was in thinking
it a jest at all!' She turned away impatiently and devoted her attention
to such scraps of comment as she could overhear in the crowd--or such,
rather, as she could understand.

'That one--that's just come--yes, in the blue tam-o'-shanter, that's the
one I was tellin' you about,' said a red-haired man, with a cheerful and
rubicund face.

'_Looks_ like she'd be 'andy with her fists, don't she?' contributed a
friend alongside. The boys in front and behind laughed appreciatively.

But the ruddy man said, 'Fists? No. _She's_ the one wot carries the
dog-whip;' and they all craned forward with redoubled interest. It is
sad to be obliged to admit that the two ladies did precisely the same.

While the boys were, in addition, cat-calling and inquiring about the
dog-whip--

'That must be the woman the papers have been full of,' Mrs. Fox-Moore
whispered, staring at the new-comer with horrified eyes.

'Yes, no doubt.' Vida, too, scrutinized her more narrowly.

The wearer of the 'Tam' was certainly more robust-looking than the
others, but even she had the pallor of the worker in the town. She
carried her fine head and shoulders badly, like one who has stooped over
tasks at an age when she should have been running about the fields. She
drew her thick brows together every now and then with an effect of
determination that gave her well-chiselled features so dark and
forbidding an aspect it was a surprise to see the grace that swept into
her face when, at something one of her comrades said, she broke into a
smile. Two shabby men on Vida's left were working themselves into a fine
state of moral indignation over the laxity of the police in allowing
these women to air their vanity in public.

'Comin' here with tam-o'-shanters to tell us 'ow to do our business.'

'It's part o' wot I mean w'en I s'y old England's on the down gryde.'

'W'ich is the one in black--this end?' his companion asked, indicating
a refined-looking woman of forty or so. 'Is that Miss----?'

'Miss,' chipped in a young man of respectable appearance just behind.
'_Miss?_ Why, that's the mother o' the Gracchi,' and there was a little
ripple of laughter.

'Hasn't she got any of her jewels along with her to-day?' said another
voice.

'What do they mean?' demanded Mrs. Fox-Moore.

Vida shook her head. She herself was looking about for some one to ask.

'Isn't it queer that you and I have lived all this time in the world and
have never yet been in a mixed crowd before in all our lives?--never _as
a part of it_.'

'I think myself it's less strange we haven't done it before than that
we're doing it now. There's the woman selling things. Let us ask
her----'

They had noticed before a faded-looking personage who had been going
about on the fringe of the crowd with a file of propagandist literature
on her arm. Vida beckoned to her. She made her way with some difficulty
through the chaffing, jostling horde, saying steadily and with a kind of
cheerful doggedness--

'Leaflets! Citizenship of Women, by Lothian Scott! Labour Record! Prison
Experiences of Miss----'

'How much?' asked Miss Levering.

'What you like,' she answered.

Miss Levering took her change out in information. 'Can you tell me who
the speakers are?'

'Oh, yes.' The haggard face brightened before the task. 'That one is the
famous Miss Claxton.'

'With her face screwed up?'

'That's because the sun is in her eyes.'

'She isn't so bad-looking,' admitted Mrs. Fox-Moore.

'No; but just wait till she speaks!' The faded countenance of the woman
with the heavy pile of printed propaganda on her arm was so lit with
enthusiasm, that it, too, was almost good-looking, in the same way as
the younger, more regular face up there, frowning at the people, or the
sun, or the memory of wrongs.

'Is Miss Claxton some relation of yours?' asked Mrs. Fox-Moore.

'No, oh, no, I don't even know her. She hasn't been out of prison long.
The man in grey--he's Mr. Henry.'

'Out of prison! And Henry's the chairman, I suppose.'

'No; the chairman is the lady in black.' The pamphlet-seller turned away
to make change for a new customer.

'Do you mean the mother of the Gracchi?' said Vida, at a venture, and
saw how if she herself hadn't understood the joke the lady with the
literature did. She laughed good-humouredly.

'Yes; that's Mrs. Chisholm.'

'What!' said a decent-looking but dismal sort of shopman just behind,
'is that the mother of those dreadful young women?'

Neither of the two ladies were sufficiently posted in the nefarious
goings on of the 'dreadful' progeny quite to appreciate the bystander's
surprise, but they gazed with renewed interest at the delicate face.

'What can the man mean! She doesn't _look_----' Mrs. Fox-Moore
hesitated.

'No,' Vida helped her out with a laughing whisper; 'I agree she doesn't
_look_ big enough or bad enough or old enough or bold enough to be the
mother of young women renowned for their dreadfulness. But as soon as
she opens her mouth no doubt we'll smell the brimstone. I wish she'd
begin her raging. Why are they waiting?'

'It's only five minutes past,' said the lady with the literature. 'I
think they're waiting for Mr. Lothian Scott. He's ill. But he'll come!'
As though the example of his fidelity to the cause nerved her to more
earnest prosecution of her own modest duty, she called out, 'Leaflets!
Citizenship of Women, by Lothian Scott!'

'Wot do they give ye,' inquired a half-tipsy tramp, 'fur 'awkin' that
rot about?'

She turned away quite unruffled. 'Citizenship of Women, one penny.'

'I hope you _do_ get paid for so disagreeable a job--forgive my saying
so,' said Vida.

'Paid? Oh, no!' she said cheerfully. 'I'm too hard at work all week to
help much. And I can't speak, so I do this. Leaflets! Citizenship----'

'Is that pinched-looking creature at the end,'--Mrs. Fox-Moore detained
the pamphlet-seller to point out a painfully thin, eager little figure
sitting on the ledge of the plinth and looking down with anxious eyes at
the crowd--'is that one of them?'

'Oh, yes. I thought everybody knew _her_. That's Miss Mary O'Brian.'

She spoke the name with an accent of such protecting tenderness that
Vida asked--

'And who is Miss Mary O'Brian?' But the pamphlet-seller had descried a
possible customer, and was gone.

'Mary O'Brian,' said a blear-eyed old man, 'is the one that's just come
out o' quod.'

'Oh, thank you.' Then to her sister Vida whispered, 'What is quod?'

But Mrs. Fox-Moore could only shake her head. Even when they heard the
words these strange fellow-citizens used, meaning often failed to
accompany sound.

'Oh, is _that_ Mary?' A rollicking young rough, with his hat on the
extreme back of his head, began to sing, 'Molly Darling.'

''Ow'd yer like the skilly?' another shouted up at the girl.

'Skilly?' whispered Mrs. Fox-Moore.

Vida in turn shook her head. It wasn't in the dictionary of any language
she knew. But it seemed in some way to involve dishonour, for the
chairman, who had been consulting with the man in grey, turned suddenly
and faced the crowd. Her eyes were shining with the light of battle, but
what she said in a peculiarly pleasant voice was--

'Miss O'Brian has come here for the express purpose of telling you how
she liked it.'

'Oh, she's going to tell us all about it. 'Ow _nice_!' But they let the
thin little slip of a girl alone after that.

It was a new-comer, a few moments later who called out from the fringe
of the crowd--

'I say, Mary, w'en yer get yer rights will y' be a perliceman?' Even the
tall, grave guardians of the peace ranged about the monument, even they
smiled at the suggested image.

After all, it might not be so uninteresting to listen to these people
for a few minutes. It wasn't often that life presented such an
opportunity. It probably would never occur again. These women on the
plinth must be not alone of a different world, but of a different clay,
since they not only did not shrink from disgracing themselves--women
had been capable of that before--but these didn't even mind ridicule.
Which was new.

Just then the mother of the Gracchi came to the edge of the plinth to
open the meeting.

'Friends!' she began. The crowd hooted that proposition to start with.
But the pale woman with the candid eyes went on as calmly as though she
had been received with polite applause, telling the jeering crowd
several things they certainly had not known before, that, among other
matters, they were met there to pass a censure on the Government----

'Haw! haw!'

''Ear, 'ear!' said the deaf old newsvendor, with his free hand up to his
ear.

'And to express our sympathy with the brave women----'

The staccato cries throughout the audience dissolved into one general
hoot; but above it sounded the old newsvendor's ''Ear, 'ear!'

''E can't 'ear without 'e shouts about it.'

'Try and keep _yerself_ quiet,' said he, with dignity. 'We ain't 'ere to
'ear _you_.'

'----sympathy with the brave women,' the steady voice went on, 'who are
still in prison.'

'Serve 'em jolly well right!'

'Give the speaker a chaunce, caun't ye?' said the newsvendor, with a
withering look.

It was plain this old gentleman was an unblushing adherent to the cause
(undismayed by being apparently the only one in that vicinity), ready to
cheer the chairman at every juncture, and equally ready to administer
caustic reproof to her opponents.

'Our friends who are in prison, are there simply for trying to bring
before a member of the Government----'

'Good old Effingham. Three cheers for Effingham!'

'Oh, yes,' said the newsvendor, 'go on! 'E needs a little cheerin',
awfter the mess 'e's made o' things!'

'For trying to put before a member of the Government a statement of the
injustice----'

'_That_ ain't why they're in gaol. It's fur ringin' wot's-'is-name's
door-bell.'

'Kickin' up rows in the street----'

'Oh, you shut up,' says the old champion, out of patience. 'You've 'ad
'arf a pint too much.'

Everybody in the vicinity was obliged to turn and look at the youth to
see what proportion of the charge was humour and how much was fact. The
youth resented so deeply the turn the conversation had taken that he
fell back for a moment on bitter silence.

'When you go to call on some one,' the chairman was continuing, with the
patient air of one instructing a class in a kindergarten, 'it is the
custom to ring the bell. What do you suppose a door-bell is for? Do you
think our deputation should have tried to get in without ringing at the
door?'

'They 'adn't no business goin' to 'is private 'ouse.'

'Oh, look 'ere, just take that extry 'arf pint outside the meetin' and
cool off, will yer?'

It was the last time that particular opponent aired his views. The old
man's judicious harping on the ''arf pint' induced the ardent youth to
moderate his political transports. They were not rightly valued, it
appeared. After a few more mutterings he took his 'extry 'alf pint' into
some more congenial society. But there were several others in the crowd
who had come similarly fortified, and they were everywhere the most
audible opponents. But above argument, denial, abuse, steadily in that
upper air the clear voice kept on--

'Do you think they _wanted_ to go to his house? Haven't you heard that
they didn't do that until they had exhausted every other means to get a
hearing?'

To the shower of denial and objurgation that greeted this, she said with
uplifted hand--

'Stop! Let me tell you about it.'

The action had in it so much of authority that (as it seemed, to their
own surprise) the interrupters, with mouths still open, suspended
operations for a moment.

'Why, this is a woman of education! What on earth is a person like that
doing in this _galere_?' Vida asked, as if Mrs. Fox-Moore might be able
to enlighten her. 'Can't she see--even if there were anything in the
"Cause," as she calls it--what an imbecile waste of time it is talking
to these louts?'

'There's a good many voters here,' said a tall, gloomy-looking
individual, wearing a muffler in lieu of a collar. 'She's politician
enough to know that.'

Mrs. Fox-Moore looked through the man. 'The only reassuring thing I see
in the situation,' she said to her sister, 'is that they don't find many
women to come and listen to their nonsense.'

'Well, they've got you and me! Awful thought! Suppose they converted
us!'

Mrs. Fox-Moore didn't even trouble to reply to such levity. What was
interesting was the discovery that this 'chairman,' before an audience
so unpromising, not only held her own when she was interrupted and
harassed by the crowd--even more surprising she bore with the most
recalcitrant members of it--tried to win them over, and yet when they
were rude, did not withhold reproof, and at times looked down upon them
with so fine a scorn that it seemed as if even those ruffianly young men
felt the edge of it. Certainly a curious sight--this well-bred woman
standing there in front of the soaring column, talking with grave
passion to those loafers about the 'Great Woman Question,' and they
treating it as a Sunday afternoon street entertainment.

The next speaker was a working woman, the significance of whose
appearance in that place and in that company was so little apprehended
by the two ladies in the crowd that they agreed in laughingly
commiserating the chairman for not having more of her own kind to back
her up in her absurd contention. Though the second speaker merely bored
the two who, having no key either to her pathos or her power, saw
nothing but 'low cockney effrontery' in her effort, she nevertheless had
a distinct success with the crowd. Here was somebody speaking their own
language--they paid her the tribute of their loudest hoots mixed with
applause. She never lost her hold on them until the appearance on the
plinth of a grave, rugged, middle-aged man in a soft hat.

'That's 'im!'

'Yes. Lothian Scott!'

Small need for the chairwoman to introduce the grey man with the
northern burr in his speech, and the northern turn for the
uncompromising in opinion. Every soul there save the two 'educated'
ladies knew this was the man who had done more to make the Labour Party
a political force to be reckoned with than any other creature in the
three kingdoms. Whether he was conscious of having friends in a
gathering largely Tory (as lower-class crowds still are), certainly he
did not spare his enemies.

During the first few minutes of a speech full of Socialism, Mrs.
Fox-Moore (stirred to unheard-of expressiveness) kept up a low, running
comment--

'Oh, of _course_! He says that to curry favour with the mob--a rank
demagogue, this man! Such pandering to the populace!' Then, turning
sharply to her companion, '_He wants votes!_' she said, as though
detecting in him a taste unknown among the men in her purer circle. 'Oh,
no doubt he makes a very good thing out of it! Going about filling the
people's heads with revolutionary ideas! Monstrous wickedness, _I_ call
it, stirring up class against class! I begin to wonder what the police
are thinking about.' She looked round uneasily.

The excitement had certainly increased as the little grey politician
denounced the witlessness of the working-class, and when they howled at
him, went on to expound a trenchant doctrine of universal
Responsibility, which preceded the universal Suffrage that was to come.
Much of what he said was drowned in uproar. It had become clear that his
opinions revolted the majority of his hearers even more than they did
the two ladies. So outraged were the sensibilities of the hooligan and
the half-drunk that they drowned as much of the speech as they were able
in cat-calls and jeers. But enough still penetrated to ears polite not
only to horrify, but to astonish them--such force has the spoken word
above even its exaggeration in cold print.

The ladies had read--sparingly, it is true--that these things were said,
but to _hear_ them!

'He doesn't, after all, seem to be saying what the mob wants to hear,'
said the younger woman.

'No; mercifully the heart of the country is still sound!'

But for one of these two out of the orderlier world, the opposition that
the 'rank demagogue' roused in the mob was to light a lamp whereby she
read wondering the signs of an unsuspected bond between Janet Fox-Moore
and the reeking throng.

When, contrary to the old-established custom of the demagogue, the
little politician in homespun had confided to the men in front of him
what he thought of them, he told them that the Woman's Movement which
they held themselves so clever for ridiculing, was in much the same
position to-day as the Extension of Suffrage for men was in '67. Had it
not been for demonstrations (beside which the action that had lodged the
women in gaol was innocent child's play), neither he, the speaker, nor
any of the men in front of him would have the right to vote to-day.

'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 

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