summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/42136-h/42136-h.htm
blob: 4b4887ca24c3c2f0651dced50280c9bf8d6cca23 (plain) 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735
736
737
738
739
740
741
742
743
744
745
746
747
748
749
750
751
752
753
754
755
756
757
758
759
760
761
762
763
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793
794
795
796
797
798
799
800
801
802
803
804
805
806
807
808
809
810
811
812
813
814
815
816
817
818
819
820
821
822
823
824
825
826
827
828
829
830
831
832
833
834
835
836
837
838
839
840
841
842
843
844
845
846
847
848
849
850
851
852
853
854
855
856
857
858
859
860
861
862
863
864
865
866
867
868
869
870
871
872
873
874
875
876
877
878
879
880
881
882
883
884
885
886
887
888
889
890
891
892
893
894
895
896
897
898
899
900
901
902
903
904
905
906
907
908
909
910
911
912
913
914
915
916
917
918
919
920
921
922
923
924
925
926
927
928
929
930
931
932
933
934
935
936
937
938
939
940
941
942
943
944
945
946
947
948
949
950
951
952
953
954
955
956
957
958
959
960
961
962
963
964
965
966
967
968
969
970
971
972
973
974
975
976
977
978
979
980
981
982
983
984
985
986
987
988
989
990
991
992
993
994
995
996
997
998
999
1000
1001
1002
1003
1004
1005
1006
1007
1008
1009
1010
1011
1012
1013
1014
1015
1016
1017
1018
1019
1020
1021
1022
1023
1024
1025
1026
1027
1028
1029
1030
1031
1032
1033
1034
1035
1036
1037
1038
1039
1040
1041
1042
1043
1044
1045
1046
1047
1048
1049
1050
1051
1052
1053
1054
1055
1056
1057
1058
1059
1060
1061
1062
1063
1064
1065
1066
1067
1068
1069
1070
1071
1072
1073
1074
1075
1076
1077
1078
1079
1080
1081
1082
1083
1084
1085
1086
1087
1088
1089
1090
1091
1092
1093
1094
1095
1096
1097
1098
1099
1100
1101
1102
1103
1104
1105
1106
1107
1108
1109
1110
1111
1112
1113
1114
1115
1116
1117
1118
1119
1120
1121
1122
1123
1124
1125
1126
1127
1128
1129
1130
1131
1132
1133
1134
1135
1136
1137
1138
1139
1140
1141
1142
1143
1144
1145
1146
1147
1148
1149
1150
1151
1152
1153
1154
1155
1156
1157
1158
1159
1160
1161
1162
1163
1164
1165
1166
1167
1168
1169
1170
1171
1172
1173
1174
1175
1176
1177
1178
1179
1180
1181
1182
1183
1184
1185
1186
1187
1188
1189
1190
1191
1192
1193
1194
1195
1196
1197
1198
1199
1200
1201
1202
1203
1204
1205
1206
1207
1208
1209
1210
1211
1212
1213
1214
1215
1216
1217
1218
1219
1220
1221
1222
1223
1224
1225
1226
1227
1228
1229
1230
1231
1232
1233
1234
1235
1236
1237
1238
1239
1240
1241
1242
1243
1244
1245
1246
1247
1248
1249
1250
1251
1252
1253
1254
1255
1256
1257
1258
1259
1260
1261
1262
1263
1264
1265
1266
1267
1268
1269
1270
1271
1272
1273
1274
1275
1276
1277
1278
1279
1280
1281
1282
1283
1284
1285
1286
1287
1288
1289
1290
1291
1292
1293
1294
1295
1296
1297
1298
1299
1300
1301
1302
1303
1304
1305
1306
1307
1308
1309
1310
1311
1312
1313
1314
1315
1316
1317
1318
1319
1320
1321
1322
1323
1324
1325
1326
1327
1328
1329
1330
1331
1332
1333
1334
1335
1336
1337
1338
1339
1340
1341
1342
1343
1344
1345
1346
1347
1348
1349
1350
1351
1352
1353
1354
1355
1356
1357
1358
1359
1360
1361
1362
1363
1364
1365
1366
1367
1368
1369
1370
1371
1372
1373
1374
1375
1376
1377
1378
1379
1380
1381
1382
1383
1384
1385
1386
1387
1388
1389
1390
1391
1392
1393
1394
1395
1396
1397
1398
1399
1400
1401
1402
1403
1404
1405
1406
1407
1408
1409
1410
1411
1412
1413
1414
1415
1416
1417
1418
1419
1420
1421
1422
1423
1424
1425
1426
1427
1428
1429
1430
1431
1432
1433
1434
1435
1436
1437
1438
1439
1440
1441
1442
1443
1444
1445
1446
1447
1448
1449
1450
1451
1452
1453
1454
1455
1456
1457
1458
1459
1460
1461
1462
1463
1464
1465
1466
1467
1468
1469
1470
1471
1472
1473
1474
1475
1476
1477
1478
1479
1480
1481
1482
1483
1484
1485
1486
1487
1488
1489
1490
1491
1492
1493
1494
1495
1496
1497
1498
1499
1500
1501
1502
1503
1504
1505
1506
1507
1508
1509
1510
1511
1512
1513
1514
1515
1516
1517
1518
1519
1520
1521
1522
1523
1524
1525
1526
1527
1528
1529
1530
1531
1532
1533
1534
1535
1536
1537
1538
1539
1540
1541
1542
1543
1544
1545
1546
1547
1548
1549
1550
1551
1552
1553
1554
1555
1556
1557
1558
1559
1560
1561
1562
1563
1564
1565
1566
1567
1568
1569
1570
1571
1572
1573
1574
1575
1576
1577
1578
1579
1580
1581
1582
1583
1584
1585
1586
1587
1588
1589
1590
1591
1592
1593
1594
1595
1596
1597
1598
1599
1600
1601
1602
1603
1604
1605
1606
1607
1608
1609
1610
1611
1612
1613
1614
1615
1616
1617
1618
1619
1620
1621
1622
1623
1624
1625
1626
1627
1628
1629
1630
1631
1632
1633
1634
1635
1636
1637
1638
1639
1640
1641
1642
1643
1644
1645
1646
1647
1648
1649
1650
1651
1652
1653
1654
1655
1656
1657
1658
1659
1660
1661
1662
1663
1664
1665
1666
1667
1668
1669
1670
1671
1672
1673
1674
1675
1676
1677
1678
1679
1680
1681
1682
1683
1684
1685
1686
1687
1688
1689
1690
1691
1692
1693
1694
1695
1696
1697
1698
1699
1700
1701
1702
1703
1704
1705
1706
1707
1708
1709
1710
1711
1712
1713
1714
1715
1716
1717
1718
1719
1720
1721
1722
1723
1724
1725
1726
1727
1728
1729
1730
1731
1732
1733
1734
1735
1736
1737
1738
1739
1740
1741
1742
1743
1744
1745
1746
1747
1748
1749
1750
1751
1752
1753
1754
1755
1756
1757
1758
1759
1760
1761
1762
1763
1764
1765
1766
1767
1768
1769
1770
1771
1772
1773
1774
1775
1776
1777
1778
1779
1780
1781
1782
1783
1784
1785
1786
1787
1788
1789
1790
1791
1792
1793
1794
1795
1796
1797
1798
1799
1800
1801
1802
1803
1804
1805
1806
1807
1808
1809
1810
1811
1812
1813
1814
1815
1816
1817
1818
1819
1820
1821
1822
1823
1824
1825
1826
1827
1828
1829
1830
1831
1832
1833
1834
1835
1836
1837
1838
1839
1840
1841
1842
1843
1844
1845
1846
1847
1848
1849
1850
1851
1852
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870
1871
1872
1873
1874
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881
1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
2027
2028
2029
2030
2031
2032
2033
2034
2035
2036
2037
2038
2039
2040
2041
2042
2043
2044
2045
2046
2047
2048
2049
2050
2051
2052
2053
2054
2055
2056
2057
2058
2059
2060
2061
2062
2063
2064
2065
2066
2067
2068
2069
2070
2071
2072
2073
2074
2075
2076
2077
2078
2079
2080
2081
2082
2083
2084
2085
2086
2087
2088
2089
2090
2091
2092
2093
2094
2095
2096
2097
2098
2099
2100
2101
2102
2103
2104
2105
2106
2107
2108
2109
2110
2111
2112
2113
2114
2115
2116
2117
2118
2119
2120
2121
2122
2123
2124
2125
2126
2127
2128
2129
2130
2131
2132
2133
2134
2135
2136
2137
2138
2139
2140
2141
2142
2143
2144
2145
2146
2147
2148
2149
2150
2151
2152
2153
2154
2155
2156
2157
2158
2159
2160
2161
2162
2163
2164
2165
2166
2167
2168
2169
2170
2171
2172
2173
2174
2175
2176
2177
2178
2179
2180
2181
2182
2183
2184
2185
2186
2187
2188
2189
2190
2191
2192
2193
2194
2195
2196
2197
2198
2199
2200
2201
2202
2203
2204
2205
2206
2207
2208
2209
2210
2211
2212
2213
2214
2215
2216
2217
2218
2219
2220
2221
2222
2223
2224
2225
2226
2227
2228
2229
2230
2231
2232
2233
2234
2235
2236
2237
2238
2239
2240
2241
2242
2243
2244
2245
2246
2247
2248
2249
2250
2251
2252
2253
2254
2255
2256
2257
2258
2259
2260
2261
2262
2263
2264
2265
2266
2267
2268
2269
2270
2271
2272
2273
2274
2275
2276
2277
2278
2279
2280
2281
2282
2283
2284
2285
2286
2287
2288
2289
2290
2291
2292
2293
2294
2295
2296
2297
2298
2299
2300
2301
2302
2303
2304
2305
2306
2307
2308
2309
2310
2311
2312
2313
2314
2315
2316
2317
2318
2319
2320
2321
2322
2323
2324
2325
2326
2327
2328
2329
2330
2331
2332
2333
2334
2335
2336
2337
2338
2339
2340
2341
2342
2343
2344
2345
2346
2347
2348
2349
2350
2351
2352
2353
2354
2355
2356
2357
2358
2359
2360
2361
2362
2363
2364
2365
2366
2367
2368
2369
2370
2371
2372
2373
2374
2375
2376
2377
2378
2379
2380
2381
2382
2383
2384
2385
2386
2387
2388
2389
2390
2391
2392
2393
2394
2395
2396
2397
2398
2399
2400
2401
2402
2403
2404
2405
2406
2407
2408
2409
2410
2411
2412
2413
2414
2415
2416
2417
2418
2419
2420
2421
2422
2423
2424
2425
2426
2427
2428
2429
2430
2431
2432
2433
2434
2435
2436
2437
2438
2439
2440
2441
2442
2443
2444
2445
2446
2447
2448
2449
2450
2451
2452
2453
2454
2455
2456
2457
2458
2459
2460
2461
2462
2463
2464
2465
2466
2467
2468
2469
2470
2471
2472
2473
2474
2475
2476
2477
2478
2479
2480
2481
2482
2483
2484
2485
2486
2487
2488
2489
2490
2491
2492
2493
2494
2495
2496
2497
2498
2499
2500
2501
2502
2503
2504
2505
2506
2507
2508
2509
2510
2511
2512
2513
2514
2515
2516
2517
2518
2519
2520
2521
2522
2523
2524
2525
2526
2527
2528
2529
2530
2531
2532
2533
2534
2535
2536
2537
2538
2539
2540
2541
2542
2543
2544
2545
2546
2547
2548
2549
2550
2551
2552
2553
2554
2555
2556
2557
2558
2559
2560
2561
2562
2563
2564
2565
2566
2567
2568
2569
2570
2571
2572
2573
2574
2575
2576
2577
2578
2579
2580
2581
2582
2583
2584
2585
2586
2587
2588
2589
2590
2591
2592
2593
2594
2595
2596
2597
2598
2599
2600
2601
2602
2603
2604
2605
2606
2607
2608
2609
2610
2611
2612
2613
2614
2615
2616
2617
2618
2619
2620
2621
2622
2623
2624
2625
2626
2627
2628
2629
2630
2631
2632
2633
2634
2635
2636
2637
2638
2639
2640
2641
2642
2643
2644
2645
2646
2647
2648
2649
2650
2651
2652
2653
2654
2655
2656
2657
2658
2659
2660
2661
2662
2663
2664
2665
2666
2667
2668
2669
2670
2671
2672
2673
2674
2675
2676
2677
2678
2679
2680
2681
2682
2683
2684
2685
2686
2687
2688
2689
2690
2691
2692
2693
2694
2695
2696
2697
2698
2699
2700
2701
2702
2703
2704
2705
2706
2707
2708
2709
2710
2711
2712
2713
2714
2715
2716
2717
2718
2719
2720
2721
2722
2723
2724
2725
2726
2727
2728
2729
2730
2731
2732
2733
2734
2735
2736
2737
2738
2739
2740
2741
2742
2743
2744
2745
2746
2747
2748
2749
2750
2751
2752
2753
2754
2755
2756
2757
2758
2759
2760
2761
2762
2763
2764
2765
2766
2767
2768
2769
2770
2771
2772
2773
2774
2775
2776
2777
2778
2779
2780
2781
2782
2783
2784
2785
2786
2787
2788
2789
2790
2791
2792
2793
2794
2795
2796
2797
2798
2799
2800
2801
2802
2803
2804
2805
2806
2807
2808
2809
2810
2811
2812
2813
2814
2815
2816
2817
2818
2819
2820
2821
2822
2823
2824
2825
2826
2827
2828
2829
2830
2831
2832
2833
2834
2835
2836
2837
2838
2839
2840
2841
2842
2843
2844
2845
2846
2847
2848
2849
2850
2851
2852
2853
2854
2855
2856
2857
2858
2859
2860
2861
2862
2863
2864
2865
2866
2867
2868
2869
2870
2871
2872
2873
2874
2875
2876
2877
2878
2879
2880
2881
2882
2883
2884
2885
2886
2887
2888
2889
2890
2891
2892
2893
2894
2895
2896
2897
2898
2899
2900
2901
2902
2903
2904
2905
2906
2907
2908
2909
2910
2911
2912
2913
2914
2915
2916
2917
2918
2919
2920
2921
2922
2923
2924
2925
2926
2927
2928
2929
2930
2931
2932
2933
2934
2935
2936
2937
2938
2939
2940
2941
2942
2943
2944
2945
2946
2947
2948
2949
2950
2951
2952
2953
2954
2955
2956
2957
2958
2959
2960
2961
2962
2963
2964
2965
2966
2967
2968
2969
2970
2971
2972
2973
2974
2975
2976
2977
2978
2979
2980
2981
2982
2983
2984
2985
2986
2987
2988
2989
2990
2991
2992
2993
2994
2995
2996
2997
2998
2999
3000
3001
3002
3003
3004
3005
3006
3007
3008
3009
3010
3011
3012
3013
3014
3015
3016
3017
3018
3019
3020
3021
3022
3023
3024
3025
3026
3027
3028
3029
3030
3031
3032
3033
3034
3035
3036
3037
3038
3039
3040
3041
3042
3043
3044
3045
3046
3047
3048
3049
3050
3051
3052
3053
3054
3055
3056
3057
3058
3059
3060
3061
3062
3063
3064
3065
3066
3067
3068
3069
3070
3071
3072
3073
3074
3075
3076
3077
3078
3079
3080
3081
3082
3083
3084
3085
3086
3087
3088
3089
3090
3091
3092
3093
3094
3095
3096
3097
3098
3099
3100
3101
3102
3103
3104
3105
3106
3107
3108
3109
3110
3111
3112
3113
3114
3115
3116
3117
3118
3119
3120
3121
3122
3123
3124
3125
3126
3127
3128
3129
3130
3131
3132
3133
3134
3135
3136
3137
3138
3139
3140
3141
3142
3143
3144
3145
3146
3147
3148
3149
3150
3151
3152
3153
3154
3155
3156
3157
3158
3159
3160
3161
3162
3163
3164
3165
3166
3167
3168
3169
3170
3171
3172
3173
3174
3175
3176
3177
3178
3179
3180
3181
3182
3183
3184
3185
3186
3187
3188
3189
3190
3191
3192
3193
3194
3195
3196
3197
3198
3199
3200
3201
3202
3203
3204
3205
3206
3207
3208
3209
3210
3211
3212
3213
3214
3215
3216
3217
3218
3219
3220
3221
3222
3223
3224
3225
3226
3227
3228
3229
3230
3231
3232
3233
3234
3235
3236
3237
3238
3239
3240
3241
3242
3243
3244
3245
3246
3247
3248
3249
3250
3251
3252
3253
3254
3255
3256
3257
3258
3259
3260
3261
3262
3263
3264
3265
3266
3267
3268
3269
3270
3271
3272
3273
3274
3275
3276
3277
3278
3279
3280
3281
3282
3283
3284
3285
3286
3287
3288
3289
3290
3291
3292
3293
3294
3295
3296
3297
3298
3299
3300
3301
3302
3303
3304
3305
3306
3307
3308
3309
3310
3311
3312
3313
3314
3315
3316
3317
3318
3319
3320
3321
3322
3323
3324
3325
3326
3327
3328
3329
3330
3331
3332
3333
3334
3335
3336
3337
3338
3339
3340
3341
3342
3343
3344
3345
3346
3347
3348
3349
3350
3351
3352
3353
3354
3355
3356
3357
3358
3359
3360
3361
3362
3363
3364
3365
3366
3367
3368
3369
3370
3371
3372
3373
3374
3375
3376
3377
3378
3379
3380
3381
3382
3383
3384
3385
3386
3387
3388
3389
3390
3391
3392
3393
3394
3395
3396
3397
3398
3399
3400
3401
3402
3403
3404
3405
3406
3407
3408
3409
3410
3411
3412
3413
3414
3415
3416
3417
3418
3419
3420
3421
3422
3423
3424
3425
3426
3427
3428
3429
3430
3431
3432
3433
3434
3435
3436
3437
3438
3439
3440
3441
3442
3443
3444
3445
3446
3447
3448
3449
3450
3451
3452
3453
3454
3455
3456
3457
3458
3459
3460
3461
3462
3463
3464
3465
3466
3467
3468
3469
3470
3471
3472
3473
3474
3475
3476
3477
3478
3479
3480
3481
3482
3483
3484
3485
3486
3487
3488
3489
3490
3491
3492
3493
3494
3495
3496
3497
3498
3499
3500
3501
3502
3503
3504
3505
3506
3507
3508
3509
3510
3511
3512
3513
3514
3515
3516
3517
3518
3519
3520
3521
3522
3523
3524
3525
3526
3527
3528
3529
3530
3531
3532
3533
3534
3535
3536
3537
3538
3539
3540
3541
3542
3543
3544
3545
3546
3547
3548
3549
3550
3551
3552
3553
3554
3555
3556
3557
3558
3559
3560
3561
3562
3563
3564
3565
3566
3567
3568
3569
3570
3571
3572
3573
3574
3575
3576
3577
3578
3579
3580
3581
3582
3583
3584
3585
3586
3587
3588
3589
3590
3591
3592
3593
3594
3595
3596
3597
3598
3599
3600
3601
3602
3603
3604
3605
3606
3607
3608
3609
3610
3611
3612
3613
3614
3615
3616
3617
3618
3619
3620
3621
3622
3623
3624
3625
3626
3627
3628
3629
3630
3631
3632
3633
3634
3635
3636
3637
3638
3639
3640
3641
3642
3643
3644
3645
3646
3647
3648
3649
3650
3651
3652
3653
3654
3655
3656
3657
3658
3659
3660
3661
3662
3663
3664
3665
3666
3667
3668
3669
3670
3671
3672
3673
3674
3675
3676
3677
3678
3679
3680
3681
3682
3683
3684
3685
3686
3687
3688
3689
3690
3691
3692
3693
3694
3695
3696
3697
3698
3699
3700
3701
3702
3703
3704
3705
3706
3707
3708
3709
3710
3711
3712
3713
3714
3715
3716
3717
3718
3719
3720
3721
3722
3723
3724
3725
3726
3727
3728
3729
3730
3731
3732
3733
3734
3735
3736
3737
3738
3739
3740
3741
3742
3743
3744
3745
3746
3747
3748
3749
3750
3751
3752
3753
3754
3755
3756
3757
3758
3759
3760
3761
3762
3763
3764
3765
3766
3767
3768
3769
3770
3771
3772
3773
3774
3775
3776
3777
3778
3779
3780
3781
3782
3783
3784
3785
3786
3787
3788
3789
3790
3791
3792
3793
3794
3795
3796
3797
3798
3799
3800
3801
3802
3803
3804
3805
3806
3807
3808
3809
3810
3811
3812
3813
3814
3815
3816
3817
3818
3819
3820
3821
3822
3823
3824
3825
3826
3827
3828
3829
3830
3831
3832
3833
3834
3835
3836
3837
3838
3839
3840
3841
3842
3843
3844
3845
3846
3847
3848
3849
3850
3851
3852
3853
3854
3855
3856
3857
3858
3859
3860
3861
3862
3863
3864
3865
3866
3867
3868
3869
3870
3871
3872
3873
3874
3875
3876
3877
3878
3879
3880
3881
3882
3883
3884
3885
3886
3887
3888
3889
3890
3891
3892
3893
3894
3895
3896
3897
3898
3899
3900
3901
3902
3903
3904
3905
3906
3907
3908
3909
3910
3911
3912
3913
3914
3915
3916
3917
3918
3919
3920
3921
3922
3923
3924
3925
3926
3927
3928
3929
3930
3931
3932
3933
3934
3935
3936
3937
3938
3939
3940
3941
3942
3943
3944
3945
3946
3947
3948
3949
3950
3951
3952
3953
3954
3955
3956
3957
3958
3959
3960
3961
3962
3963
3964
3965
3966
3967
3968
3969
3970
3971
3972
3973
3974
3975
3976
3977
3978
3979
3980
3981
3982
3983
3984
3985
3986
3987
3988
3989
3990
3991
3992
3993
3994
3995
3996
3997
3998
3999
4000
4001
4002
4003
4004
4005
4006
4007
4008
4009
4010
4011
4012
4013
4014
4015
4016
4017
4018
4019
4020
4021
4022
4023
4024
4025
4026
4027
4028
4029
4030
4031
4032
4033
4034
4035
4036
4037
4038
4039
4040
4041
4042
4043
4044
4045
4046
4047
4048
4049
4050
4051
4052
4053
4054
4055
4056
4057
4058
4059
4060
4061
4062
4063
4064
4065
4066
4067
4068
4069
4070
4071
4072
4073
4074
4075
4076
4077
4078
4079
4080
4081
4082
4083
4084
4085
4086
4087
4088
4089
4090
4091
4092
4093
4094
4095
4096
4097
4098
4099
4100
4101
4102
4103
4104
4105
4106
4107
4108
4109
4110
4111
4112
4113
4114
4115
4116
4117
4118
4119
4120
4121
4122
4123
4124
4125
4126
4127
4128
4129
4130
4131
4132
4133
4134
4135
4136
4137
4138
4139
4140
4141
4142
4143
4144
4145
4146
4147
4148
4149
4150
4151
4152
4153
4154
4155
4156
4157
4158
4159
4160
4161
4162
4163
4164
4165
4166
4167
4168
4169
4170
4171
4172
4173
4174
4175
4176
4177
4178
4179
4180
4181
4182
4183
4184
4185
4186
4187
4188
4189
4190
4191
4192
4193
4194
4195
4196
4197
4198
4199
4200
4201
4202
4203
4204
4205
4206
4207
4208
4209
4210
4211
4212
4213
4214
4215
4216
4217
4218
4219
4220
4221
4222
4223
4224
4225
4226
4227
4228
4229
4230
4231
4232
4233
4234
4235
4236
4237
4238
4239
4240
4241
4242
4243
4244
4245
4246
4247
4248
4249
4250
4251
4252
4253
4254
4255
4256
4257
4258
4259
4260
4261
4262
4263
4264
4265
4266
4267
4268
4269
4270
4271
4272
4273
4274
4275
4276
4277
4278
4279
4280
4281
4282
4283
4284
4285
4286
4287
4288
4289
4290
4291
4292
4293
4294
4295
4296
4297
4298
4299
4300
4301
4302
4303
4304
4305
4306
4307
4308
4309
4310
4311
4312
4313
4314
4315
4316
4317
4318
4319
4320
4321
4322
4323
4324
4325
4326
4327
4328
4329
4330
4331
4332
4333
4334
4335
4336
4337
4338
4339
4340
4341
4342
4343
4344
4345
4346
4347
4348
4349
4350
4351
4352
4353
4354
4355
4356
4357
4358
4359
4360
4361
4362
4363
4364
4365
4366
4367
4368
4369
4370
4371
4372
4373
4374
4375
4376
4377
4378
4379
4380
4381
4382
4383
4384
4385
4386
4387
4388
4389
4390
4391
4392
4393
4394
4395
4396
4397
4398
4399
4400
4401
4402
4403
4404
4405
4406
4407
4408
4409
4410
4411
4412
4413
4414
4415
4416
4417
4418
4419
4420
4421
4422
4423
4424
4425
4426
4427
4428
4429
4430
4431
4432
4433
4434
4435
4436
4437
4438
4439
4440
4441
4442
4443
4444
4445
4446
4447
4448
4449
4450
4451
4452
4453
4454
4455
4456
4457
4458
4459
4460
4461
4462
4463
4464
4465
4466
4467
4468
4469
4470
4471
4472
4473
4474
4475
4476
4477
4478
4479
4480
4481
4482
4483
4484
4485
4486
4487
4488
4489
4490
4491
4492
4493
4494
4495
4496
4497
4498
4499
4500
4501
4502
4503
4504
4505
4506
4507
4508
4509
4510
4511
4512
4513
4514
4515
4516
4517
4518
4519
4520
4521
4522
4523
4524
4525
4526
4527
4528
4529
4530
4531
4532
4533
4534
4535
4536
4537
4538
4539
4540
4541
4542
4543
4544
4545
4546
4547
4548
4549
4550
4551
4552
4553
4554
4555
4556
4557
4558
4559
4560
4561
4562
4563
4564
4565
4566
4567
4568
4569
4570

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
    <title>
      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rebel Women, by Evelyn Sharp.
    </title>
    <style type="text/css">

body {
    margin-left: 10%;
    margin-right: 10%;
}

    h1,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
    text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
    clear: both;
}

h2
  {
     text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
     clear: both;
     page-break-before: always;
  }

p {
    margin-top: .51em;
    text-align: justify;
    margin-bottom: .49em;
}

hr {
    width: 33%;
    margin-top: 2em;
    margin-bottom: 2em;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
    clear: both;
}

hr.tb   {width: 45%;}
hr.chap {width: 65%;}

p.titletwo
  { text-align: center;
     font-size: x-large;
     font-weight: bold;
   }

ul { list-style-type: none; }

table {
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
}

th
 {
    font-weight: normal;
    text-align: right;
  }

.tdl     {text-align: left;}
.tdr     {text-align: right;}
.tdc     {text-align: center;}

.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
    /*  visibility: hidden;  */
    position: absolute;
    left: 92%;
    font-size: smaller;
    text-align: right;
} /* page numbers */

.center   {text-align: center;}

.right   {text-align: right;}

.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}

/* Images */
.figcenter   {
    margin: auto;
    text-align: center;
}

/* Footnotes */
.footnotes        {border: dashed 1px;}

.footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}

.footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}

.fnanchor {
    vertical-align: super;
    font-size: .8em;
    text-decoration:
    none;
}

ins {text-decoration:none; border-bottom: thin dotted gray;} .tnote {border: dashed
1px; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em;
padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em;}

/* Poetry */
.poem {
    margin-left:5%;
    margin-right:10%;
    text-align: left;
}

.poem br {display: none;}

.poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}

    </style>
  </head>
<body>
<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42136 ***</div>

<div class="figcenter" style="width: 384px;">
<img id="coverpage" src="images/cover2.jpg" width="384" height="600" alt="Book cover" />
</div>

<hr class="chap" />




<div class="center"><h1>Rebel Women</h1>
<h2>BY<br />
EVELYN SHARP<br /></h2>
<br />
<br />
NEW YORK<br />
JOHN LANE COMPANY<br />
MCMX<br /><br /></div>




<div class="center">Copyright, 1910<br />
<span class="smcap">By John Lane Company</span><br /><br /></div>


<div class="center">Some of these sketches have appeared in<br />
the <cite>Manchester Guardian</cite>, the <cite>Daily<br />
Chronicle</cite>, and <cite>Votes for Women</cite>.<br /><br /></div>




<div class="center"><h2><a name="Contents" id="Contents">Contents</a></h2>



<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Table of Contents">
<tr><th>&nbsp;</th><th>&nbsp;</th><th>Page</th></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">I.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">The Women at the Gate</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">II.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">To Prison while the Sun Shines</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_20">20</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">III.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">Shaking Hands with the Middle Ages</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">IV.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">Filling the War Chest</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_41">41</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">V.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">The Conversion of Penelope's Mother</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">VI.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">At a Street Corner</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_59">59</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">VII.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">The Crank of all the Ages</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_68">68</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">VIII.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">Patrolling the Gutter</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">IX.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">The Black Spot of the Constituency</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_83">83</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">X.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">"Votes for Women&mdash;Forward!"</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_92">92</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">XI.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">The Person who cannot Escape</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">XII.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">The Daughter who Stays at Home</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_110">110</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">XIII.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">The Game that wasn't Cricket</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_118"><ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads '119'">118</ins></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdr">XIV.&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">Dissension in the Home</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_123">123</a></td></tr>
</table></div>
<hr class="chap" />


<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span></p>



<h2><a name="Rebel_Women" id="Rebel_Women">Rebel Women</a><br /><br /></h2>




<h2><a name="I" id="I">I</a><br />
The Women at the Gate</h2>


<p>"Funny, isn't it?" said the young man on the
top of the omnibus.</p>

<p>"No," said the young woman from whom he
appeared to expect an answer, "I don't think it is
funny."</p>

<p>"Take care," said the young man's friend, nudging
him, "perhaps she's one of them!"</p>

<p>Everybody within hearing laughed, except the
woman, who did not seem to be aware that they
were talking about her. She was on her feet,
steadying herself by grasping the back of the seat
in front of her, and her eyes, non-committal in their
lack of expression, were bent on the roaring, restless
crowd that surged backwards and forwards in
the Square below, where progress was gradually becoming
an impossibility <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'impossibility to'">due</ins> to the stream of traffic
struggling towards Whitehall. The thing she
wanted to find was not down there, among the slipping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
horses, the swaying men and women, the moving
lines of policemen; nor did it lurk in those denser
blocks of humanity that marked a spot, here and
there, where some resolute, battered woman was
setting her face towards the gate of St. Stephen's;
nor was the thing she sought to be found behind
that locked gate of liberty where those in possession,
stronger far in the convention of centuries than
locks or bars could make them, stood in their well-bred
security, immeasurably shocked at the scene
before them and most regrettably shaken, as some
of them were heard to murmur, in a lifelong devotion
to the women's cause.</p>

<p>The searching gaze of the woman on the omnibus
wandered for an instant from all this, away to
Westminster Bridge and the blue distance of Lambeth,
where darting lamps, like will-o'-the-wisps
come to town, added a touch of magic relief to the
dinginess of night. Then she came back again to
the sharp realism of the foreground and found no
will-o'-the-wisps there, only the lights of London
shining on a picture she should remember to the
end of her life. It did not matter, for the thing
beyond it all that she wanted to be sure of, shone
through rain and mud alike.</p>

<p>"Lookin' for a friend of yours, p'raps?" said a
not unfriendly woman with a baby, who was also
standing up to obtain a more comprehensive view
of what was going on below.</p>

<p>"No," was the answer again, "I am looking at
something that isn't exactly there; at least&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"If I was you, miss," interrupted the facetious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
youth, with a wink at his companion, "I should
chuck looking for what ain't there, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>She turned and smiled at him unexpectedly.
"Perhaps you are right," she said. "And yet,
if I didn't hope to find what isn't there, I couldn't
go through with what I have to do to-night."</p>

<p>The amazed stare of the young man covered her,
as she went swiftly down the steps of the omnibus
and disappeared in the crowd.</p>

<p>"Balmy, the whole lot of 'em!" commented the
conductor briefly.</p>

<p>The woman with the passionless eyes was threading
her way through the straggling clusters of
people that fringed the great crowd where it thinned
out towards Broad Sanctuary. A girl wearing the
militant tricolour in her hat, brushed against her,
whispered, "Ten been taken, they say; they're
knocking them about terribly to-night!" and
passed noiselessly away. The first woman went
on, as though she had not heard.</p>

<p>A roar of voices and a sudden sway of the throng
that pinned her against some railings at the bottom
of Victoria Street, announced the eleventh arrest.
A friendly artisan in working clothes swung her up
till she stood beside him on the stone coping, and
told her to "ketch on." She caught on, and recovered
her breath laboriously.</p>

<p>The woman, who had been arrested after being
turned back from the doors of the House repeatedly
for two successive hours, was swept past in the
custody of an inspector, who had at last put a
period to the mental and physical torment that a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
pickpocket would have been spared. A swirling
mass of people, at once interested and puzzled,
sympathetic and uncomprehending, was swept
along with her and round her. In her eyes was the
same unemotional, detached look that filled the gaze
of the woman clinging to the railings. It was the
only remarkable thing about her; otherwise, she
was just an ordinary workaday woman, rather
drab-looking, undistinguished by charm or attraction,
as these things are generally understood.</p>

<p>"Now then, please, every one who wants a vote
must keep clear of the traffic. Pass along the footway,
ladies, if you please; there's no votes to be
had in the middle of the roadway," said the jocular
voice of the mounted constable, who was backing
his horse gently and insistently into the pushing,
struggling throng.</p>

<p>The jesting tone was an added humiliation;
and women in the crowd, trying to see the last
of their comrade and to let her know that they
were near her then, were beaten back, hot with
helpless anger. The mounted officer came relentlessly
on, successfully sweeping the pavement
clear of the people whom he was exhorting with so
much official reasonableness not to invade the
roadway. He paused once to salute and to avoid
two men, who, having piloted a lady through the
backwash of the torrent set in motion by the plunging
horse, were now hoisting her into a place of
safety just beyond the spot where the artisan
and the other woman held on to the railings.</p>

<p>"Isn't it terrible to see women going on like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
this?" lamented the lady breathlessly. "And they
say some of them are quite nice&mdash;like us, I mean."</p>

<p>The artisan, who, with his neighbour, had
managed to evade the devastating advance of the
mounted policeman, suddenly put his hand to his
mouth and emitted a hoarse cheer.</p>

<p>"Bravo, little 'un!" he roared. "Stick to it!
Votes for women, I say! Votes for women!"</p>

<p>The crowd, friendly to the point of admiring a
struggle against fearful odds which they yet allowed
to proceed without their help, took up the words
with enthusiasm; and the mud-bespattered woman
went away to the haven of the police station with
her war-cry ringing in her ears.</p>

<p>The man who had led the cheer turned to the
woman beside him, as though to justify his impulse.
"It's their pluck," he said. "If the unemployed
had half as much, they'd have knocked sense into
this Government long ago!"</p>

<p>A couple of yards away, the lady was still lamenting
what she saw in a plaintive and disturbed tone.
Unconsciously, she was putting herself on the
defensive.</p>

<p>"I shouldn't blame them," she maintained, "if
they did something really violent, like&mdash;like throwing
bombs and things. I could understand that.
But all this&mdash;all this silly business of trying to get
into the House of Commons, when they know
beforehand that they can't possibly do it&mdash;oh, it's
so sordid and loathsome! Did you see that woman's
hair, and the way her hat was bashed in, and the
mud on her nose? Ugh!"</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
"You can't have all the honour and glory of war,
and expect to keep your hair tidy too," observed
one of the men, slightly amused.</p>

<p>"War!" scoffed his wife. "There's none of the
glory of war in this."</p>

<p>Her glance ranged, as the other woman's had
done, over the dull black stream of humanity rolling
by at her feet, over the wet and shining pavements,
casting back their myriad distorted reflections in
which street lamps looked like grinning figures of
mockery&mdash;over the whole drear picture of London
at its worst. She saw only what she saw, and she
shuddered with distaste as another mounted officer
came sidling through the crowd, pursuing another
hunted rebel woman, who gave way only inch by
inch, watching her opportunity to face once more
towards the locked gate of liberty. Evidently,
she had not yet given sufficient proof of her unalterable
purpose to have earned the mercy of
arrest; and a ring of compassionate men formed
round her as a body-guard, to allow her a chance of
collecting her forces. A reinforcement of mounted
police at once bore down upon the danger spot,
and by the time these had worked slowly through
the throng, the woman and her supporters had
gone, and a new crowd had taken the place of the
former one.</p>

<p>"Oh, there's none of the glory of war in that!"
cried the woman again, a tremble in her voice.</p>

<p>"There is never any glory in war&mdash;at least, not
where the war is," said her second companion,
speaking for the first time. His voice travelled to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
the ear of the other woman, still clinging to the
railings with the artisan. She glanced round at
him swiftly, and as swiftly let him see that she did
not mean to be recognized; and he went on talking
as if he had not seen her turn round.</p>

<p>"This is the kind of thing you get on a bigger
scale in war," he said, in a half-jesting tone, as if
ashamed of seeming serious. "Same mud and
slush, same grit, same cowardice, same stupidity and
beastliness all round. The women here are fighting
for something big; that's the only difference. Oh,
there's another, of course; they're taking all the
kicks themselves and giving none of 'em back.
I suppose it has to be that way round when
you're fighting for your souls and not for your
bodies."</p>

<p>"I didn't know you felt like that about it," said
the woman, staring at him curiously. "Oh, but of
course you can't mean that real war is anything
like this wretched scuffle of women and police!"</p>

<p>"Oh, yes," returned the other, in the same tone
of gentle raillery. "Don't you remember Monsieur
Bergeret? He was perfectly right. There is no
separate art of war, because in war you merely
practise the arts of peace rather badly, such as
baking and washing, and cooking and digging,
and travelling about. On the spot it is a wretched
scuffle; and the side that wins is the side that
succeeds in making the other side believe it to be
invincible. When the women can do that, they've
won."</p>

<p>"They don't look like doing it to-night, do they?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
said the woman's husband breezily. "Thirteen
women and six thousand police, you know!"</p>

<p>"Exactly. That proves it," retorted the man,
who had fought in real wars. "They wouldn't
bring out six thousand police to arrest thirteen men,
even if they all threw bombs, as your wife here
would like to see."</p>

<p>"The police are not there only to arrest the
women&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"That's the whole point," was the prompt reply.
"You've got to smash an idea as well as an army in
every war, still more in every revolution, which is
always fought exclusively round an idea. If
thirteen women batter at the gates of the House of
Commons, you don't smash the idea by arresting the
thirteen women, which could be done in five minutes.
So you bring out six thousand police to see if that
will do it. That is what lies behind the mud and the
slush&mdash;the idea you can't smash."</p>

<p>A man reeled along the pavement and lurched
up against them.</p>

<p>"Women in trousers! What's the country
coming to?" he babbled; and bystanders laughed
hysterically.</p>

<p>"Come along; let's get out of this," said the
woman's husband hurriedly; and the trio went off
in the direction of the hotel.</p>

<p>The woman with the passionless eyes looked
after them. "He sees what we see," she murmured.</p>

<p>"Seems he's been in the army, active service,
too," remarked the artisan in a sociable manner.
"I like the way he conversed, myself."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
"He understands, that is all," explained his
companion. "He sees what it all means&mdash;all this,
I mean, that the ordinary person calls a failure
because we don't succeed in getting into the House.
Do you remember, in 'Agamemnon'&mdash;have you
read 'Agamemnon'?"</p>

<p>It did not strike her as strange that she should be
clasping iron railings in Westminster, late on a
wet evening, talking to a working-man about Greek
tragedy. The new world she was treading to-night,
in which things that mattered were given their true
proportions, and important scruples of a lifetime
dwindled to nothingness, gave her a fresh and a
whimsical insight into everything that happened;
and the odd companion that chance had flung her,
half an hour ago, became quite easily the friend she
wanted at the most friendless moment she had ever
known.</p>

<p>The man, without sharing her reasons for a
display of unusual perception, seemed equally
unaware of any strangeness in the situation.</p>

<p>"No, miss, I haven't read it," he answered.
"That's Greek mythology, isn't it? I never learnt
to speak Greek."</p>

<p>"Nor I," she told him; "but you can get it
translated into English prose. It reminds me always
of our demonstrations in Parliament Square,
because there is a chorus in it of stupid old men,
councillors, they are, I think, who never understand
what is going on, however plainly it is put to them.
When Cassandra prophesies that Agamemnon is
going to be murdered&mdash;as we warn the Prime<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
Minister when we are coming to see him&mdash;they
pretend not to see what she is driving at, because
if they did, they would have to do something.
And then, when her prophecy comes true and he is
murdered&mdash;of course, the analogy ends here,
because we are not out to murder anybody, only to
make the Prime Minister hear our demands&mdash;they
run about wringing their hands and complaining;
but nobody does anything to stop it. It really is
rather like the evasions of the Home Office when
people ask questions in Parliament about the
prison treatment of the Suffragettes, isn't it?"</p>

<p>"Seems so," agreed her new friend, affably.</p>

<p>"And then," continued the woman, scorn rising
in her voice, "when Clytaemnestra comes out of the
house and explains why she has murdered her
husband, they find plenty to say because there is a
woman to be blamed, though they never blamed
Agamemnon for doing far worse things to her.
That is the way the magistrate and the daily
papers will talk to-morrow, when our women are
brought up in the police court."</p>

<p>"That's it! Always put all the blame on the
women," said the artisan, grasping what he could
of her strange discourse.</p>

<p>Big Ben tolled out ten strokes, and his companion,
catching her breath, looked with sudden
apprehension at the moving, throbbing block of
people, now grown so immense that the police,
giving up the attempt to keep the road clear, were
merely concerned in driving back the throng on four
sides and preserving an open space round the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
cluster of buildings known to a liberty-loving
nation as the People's House. The gentlemen, who
still stood in interested groups behind the barred
gates of it, found the prospect less entertaining
now that the action had been removed beyond the
range of easy vision; and some of the bolder ones
ventured out into the hollow square, formed by an
unbroken line of constables, who were standing
shoulder to shoulder, backed by mounted men
who made little raids from time to time on the
crowd behind, now fast becoming a very ugly one.
Every possible precaution was being taken to avoid
the chance of annoyance to any one who might still
wish to preserve a decorous faith in the principle
of women's liberty.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, somewhere in that shouting, hustling,
surging mass of humanity, as the woman onlooker
knew full well, was the twelfth member of the
women's deputation that had been broken up by
the police, two hours ago, before it could reach
the doors of the House; and knowing that her
turn had come now, she pictured that twelfth woman
beating against a barrier that had been set up
against them both ever since the world grew
civilized. There was not a friend near, when she
nodded to the artisan and slipped down from her
temporary resting-place. The respectable and
sympathetic portion of the crowd was cut off from
her, away up towards Whitehall, whither it had
followed the twelfth woman. On this side of
Parliament Square all the idlers, all the coarse-tongued
reprobates of the slums of Westminster,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
never far distant from any London crowd, were
herded together in a stupid, pitiless, ignorant mob.
The slough of mud underfoot added the last sickening
touch to a scene that for the flash of an instant
made her heart fail.</p>

<p>"St. James's Park is the nearest station, miss,"
said the man, giving her a helping hand. "Don't
advise you to try the Bridge; might find it a bit
rough getting across."</p>

<p>She smiled back at him from the kerbstone, where
she stood hovering a second or two on the fringe
of the tumult and confusion. Her moment's
hesitation was gone, and the sure look had come
back to her eyes.</p>

<p>"I am not going home," she told him. "I am
the thirteenth woman, you see."</p>

<p>She left the artisan staring at the spot near the
edge of the pavement where the crowd had opened
and swallowed her up.</p>

<p>"And she so well-informed too!" he murmured.
"I don't like to think of it&mdash;I don't like to think
of it!"</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>Shortly after midnight two men paused, talking,
under the shadow of Westminster Abbey, and
watched a patrol of mounted police that ambled
at a leisurely pace across the deserted Square. The
light in the Clock Tower was out. Thirteen women,
granted a few hours' freedom in return for a word
of honour, had gone to their homes, proudly conscious
of having once more vindicated the invincibility
of their cause; and some five or six<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
hundred gentlemen had been able to issue in safety
from the stronghold of liberty, which they had once
more proved to themselves to be impregnable. And
on the morrow the prisoners of war would again
pay the price of the victory that both sides thought
they had won.</p>

<p>"If that is like real war too," said one of the
men to the other, who had just made these observations
aloud, "how does anybody ever know which
side has won?"</p>

<p>"By looking to see which side pays the price of
victory," answered the man who had fought in
real wars.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="II" id="II">II</a><br />
To Prison while the Sun Shines</h2>


<p>Once, when I went to Holloway Gaol to visit
a friend who had been sent there by a puzzled
Government, the wardress who led me across the
echoing stone yard was inspired to make a little
pleasant conversation.</p>

<p>"It's pretty here in summer," she remarked
sombrely.</p>

<p>At the time it was natural, perhaps, to credit
her with a grim sense of humour; but a morning
spent not long afterwards in a London police
court suggested another explanation. You cannot
sit in a police court and watch while men and women
pass out into captivity, without realizing how
many there are of us who go through the world
snatching desperately at the air for some of the
colour of life. I think my wardress-guide would
scarcely have burst out with her involuntary remark
had not some one come in from the outside to
remind her that she lived in a grey semblance of a
world, full of people who had tried to take a short
cut to happiness and managed to get lost on the
way. It was her instinctive human defence of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
system that thinks to cure a desire for sunshine
by shutting it out.</p>

<p>All the people I saw convicted in the police court
that morning went to prison while the sun shone;
for it was one of those irrepressible summer days
that even London smoke cannot succeed in dimming.
The brilliance of it had touched the official soul
of the constable who guarded the door; and the
little crowd on the pavement, clamouring with or
without justification for admittance, was at least
being handled with wit and good humour.</p>

<p>"Only those under remand, if you please!"
remonstrated the doorkeeper politely, placing on
one side the little woman who was waving a visiting-card
at him. "Press, did you say, madam?
Pressing to get in, I should call it, wouldn't you?
Well, well, I can't say what might happen presently
if you care to wait on the chance. Those under
remand only. Yes, yes, to be sure! If you were
let out on bail the previous evening, you're under
remand; but you're not a prisoner yet, or you
wouldn't be out here, would you now? Pass inside,
please. The other lady is your mother? Some
of you ladies can show a lot of mothers to-day, it
seems to me. Right along the footway, ladies, if
you please. Those under remand only!"</p>

<p>A man with a blue paper in his hand made a
path with some difficulty through the crowd of
waiting women who continued to throng the
pavement with courageous patience. He was
admitted without question, but wore the air of a
man who felt that his natural prerogative as a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
frequenter of police courts was being infringed.
Certainly the constable who guarded the door
took far less interest in him than in the ladies on
remand; and he was received without any wit at
all. After him came the gentlemen of the press,
who were also passed in without comment; and
seeing this, the lady with the visiting-card resumed
her plea.</p>

<p>"Oh, come along," said the indulgent constable;
and she found herself at last inside, confronted by
more constables and an inspector. They were
all smiling. She dived in her bag for credentials,
but was instantly waved aside with fresh
humour.</p>

<p>"We don't ask any questions, and it's best to give
no answers," she was told pleasantly, as they took
her across an empty ante-room that seemed unnecessarily
large, into a crowded court that was
certainly unnecessarily small. It was all very
still; the wit and the clamour and the sunshine
outside seemed suddenly very far away.</p>

<p>Admitting freely that tradition and fact are at
variance in most countries, one felt that the little
judgment hall, with its want of space, of sunlight,
of air and sound and all the things that matter, was
strangely at war with the accepted notion of the
publicity of British justice. The British public was
there, it is true&mdash;a dozen strong, perhaps, very
self-conscious, and eaten up with pride at having
succeeded in getting past the constable at the door.
But it was a distinctly exclusive, not to say private,
sort of public.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
One forgot all this, however, when the magistrate
came in and began to hear the cases. There were
a good many, and they were heard with extraordinary
rapidity. I suppose the offenders knew
beforehand what they were charged with&mdash;an
advantage they sometimes had over the magistrate
when he mixed up the charge sheets. But the
British public, jammed together on the one bench
reserved for it, could only gather occasionally
why this or that person was fined or sent to prison
or remanded. One thing could be clearly deduced
from the progress of that heart-breaking procession
of human failures, as they passed, generally in
hopeless silence, from the greyness of the police
court to the more complete greyness beyond. They
were all people who had snatched desperately at the
air for some of the colour of life, and had succumbed
helplessly before they found it.</p>

<p>No court of justice could help them. You could
not expect a magistrate, faced with something like
forty cases, to stop and consider the terrible monotony
of existence that had driven the little scullery-maid
to be "drunk and disorderly," or the poor
clerk to steal his employer's money, thinking to
steal his happiness with it; or the lad with the
jolly fearless face to beg in the streets because he
was "out of work"&mdash;at fifteen!&mdash;or the boy,
whose eyes were swollen with crying, to be so unmanageable
that his father had to bring him to a
place where no child should be, at an age when, in
happier circumstances, he would be just starting for
Eton with a prospect before him of unlimited opportunities<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
for "ragging."<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> The magistrate was not
unkind; nobody was unkind. All the prisoners
were scrupulously asked if they had anything to
say, if they would like to call a witness. Anything
to say! You might as well try to discharge a
mountain torrent through a bath tap. As for
witnesses, a bewildered woman, convicted of
drunkenness because she had been found lying
unconscious on the pavement, could not be expected
under the circumstances to have secured a witness
to prove her contention that she was merely faint.
One by one, they all shook their heads mutely,
and went away to prison while the sun shone.</p>

<p>Then the remand prisoners, the women who had
thronged the doorstep in the early morning, who
were there to answer for their rebellious manner of
demanding a human and a political right, were
brought into the dock by ones and twos; and there
crept a change, a subtle change, into the musty atmosphere
of ages. The court was still bathed in its
queer half light. There was the same feeling in it
of spectral unreality. You knew even more certainly
than before that the machinery of the little
judgment hall was entirely inadequate to deal with
the prisoners in the dock. But the hopelessness of
the whole thing was gone. These were not people
whose spirit had been driven out of them by monotony
and bad luck, as it had been driven out of the
derelicts who stood in the dock before them. These
were not people who were going to give in before
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>they had won from life what they demanded from
it. It may be a perilous business to hunt down the
colour of life for other people; but it is a less
hopeless kind of job than hunting it down for
yourself.</p>

<p>The great British public, represented by the
handful of spectators who had evaded the censorship
of the constable at the door, might, without
cudgelling its brains unduly, have found some
connection between the dreary convictions it had
just witnessed, between the clumsy if kindly
handling of habitual offenders, and this passage
through the dock of imperturbably serene young
women who, by the grace of God and the aid of a
good cause, did not belong to the criminal classes.
It might even have discovered that the one set of
offenders had brought the other after it, into a police
court on a summer morning.</p>

<p>There was the same rapidity in hearing the cases,
the same courteous farce of asking for questions
that could only be answered outside the police
court, and then, perhaps, only once in a hundred
years or so. And there was the same unimaginative
treatment of those who thought it worth while to
accept the invitation to speak.</p>

<p>"Have you anything to say?" came the regulation
enquiry, hallowed by centuries of official belief
in the innocence of unconvicted prisoners who yet
felt their cases to be prejudged. Then, as the
woman in the dock showed every indication of
having a great deal to say, this would be followed
up with a hasty "Yes, yes; but I have nothing to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
do with that. I am here to administer the law as
it stands."</p>

<p>So the law was administered as it stood; and
the colour of life still flickered elusive beyond
the grasp of all of us, as thirteen more offenders,
a rebel woman every one of them, went away to
prison while the sun shone.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="III" id="III">III</a><br />
Shaking Hands with the Middle Ages</h2>


<p>"Going to be a good meeting, don't you
think?" chatted one of the men wearing
a steward's button to a woman dressed in black,
who sat in the front row of the little block of seats
reserved for ladies, just below the platform.</p>

<p>She gave an indifferent glance round the hall.</p>

<p>"Yes," she acquiesced; "I suppose it is. I've
never been to a political meeting before."</p>

<p>"Really?" said the steward blandly. "Quite
an experience for you, then, with a Cabinet Minister
coming!"</p>

<p>He hurried away, unaware of the touch of condescension
that had jarred indescribably, and spoke
in an eager undertone to a large stout gentleman
who was inspecting tickets at the ladies' entrance.</p>

<p>"It's all right," he said officiously. "I've just
been talking to her. She isn't one of them."</p>

<p>The stout gentleman looked over his shoulder.
"Who? That one next my wife? Oh, no! She's
not their sort. Besides, they all wear green or
purple, or both. I'm up to their dodges by this
time&mdash;just had to turn away quite a nice little
girl in a green hat&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
"My sister!" observed the other. "Oh, it
don't matter; I let her in by the side door, and it
won't do her any harm. They've got so out of
hand, some of these canvassers, since the general
election."</p>

<p>The large steward observed with an indulgent
smile that one must make allowances. He did not
say for what or for whom, but his meaning seemed
to be clear to the other steward.</p>

<p>"The eternal feminine, eh?" he remarked with
a knowing nod; and all the men standing round
laughed immoderately. Under cover of this exhibition
of humour, a girl in grey, with a fur cap and
muff, was allowed to pass in without any special
scrutiny. She moved very deliberately along the
front chairs, which were now filled, stood for an
instant facing the audience while she selected her
seat, then made her way to one in the middle of a
row.</p>

<p>"Votes for women!" piped a wit in the gallery,
reproducing the popular impression of the feminine
voice; and the audience, strung up to the point of
snatching at any outlet for emotion, rocked with
mirth.</p>

<p>The girl in grey joined in the laughter. "Every
one seems very jumpy to-night," she observed to
her neighbour, a lady in tight black satin who wore
the badge of some Women's Federation. "I was
actually taken for a Suffragette in the market-place
just now."</p>

<p>"Were you, now?" returned the lady, sociably.
"No wonder they're a trifle apprehensive after the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
way those dreadful creatures went on at the Corn
Exchange, last week. You were there, perhaps?"</p>

<p>The girl in grey said she was there, and the
Federation woman proceeded to converse genially.
"Thought I'd seen your face somewhere," she said.
"A splendid gathering, that would have been a
glorious triumph for the Party, if it hadn't been for
those&mdash;&mdash;" She paused for a word, and found it
with satisfaction&mdash;"females. Females," she repeated
distinctly. "You really can't call them anything
else."</p>

<p>"I suppose you can't," said the girl demurely.
The sparkle lit up her eyes again. "Our minister
called them bipeds, in the pulpit, last Sunday," she
added.</p>

<p>"And so they are!" cried the lady in tight black
satin. "So they are."</p>

<p>"They are," agreed the girl in grey.</p>

<p>In the front row of chairs, speculation was rife
as to the possible presence of Suffragettes. The
wife of the man at the door, a homely little woman
with a pleasant face, was assuring everybody who
cared to know that the thing was impossible.</p>

<p>"They've drafted five hundred police into the
town, I'm told; and my husband arranged for
thirty extra stewards at the last minute, because
the detectives wired that two of them had travelled
down in the London train," she informed a circle
of interested listeners.</p>

<p>"Is that why there are so many men wearing
little buttons?" asked the woman on her left. "I
wondered if that was usual at political meetings."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
"I think I heard you say you'd never been to
a meeting before, didn't I?" said her neighbour
pleasantly. "Neither have I, and I wouldn't be
wasting my time here to-night if it wasn't to please
my husband. He likes to see women take an interest
in politics; it was him that got our member a hundred
and twenty-eight canvassers, last election. Oh,
he thinks a lot of women, does my husband; says
he hasn't any objection to their having a vote, either,
only they ought to be ashamed of themselves for
going on so about it. I don't hold with votes myself.
It's only men that's got all that idle time
on their hands, and if they're respectable married
men, there's nothing else to occupy them but politics.
But for a woman it's work, work, work,
from her wedding-day till her funeral, and how can
she find time for such nonsense? 'You've got to be
made to think, Martha,' he says to me, coming here
to-night. Think? If a woman stops to think, she
don't stop with her husband, chances are. Of
course, he don't believe me when I say that. He's
too sure of me, that's where it is."</p>

<p>"That is always where it is," said the woman in
black, quietly.</p>

<p>Her neighbour took out some knitting. "They
laugh at me for bringing my knitting everywhere,"
she said. "I can't listen if I sit idle. Not that I
want to listen," she concluded, as she settled down
comfortably to the counting of stitches.</p>

<p>The organ boomed out a jerky tune with elephantine
lightness, and the audience vented its impatience
in a lusty rendering of some song about England<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
and liberty. The music was uninspiring, the words
were clap-trap, and seemed to convey the singular
idea that freedom had been invented and patented
within recent years by a particular political party;
but the indifferent expression of the woman in black
changed and softened as the chorus rose and fell,
and a tall man with a lean, humorous face, who
stood looking at her, gave her a smile of understanding
as the echoing sounds died away. He too
was wearing a steward's button, she noticed.</p>

<p>"There's a sort of barbaric splendour about that,
isn't there?" he remarked.</p>

<p>She felt none of the irritation that had been
roused by the conversational advances of the other
steward. It was a relief, indeed, to talk about
something ordinary with a man who, she felt instinctively,
knew how to give even ordinary things
their true values.</p>

<p>"It's the whole effect," she answered impulsively.
"The cathedral outside, and this thirteenth-century
interior, and then&mdash;this!" She looked round the
magnificent old County Hall, and along the densely
packed rows of restless modern men and women,
and then back again, half whimsically, at the man
who had spoken to her. "It is like reaching back
to shake hands with the Middle Ages," she said.</p>

<p>"To fight with the Middle Ages," he amended,
and they both laughed. "You will find," he added,
narrowing his eyes a little to look at her, "that the
Middle Ages generally win, when we hold political
meetings here in the provinces."</p>

<p>There was a distant sound of cheering, and every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
one stiffened into attention. A stir ran round the
hall; doors were closed with a good deal of noise,
and the stewards, looking apprehensively at the
little block of seats in the front, gradually closed
round them until the gangways were entirely blocked
at that end of the hall. One lady, who complained
that she could not see the platform for stewards,
instantly found herself placed under observation,
and was only freed from suspicion when one of the
gentlemen identified her as his aunt and pledged his
word that she did not want a Parliamentary vote.
Her neighbours congratulated her, but in accents
that betrayed disappointment.</p>

<p>The stir was followed by an expectant hush.
The tall man looked steadily at the fingers of the
woman in black, which locked and unlocked ceaselessly,
though she leaned back in her chair with a
vast assumption of unconcern. Those tireless,
nervous hands told him what he wanted to know.</p>

<p>The little officious steward was back at his side,
whispering in his ear. He shook his head impatiently
in reply.</p>

<p>"I'm not going to stay," he said shortly.
"You've got enough without me, even to deal with
two Suffragettes who may not be here; and&mdash;well,
it's a sickening business, and I'd sooner be out
of it."</p>

<p>He went, and all that was of her world seemed
to the woman in black to go with him, as she looked
after him, half disappointed, half contemptuous.
Up to this point, the Middle Ages were certainly
winning, she decided.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
The next quarter of an hour was the longest she
had ever lived through. Afterwards, looking back,
she remembered every detail of what took place,
all the impressiveness of it, all the ironic absurdity.
At the time, it felt like holding one's breath for
interminable minutes while unfamiliar things went
on somewhere in the thick of a mist, as things
happen in a bad dream that just escapes the final
incoherence of a nightmare.</p>

<p>There was the roar that broke through the mist
in a huge wave of sound, when the speakers walked
on to the platform. Looking round at that swaying,
white-faced multitude, mad with a hero-worship
that lost not a jot of its attraction in her eyes because
for her there was no hero, the woman in the front
row, who had never been to a political meeting
before, felt a moment's amazement at her own
temerity in coming there, alone with one other, to
defy an enthusiasm that had all the appearance
of invincibility. Then the mist began to roll away,
as somebody started the usual popular chorus.
Translated in terms of jolly good-fellowship, hero-worship
no longer appeared unconquerable.</p>

<p>To the woman in black it seemed as though a
thousand chairs scraped, a thousand throats grated,
while the audience settled down, and the chairman
delivered carefully prepared compliments, and the
great man sorted slips of paper. Then two women,
out of the hundred or so who had been admitted
because they did not appear to want the historic
liberties they came to applaud, clenched lips and
hands as the roar burst out once more.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
The great man was on his feet, facing it with a
gratified smile. To one at least of his audience
that smile restored a courage that was in full flight
the minute before. That he should strike so egregiously
the wrong note, that a fine situation should
be met with affability, argued something wrong
with the situation or something wrong with the
man. There was a false note, too, in that second
roar, and it stopped so unexpectedly that one man
was left cheering alone in a high, falsetto voice,
provocative of instant derision. The fineness had
gone out of the situation, and the immediate future
of the woman in black, full as it was of unfamiliar
fears, came back into some sort of a line with the
present.</p>

<p>The absolute silence that greeted the opening
period of the ministerial oration had something
abnormal in it. It was a silence that almost hurt.
The smallest movement put stewards on the alert,
made heads go round. The speaker felt the strain,
shuffled his notes, stumbled once or twice. Yet, as
the tension tightened to breaking-point, the woman
in the front row knew the grip over her own nerves
to be strengthening by minutes. In the mental
commotion around her, she felt the battle already
half won that she had come to fight.</p>

<p>A man's voice, challenging a fact, caused a sensation
of relief out of all proportion to the slightness
of the interruption. Some wag said amiably,
"Turn him out!" and there was laughter. The
man, a well-known local Socialist, repeated his objection,
and was supported this time by several other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
voices. There was quite a little stir, and the great
man put out his hand benevolently.</p>

<p>"No, no, gentlemen, let him stay!" he adjured
the stewards, none of whom had shown one sign
of wishing to do otherwise. "I stand here as the
champion of free speech&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>The rest of his sentence was drowned in a spontaneous
outburst of applause, during which it was
to be supposed that he dealt with the objection
that had been raised, for when his words again
became audible he had gone on to another point.
His next interrupter was a Tariff Reformer, at
whose expense he was courteously humorous.
The emotional audience rewarded him with appreciative
laughter, in which the Tariff Reformer
joined good-humouredly. Speaker and listeners
were rapidly coming into touch with one another.</p>

<p>The great man, growing sure of his ground, made
an eloquent appeal to the records of the past. The
woman, who had never heard a politician speak
before, leaned forward, hanging on every word.
She felt strangely elated, strangely sure of herself,
now. This man, believing all that about liberty,
seeing all that behind the commonplace of democracy,
should surely understand where others had
failed even to tolerate. She felt disproportionately
irritated by the click of knitting-needles, wondering
how any woman could occupy mind and fingers
with wool while eternal principles of justice were
being thundered over her head. Then there came
a pause in the thunder; and sight and sound were
blotted out as she took the opportunity, rose to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
her feet, and stared up blindly at the spot where
she knew the speaker to be standing.</p>

<p>"Then give all that to the women," she said,
in a voice she never seemed to have heard before.
"If you think so much of justice and freedom for
men, don't keep it any longer from the women."</p>

<p>For a little space of time, a couple of seconds,
probably, her eyes went on seeing nothing, and
her ears drummed. She thought she had never
known what it really meant to be alone until that
moment. She was a woman who had known loneliness
very early, when it came to her in an uncongenial
nursery; she knew it still, in some houses,
where everything was wrong, from the wall-papers
to the people. But the meaning of utter isolation
she had never learnt until that moment when
clamour and confusion reigned around her and she
saw and heard none of it.</p>

<p>Then her senses were invaded by the sound and
the look of it all; and to her own perplexity she
found herself on the point of smiling.</p>

<p>She thought of a hundred things, many of them
irrelevant, as she tried in vain to walk to the door,
and was obstructed at every step by stewards, who
fought to get hold of some part of her in their
curious method of restoring order and decorum.
She wondered why the meeting was interrupting
itself with such complete success, because one woman
had made the mistake of thinking that the hero
they had welcomed with bad music was a man who
meant what he said. She thought of plays she
had seen, dealing with the French Revolution, very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
bad plays most of them, she reminded herself as
she was dragged this way and that by excited
gentlemen, divided in opinion as to the door by
which she was to be ejected. The sea of distorted
faces past which they took her, the memory of the
knitting-needles, even the intolerable smile of the
great man as he made little jokes about her for the
amusement of the platform&mdash;all this was very suggestive
of the French Revolution, as portrayed in a
badly written play. In all the plays she had seen,
however, she did not remember that there had
ever been women who cried a little, or men who
sat silent and ashamed, yet not sufficiently ashamed
to put a stop to what was going on. These two
things appeared to be really happening, here and
there among the audience; and she supposed this
was why they hurt the most.</p>

<p>She thought of the fastidiousness that made her
a jest to her friends, as she felt her hat knocked sideways,
looked down and saw the lace at her wrists
dangling in rags. The blow that some one aimed
at her, as she was dragged unresisting by, seemed
a little thing in comparison with those torn strips
of lace. Apparently, she was not alone in this
eccentric adjustment of proportions; for the little
fussy steward who, unbalanced to the point of irresponsibility,
had struck the blow, was apologizing
clumsily the next minute for treading on her skirt.
He did not seem to understand when she told him
gently that he was the man who had boasted of
protecting women since the world began.</p>

<p>Sky and stars looked very remote when at last<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
by circuitous ways they brought her to a door and
thrust her out into the night. A final push from the
gentleman who liked to see women take an interest
in politics, sent her stumbling down stone steps into
a moonlit market-place. Everything looked very
big, very still, out there, after the banality and
the bad staging of the play from which she had
just made her unrehearsed exit. In the clearness
of thought that came to her, freed at last of hands
that dragged at her and voices that coarsened to
say things to her that she only now dimly began
to comprehend, she knew what it was that had made
women, ordinary quiet women like herself, into
rebels who were out to fight for the right to protect
themselves even against their protectors.</p>

<p>A cheer greeted her from the farther side of the
market-place, where the police kept back a crowd
that had waited all the evening to see the two Suffragettes
from London, and not, as the local paper
afterwards somewhat flamboyantly put it, to "worship
from afar the apostle of progress and democracy,
almost as the servants of the gods might
wait at Olympic banquets for crumbs to fall from
the rich man's table." It was a friendly cheer, she
noticed, though this did not matter much. Nothing
seemed to matter much, just then, except that the
black mass of the cathedral towered overhead and
looked unshakable.</p>

<p>A little altercation floated down to her from the
top of the steps, as she leaned motionless against
the worn stones of the old balustrade.</p>

<p>"Martha! You of all people! Disgracing me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
like that! However did you come to be mistaken
for one of those screaming&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>

<p>"Well, I couldn't stand the humbug of it, there!
Talking about free speech and all that fal-lal nonsense,
and then&mdash;&mdash;! I wouldn't let my cat be
treated as they treated her, all for nothing&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"Nothing, do you call it? Coming here on purpose
to interrupt&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"So did that ranting Socialist you think so much
of! So did Mr. What's-his-name with the husky
voice. Why didn't they tear <em>them</em> to pieces? Now,
you listen to me, James. You brought me here
to-night because you said I'd got to be made to
think. Very well. I've been made. If you don't
like it, you should ha' let me stay at home, as I
wanted to."</p>

<p>She stuffed a mass of dropped stitches into a
torn work-bag, and went down the steps, her chin
in the air. "If that's politics," she called back
to him from the pavement, "then it's time women
got the vote, if it's only to put a stop to them!"</p>

<p>The girl in grey came round the corner of the
building and joined her comrade, who still waited
in the shadow cast by the cathedral. Her muff was
gone, her cap lopped over one eye, and she held her
hand to her throat where the collar had been
wrenched at; but her eyes shone with their unalterable
courage and spirit. She knew better than
any one that every skirmish in the battle they were
out to fight was always won before a single blow
was struck.</p>

<p>"All right, are you? You did splendidly, for a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
first shot! Come along to the Martyrs' Cross; the
police say we may hold a meeting there. Oh, I
know you never have, but you can come and try.
Any <em>idiot</em> can speak after being chucked out of a
Cabinet Minister's meeting!"</p>

<p>Encouraged by this quaint process of exhaustion
to regard herself as an orator, the woman who had
never been to a political meeting till she went to be
thrown out of one, walked across the market-place
to shake hands with the Middle Ages on a spot
where men and women were made to die, centuries
ago, for having been born too soon.</p>

<p>She found the girl in grey cheerfully assuring an
interested crowd that she stood there as the champion
of free speech.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="IV" id="IV">IV</a><br />
Filling the War Chest</h2>


<p>As a passer-by, I had known that spot in a busy
street all my life; or rather, I thought I knew
it. It was only when I took my courage in both
hands and a money-box in one of them, and went
to stand there every day for a week, that I discovered
how wide a gulf it is that separates the
passer-by from those who are passed by.</p>

<p>It was all right as long as the sun shone and sent
charming side-lights across the bunches of colour
in the flower-lady's basket, and put gay and human
feelings into the heart of the public so that it
lingered and bought daffodils and pink newspapers
and ephemeral air-balls from my companions of the
gutter, and even sometimes gave me a coin as well
as an amused smile. One liked it almost as well
when the wind blew up unimportant showers, so
hurriedly and unexpectedly that the rain seemed
almost out of breath when it came; for this turned
the bit of western sky that blocked the end of the
street into a fine country sky, that ought to have
swept across a moor instead of scudding past a
London Tube station. But when it snowed, or
rained long and uncompromisingly, and when the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
wind blew swift and cold without blowing up anything
interesting with it, there were no street effects
and no smiles, and the public shut its impressionable
heart against colour and pink news and polemics,
and everything else we were hawking; and
one learned suddenly the meaning of being passed
by. Perhaps it was worth learning&mdash;one of those
odd, disagreeable experiences that are worth gathering
up by the way when you stand on the edge
of a London pavement, helping to fill a war chest
for rebel women. Certainly I might not otherwise
have reached the heart of my fellows in the
gutter.</p>

<p>"It's a 'ard life, ain't it?" said the flower-lady
sympathetically. I had known her in the past, too&mdash;the
past that seemed so long ago and yet dated
back only to last week&mdash;had sometimes bought
flowers of her because she looked cold, and had
generally found her unprepossessing and much inclined
to grumble. I thought I knew now, as I
stamped my feet to keep warm, and shook my
box invitingly in front of cold and distant people
who refused to be invited, how very much she
might have had to grumble at. The queer part of
it was that she was not grumbling now; she had
ceased to grumble, in fact, for the very reason that
made me understand for the first time why she
should grumble. Standing there beside her, in
God's rain that knew no respect of persons, I was
no longer a client out of whom another penny might
with tact be wheedled; I was just a boon companion,
bent like herself on wheedling that penny from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
a miserly public that eternally hurried by. So she
gave me her pity, though I wore a fur coat and
she only a threadbare shawl, and the same biting
wind bit at us both.</p>

<p>The newspaper sellers at first held aloof; so did
the girl who sold air-balls.</p>

<p>"I haven't took a bloomin' copper all the afternoon,"
she complained, looking pointedly after the
lady who had just dropped a shilling in my box. I
considered the wisdom of explaining that what I
was doing was going to help her in the long run,
but decided that under similar circumstances I
should prefer a more practical and immediate evidence
of good-will from any one who offered me
such an explanation. For the worst of the long run,
mean this what it may, is that it never, never
runs.</p>

<p>Luckily for our future relations, a gust of wind
carried off a blue air-ball, and in the chase that
followed I came off victorious, and was able to
hand it to the owner with a disarming smile. She
unbent slightly in return.</p>

<p>"Dessay you find it chilly out here, not bein' used
to it," she suggested, pulling the knot in the string
tighter with her teeth.</p>

<p>"What are they doin' it for? That's what I
arst! What are they doin' it for?" said the lame
newsboy in a slightly peevish tone.</p>

<p>My agility in capturing the air-ball had made
him sore, I think, though he had no reason to feel
any envy on that score. Seeing the alertness and
speed with which he dragged his useless limb after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
him when he came to show me anything uncomplimentary
about the Suffragettes that happened to
appear in his pink newspaper, I could but marvel
at the thought of what he might have accomplished
on two legs. One could only suppose that his
agility, like the flower-lady's sympathy, was the result
of a lifelong evasion of difficulties.</p>

<p>The elderly gentleman who sold the penny Conservative
paper knew why we were doing it. He
never failed to wink joyously to his friends if a
male elector stopped to argue across my money-box
about the cause for which I was shaking it.</p>

<p>"Doin' it to git theirselves 'usbands, that's what
they're doin' it for," he would say conclusively,
in denial of the usual contention of the anti-suffragist,
that we are doing it because of our distaste for
husbands.</p>

<p>When the enemy attacked, my fellow-hawkers
waited with grim anticipation for my replies.</p>

<p>"Is not this a terrible condescension on your
part?" asked one disapproving lady, putting up
her lorgnette to read the inscription on the box.
"Oh, I quite believe in your cause, but why do
this sort of thing? How much better to get round
the men another way!"</p>

<p>She looked gently pained when I explained rather
obviously that I should consider that a condescension,
and so would the right sort of man; and my
companions looked with puzzled eyes after the retreating
lady who seemed to belong to a strange
world out of their ken, in which helplessness had a
market value. It was pleasantly illuminating to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
find, however, as the week wore on, that they had
come to accept me as an equal, not because I could
hold my own against the passer-by, but because
they saw me, like themselves, exposed to all the
discomforts of being passed by. That, I am sure,
is why the elderly paper-seller gave me so much
friendly information about goloshes, and why the
lame boy observed so sympathetically, one wet evening,
that I had had a quiet day.</p>

<p>"Yes; nice and quiet, wasn't it?" I answered
gladly, being a militant suffragist of many and
strenuous experiences that would not generally be
called either nice or quiet. It was only when I
caught his astonished expression that I understood
him to be referring, not to political passions, but
to trade.</p>

<p>Even when you are filling the war chest at the
edge of the pavement it is not impossible, I find,
to spare a little pity for those who pass as well as
for those who are passed by. "<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">L'homme oisif tue
le temps; le temps tue l'homme oisif</i>," as it is expressed
by the nation that knows better than any
other, possibly, how to kill time gracefully. Time
seemed to be killing a good many idle people, I
thought, during the week of days that I stood outside
that Tube station. The habitual hawker, of
course, was a loiterer by profession; so was the
friendly constable who remarked, "Well, you ladies
do have to face somethink, you do!" referring, I
imagine, to the snow, which was soft and soothing
compared to some of the street witticisms I had
to face in the course of business. The real waster<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
was rather the person who stood at the entrance
of the station, sometimes for hours, waiting, not
for something to happen, or even in most cases for
somebody to come, but just waiting.</p>

<p>Sometimes the idler was a man. For one whole
afternoon it was a man with a pale and purposeless
blue eye that stamped him at once as being one of
those who, in killing time, are being gradually killed
by it. He said something about the weather to the
policeman, something about the winners to the
boy who sold pink information about winners; but
he did not spend a halfpenny on the information,
nor did he look as though he had spent a halfpenny
on information in the whole of his life. Even when
a motor-car broke down opposite, he did not cross
the road to look at it. You have to be really interested
in life, I suppose, to form one of a street
crowd.</p>

<p>Most of the women loiterers seemed to be the
victims, either of their small unearned incomes, or
of somebody else's unpunctuality. One of these,
after stamping her feet in unison with mine for
more than half an hour, asked me if I had seen a
lady in a green hat. I think I had seen hundreds,
which was not very helpful; but the enquiry made
an opening, and I shook my box gently and seductively
in her direction. She was quite affable, told
me she had believed in woman suffrage all her
life, and thought it an excellent idea for other
people to stand out in the rain collecting money
for it.</p>

<p>"It gives you a pinched look, and then people<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
throw you something before they see what it is
for," she added genially.</p>

<p>Evidently my complexion had not taken her unawares
in this way, for she made no effort to support
the cause in which she had believed all her
life. She had so many claims, she said. I understood
what she meant when one of the claims,
wearing a mountainous hat in emerald-green straw,
bore down upon her with torrential apologies for
being late, and carried her off to the shops.</p>

<p>"It's for something to do up my every-evening
black, and you have such a good eye for colour,"
was the cryptic remark I overheard, as they went.
In about half an hour they were back again, and
the girl in the green mountain was dropping two-pence
in my box. She smiled rather nicely, and
on a sudden impulse I asked her what she had
bought for the every-evening black.</p>

<p>She stared, laughed a little, and ended on a
sigh. "Nothing," she confessed. "Isn't it
tragic?"</p>

<p>"It must be," I tried to agree. I suppose I
succeeded in sounding a human note, for she still
lingered.</p>

<p>"I hope you'll get your vote soon, and not have
to go on wasting your time like this," she said.</p>

<p>"It isn't my vote particularly, or my waste of
time," I called after her. But she was gone, her
ridiculous hat bobbing up and down in the crowd
like a Chinese lantern on a stick; and I wondered
if she would some day make a truce with time and
save her soul alive.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
Time, though a deadly murderer, does not succeed
in killing all the people who are trying so hard
to kill him; and hope, even for a serious cause,
lurked sometimes in that stream of bored and idle
passers-by, who seemed so bent on cheating their
nature out of everything it demanded of them. It
was always a pleasant shock when women and girls,
wearing the most preposterous hats and the most
fearsome of purple-spotted veils, slid something into
my hand and hurried on, trying to look as if they
had done nothing of the kind. And my knowledge
of things human played me entirely false over the
expensive dowager in sable and velvet.</p>

<p>She had stood in front of the nearest shop
window for some minutes, discussing with a
patient companion the rival qualities of jet
trimming and gold braid. "Jet lasts," she observed
ponderously.</p>

<p>"It does last," agreed the companion.</p>

<p>"Perhaps that gold edging would look handsomer,"
proceeded the old lady, assailed by sudden
doubts.</p>

<p>"Oh, yes, it might," said the companion hastily,
adapting her tone.</p>

<p>"You are looking at the wrong one," said the old
lady bluntly. "It isn't likely I should put a four-three
edging on my best satin between-wrap."
Then she veered round and saw me.</p>

<p>Naturally I expected something very cutting, the
more so that a kindly supporter threw me a shilling
just then from the top of an omnibus, and a
money-box not being so handy as a tambourine,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
I spent the next few seconds grovelling in the
snow at the lady's feet. When I came up again,
successful but apprehensive, I found her smiling
blandly.</p>

<p>"If I were ten years younger I should be out
in the street fighting with you," was the astonishing
remark that accompanied a handsome donation to
the war chest.</p>

<p>"Do come, all the same," I urged, caught by
the lightning gleam in her little grey eye. But
she shook her head and returned to the jet and
the gold edging&mdash;a wicked waste of a warlike
grey eye!</p>

<p>So the week drew to an end, and I was no longer
to be numbered among those who are passed by
at the edge of the pavement. In my foolishness I
thought it would be easy to remain on friendly
terms with my fellow-hawkers of yesterday; and
with that idea in my mind I took an early opportunity
of returning to the spot and buying a halfpenny
pink paper and a penny white paper and a
blue air-ball and a bunch of daffodils.</p>

<p>I met with a chilly civility from them all, with
the exception of the flower lady, who shamelessly
overcharged me for the daffodils.</p>

<p>"Yes, lady, they are dear this morning; cost me
that in the market, they did&mdash;thank you, lady,
much obliged, I'm sure. Yes, it is cold for a body,
sitting out here all day."</p>

<p>That was all&mdash;from the friend and sister who
had almost offered me her shawl, a week ago, because
she saw me shivering.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
The sun was shining, and the snow had gone,
and I suppose the patch of sky at the western end
of the street was all right. But I had been put
back in my place as a passer-by; and neither sun
nor sky belonged to me any longer.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="V" id="V">V</a><br />
The Conversion of Penelope's Mother</h2>


<p>"In converting the heathen," I told Penelope,
"never make the mistake of converting your
friends. There is nothing so unconquerable as the
immortal grudge that your friend owes you for
having had the impertinence to interfere with his
opinions. You see, friendship, being a rare and
elusive and provoking condition of the soul, has
nothing to do with opinions. It matters what your
casual acquaintance thinks about the subject of the
hour, because you have to talk with him. It doesn't
matter in the least what your friend thinks, because
there is no conversation among friends, there is only
intercourse, which has nothing to do with opinions.
Naturally, I am not talking of eternal truths,
because if your friend does not see eye to eye with
you about those, no friendship is possible. One
never converts people to eternal truths, only to
the particular manifestation of these that is being
revealed to the age through which we are
passing."</p>

<p>"According to that," objected Penelope, "there
is no possibility of converting people to anything,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
unless they are already converted without knowing
it."</p>

<p>"Exactly," I said. "That is why it is waste of
time as well as impertinence to convert the person
who is your friend. And as your mother is one of
the few mothers I know who is also a friend to her
children, I strongly advise you not to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"That is all very well," again objected Penelope;
"but mother has not yet discovered that she is
converted to the particular manifestation of eternal
truth known as Votes for Women; and, to put it
plainly, you can't go on living with some one who
thinks all suffragists are hooligans, when you are
one of the hooligans."</p>

<p>"Theoretically," I argued, "you could, if&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"But I don't live with mother theoretically," interrupted
Penelope; "and if you seriously mean
that you cannot convert her because of the immortal
grudge she would owe you for doing it, I suppose I
shall have to take that risk myself. It is not at all
easy to convert an old lady to eternal truth at the
mouth of an ear-trumpet," she added insinuatingly.</p>

<p>In the end I was persuaded to undertake the
conversion, being no wiser than other apostles of
great movements who have bartered friendships
for causes since the world began; and Sarah's greeting,
when she opened the door to me the day I
called upon Penelope's mother by appointment, was
therefore disconcerting.</p>

<p>"Miss Penelope said, would you please wait in
the back drawing-room till she's finished converting
the mistress," said Sarah in the impassive tone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
of one whom no message, however strange, could
disconcert. "It's the Suffragettics, I think," she
added for my enlightenment. To Sarah all manifestations
of the eternal truths rest on the level
of rheumatics and other mortal infirmities.</p>

<p>I suggested that, folding-doors not being soundproof,
I had better wait downstairs. Sarah led the
way up to the back drawing-room without giving
this proposal a moment's serious consideration.</p>

<p>"You can hear anything that's said to the
mistress from the top of the house to the bottom&mdash;that
is, if the mistress can hear it," she explained
unemotionally.</p>

<p>The controversy had reached the acute stage
when I arrived in the back drawing-room, an unwilling
eavesdropper. This I gathered from the
significant circumstance that both speakers were
talking at once. Presently there came a calm,
in the course of which Penelope seemed to be
getting on rather well. She was keeping her
temper wonderfully, I thought, and was apparently
convincing the enemy beyond the power of retort.
The absence of retort became, indeed, astonishing,
until it was explained by a sudden interruption
from Penelope's mother, just as her daughter
reached a fine pitch of persuasive eloquence.</p>

<p>"I can't hear a word you are saying, my dear.
I wish you would pick up my ear-trumpet," said
Penelope's mother, breaking unconsciously into the
middle of a sentence.</p>

<p>Evidently the ear-trumpet was found and adjusted,
for retorts came thick and fast as soon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
as Penelope began patiently to say it all over
again.</p>

<p>"What rubbish, child!" was an early interruption.
"I have never done anything to hinder your
development, as you call it. I drew the line at
ju-jitsu, I admit, because I didn't like the appearance
of the unpleasant little yellow person with the
pigtail&mdash;he had no pigtail? Well, he was the
style of person to whom one expects to find a
pigtail attached. That is neither here nor there&mdash;"</p>

<p>"No, mother darling, it isn't," interposed Penelope
firmly; "and I never said you hindered my
development. We are not Suffragettes because
we have personal grievances, but because of the
general attitude towards women&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"You will never persuade me, my dear, that
you can cure anybody's attitude towards women by
knocking off policemen's helmets&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"We don't knock off&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"I am convinced, Penelope, that I have seen a
picture, in the <cite>Daily Illustrated</cite>, I think it was, of a
woman knocking off a policeman's helmet. Her
mouth was wide open, and she was doing it with an
umbrella&mdash;a dreadful, ill-bred, unwomanly creature
she looked! I remember it distinctly. The
<cite>Daily Illustrated</cite> is a most respectable paper; it
would never&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"Darling, you know you have told me over and
over again how all the respectable papers of the
day called Florence Nightingale a dreadful, unwomanly
creature for wanting to go out to the war
to nurse grown-up men without a chaperon, instead<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
of staying at home to nurse the baby she hadn't
got," shouted Penelope down the ear-trumpet.</p>

<p>"And so they did," cried her mother, as though
her veracity were being called in question. "All
sorts of wicked and untrue things were said about
that noble woman, for whom I have the utmost
veneration, because she taught me to air a room
by opening the window a few minutes at the bottom
instead of opening the door. Oh! it was shocking
the things they said about her! But now&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"Now," said the wily Penelope, "no woman
in England is more honoured. That shows, doesn't
it, that we should not believe everything the
papers&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"Penelope," said her mother abruptly, "I have
dropped my ear-trumpet again, so you had better
ring the bell for tea."</p>

<p>Signs of the fray were still evident when Sarah
admitted me to the front drawing-room. The ear-trumpet
was sticking out of the coal-box, always
a sign of mental disturbance in Penelope's home;
and both she and her mother were looking for the
spectacles which had been swept momentarily out of
existence.</p>

<p>"I cannot think what I did with them," complained
Penelope's mother, as though her loss were
not an hourly occurrence. "If you had not upset
me so dreadfully, Penelope&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>Then she looked up and saw me, Sarah's lusty
announcement of my name having passed over her
unheeded through the temporary disablement of
the ear-trumpet. With a royal gesture of her hand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
she banished eternal truths and their tiresome
topical manifestations to oblivion, and received me
in the grand manner that was designed, fifty years
ago, to hide from visitors and servants alike that
the head of the house ever had any private emotions
or any public interests. Now, as then, it deceived
nobody; but it bridged the gulf between
eternal truths and afternoon tea very pleasantly.</p>

<p>"How charming of you to look in just as Penelope
and I were going to have tea! Come and sit
near me," was the gracious greeting I received.
She turned a serene countenance towards Penelope,
who was showing no inherited instinct for bridging
impassable gulfs. "My dear, can you find my ear-trumpet?
I am sure I had it a moment ago."</p>

<p>"You had," murmured the rebellious Penelope.
"It might just as well have stayed in the coal-box
the whole time, for all the good it was to either
of us!"</p>

<p>It was only when, at the conclusion of a blameless
discourse on ribbon embroidery, Penelope
had been sent upstairs to look for a piece of needle-work,
that Penelope's mother stopped being my
Early Victorian hostess and became the mother
of all the ages.</p>

<p>"I suppose," she said, with the true motherly
mixture of appeal and disapproval in her tone,
"it is you who have converted Penelope to all this
nonsense."</p>

<p>"No," I said. "The age has converted her.
Penelope is the child of the age."</p>

<p>"She has no business to be anybody's child but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
her mother's," was the indignant reply. "When I
was a girl daughters were their mother's own
children&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>I interrupted to ask if she really thought that
this had ever been true. The ear-trumpet described
furious circles in the air&mdash;another danger signal,
as I knew from experience.</p>

<p>"When I was a girl," said Penelope's mother
once more, "we had the good manners not to let
our mothers guess that we knew more than they
did&mdash;even if we did."</p>

<p>I asked a depressed Penelope, on the way downstairs,
why she had not taken my advice and left me
to risk my friendship with her mother, instead of
imperilling her own?</p>

<p>"It was idiotic of me," confessed Penelope;
"she said something unfair about 'those dreadful
women,' so I had to say I was one of them; and
after that I had to go on, naturally. But if I
haven't converted mother in the drawing-room,
I seem to have succeeded incidentally in converting
cook in the kitchen. It's a pity there were not a
few more Antis concealed about the house while I
was at the ear-trumpet, isn't it?"</p>

<p>"Listen!" I interrupted.</p>

<p>Sarah was clearing away tea, and through the
open drawing-room door came scraps of conversation.</p>

<p>"It is only right to study both sides of a question,
Sarah."</p>

<p>"Yes'm."</p>

<p>"Florence Nightingale, the noblest Englishwoman<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
who ever lived&mdash;I hope you open the window and
not the door, when you wish to air your bedroom,
Sarah?&mdash;Florence Nightingale was misrepresented
just in the same way."</p>

<p>"Yes'm."</p>

<p>"I think I shall stop your monthly magazine and
order a suffrage periodical for the kitchen instead."</p>

<p>"Yes'm. We have two of Miss Penelope's
already. Thank you, ma'am."</p>

<p>Penelope and I fled downstairs to escape detection.</p>

<p>"She was converted all the time; I told you she
would be," I remarked on the doorstep.</p>

<p>"Now for the immortal grudge!" sighed Penelope.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="VI" id="VI">VI</a><br />
At a Street Corner</h2>


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

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

<p>"Go on; that's splendid!" she said with friendly
warmth.</p>

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

<p>"People of London!" she repeated amiably.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
"We have come here to tell you about 'Votes
for&mdash;&mdash;'"</p>

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

<p>"I really must wait for some more people," she
protested.</p>

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

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

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

<p>"<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Ah! ce sont les suffragettes!</i>" exclaimed one of
these unexpectedly. "<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Nous sommes des suffragistes
françaises, nous aussi! Vive le féminisme!</i>"</p>

<p>"Oh, how perfectly delightful!" said the English
suffragist, beaming on them. "Do stop and
listen. <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Nous allons avoir un</i>&mdash;oh, bother! What
is 'meeting'?&mdash;<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">un rendez-vous, mesdames!</i>"</p>

<p>"<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Tiens!</i>" gasped the French suffragists, as well
they might.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
At this moment the speaker, her mind a blank
concerning all the carefully prepared sentences
she had been learning by heart for days, could be
heard announcing that she would now call upon
the other lady to address the meeting; and the
crowd, increasing every minute, cheered inconsequently.</p>

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

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

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

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

<p>"Where did you git that from?" he shouted.</p>

<p>"My friend has forgotten his history," said
the speaker indulgently. "It is an historical
fact&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>The interrupter turned his back contemptuously
on the sugar-box, and addressed the audience in a
loud and overpowering voice.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
"Look at 'er!" he adjured them, jerking his
thumb over his shoulder. "History, she says!
Believin' what she's towld in a book. Ain't that
jest like a woman?"</p>

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

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

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

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

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

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

<p>"Then git out!" advised the crowd; and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
speaker's voice was drowned for a minute or so
in the altercation that followed.</p>

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

<p>The other, encircling a large bundle with her
arms, shook her head.</p>

<p>"I dunno," she said; "but I loves to 'ear 'em
talk."</p>

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

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

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

<p>The hostile youth, growing tired of being made
the sport of the crowd, moved off with the remark
that he would like "to see 'em all drowned";
and the speaker profited by a temporary lull and
began to talk of economics. She held her audience
now without difficulty, telling them things about
the labour market that they knew to be true;
and a kind of tense hush was over the crowd round
the sugar-box, when a well-dressed woman came
strolling along the pavement on her way home
from the Park.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
"Why, I do believe that is a real live Suffragette!
How chic!" she exclaimed with an amused smile.</p>

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

<p>"Jack, are you there? You must come and
listen to this&mdash;you positively must! I&mdash;I had no
idea they were like that!"</p>

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

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

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

<p>"Your wife will cook it before she starts," was
the ready rejoinder. "Or, better still, she can cook
it overnight, and you can bring it with you and eat
it in the Park&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

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

<p>"It won't hurt you to have cold pork and salad
just for once," said the resourceful speaker. "Only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
think how the children will love a picnic, and a picnic
like ours, too, with eighty women-speakers at the
end of it! You know how dull picnics generally
are when there is nothing more to eat&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

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

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

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

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

<p>"If you think a woman's ordinary life outside
prison is as dreary as all that, don't you think it's
time you gave her the power to improve her conditions,
so that she needn't go to Holloway for a
pleasant change?" she shot back at him, hot with
scorn; and again listening women flushed with
nervous pleasure. "Some of our comrades are
coming out of prison next Saturday," the speaker
went on rapidly; "and if you want to give them a
welcome, as I know you do"&mdash;here she paused to
allow time for yells of derision and references to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
skilly&mdash;"come and walk in our procession from
Holloway gates."</p>

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

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

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

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

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

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

<p>"I&mdash;I think you're splendid; and so does Jack!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
cried their new supporter, flinging mere accuracy
to the winds. "And I'm coming to Holloway
Gates on Saturday and to Hyde Park on Sunday&mdash;and
so is Jack!"</p>

<p>"Eh what?" said Jack mildly.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="VII" id="VII">VII</a><br />
The Crank of all the Ages</h2>


<div class="poem"><span class="smcap">Votes for Women</span>, price one penny!<br /></div>
<div class="poem">Articles by Annie Kenney,<br /></div>
<div class="poem">Mrs. Lawrence, Christabel,<br /></div>
<div class="poem">Other Suffragettes as well.<br /></div>
<div class="poem">Men and women, come and buy&mdash;<br /></div>
<div class="poem">As you pass and hear the cry&mdash;<br /></div>
<div class="poem"><span class="smcap">Votes for Women!</span> here we sell<br /></div>
<div class="poem">Articles by Christabel,<br /></div>
<div class="poem">Mrs. Lawrence, Annie Kenney&mdash;<br /></div>
<div class="poem"><span class="smcap">Votes for Women</span>, price one penny!<br /></div>

<div class="poem"><span style="padding-left: 6.5em;">(New Street Cries, 1909.)</span><br /><br /></div>


<p>I never knew until I became a regular newspaper
seller, one day in every week, how many
people there are in the world bent on reforming it.
You do not discover this so long as you merely sell
papers in a spasmodic fashion, appearing on fine
days at the edge of the pavement with a bundle of
<cite>Votes for Women</cite> under your arm, and going off to
tea as soon as these are sold out. Any element of
amateurishness at once adds an air of detachment
to the paper seller and keeps the world from really
making friends with her. But as soon as the public
grasps that she is a fixture, just as much so as the
seller of pink football news or of green politics,
except that her stock is renewed by a purple, white<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
and green pony trap instead of by a panting boy on
a bicycle, then every kind of crank who is out for an
airing thinks she is there to listen to his views on
every conceivable subject, from food reform up to
simplicitarianism.</p>

<p>You divide the world into three kinds of people,
roughly speaking, when you sell papers as a professional
and not as an amateur. There is the person
who wants to buy a paper. There is the person
who wants to know where the nearest tea-shop is, or
which omnibus goes to the Circus, or whether you
have seen any one with pink wings&mdash;the last being
a reference to millinery and not to aviation. This
person really makes one feel like a professional
newsboy at a street corner. Lastly, there is the
crank. The crank does not want to buy a paper, or
to seek information; he merely wants to talk. He
leaves the ordinary newsvendor in peace, recognizing
that he is there merely for the purpose of selling
news, whereas the seller of suffrage papers represents
an attempt to reform the world as well. So
her pitch becomes a common meeting-ground for
cranks.</p>

<p>If it be true that the character of an age is to be
found in the character of its cranks, the period we
are passing through will present extraordinary difficulties
to the chronicler of the future. That is the
worst of living in an age when most of the big things
have been established in theory, though some still
remain to be established in fact. It was quite easy
to be a crank with distinction when people tortured
you for saying the world was round. Now, you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
have to fall back on rational dress or Swedish exercises,
or a whole host of minor movements to educate
public opinion, and the real crank has a hard
struggle for existence. Personally, standing as I believe
for one of the few big things that still have
to be fought for because they are not yet established
in fact, I have always felt inclined to look upon these
lesser attempts to improve humanity as fads. But I
find from standing at the edge of the pavement that
the hall-mark of every crank is a firm belief that all
the other cranks are only faddists.</p>

<p>"No," said the tailor-made lady with firmness, as
she prepared to pass on after reading my newsbill;
"I have no time for fads. Before I married, when
I earned my own living and paid rates and taxes and&mdash;and
gas, I quite believed in this sort of thing. In
fact, I never condemn any woman for wanting a
vote."</p>

<p>She seemed to think that she deserved some praise
for this evidence of self-restraint; and I said something
inane about thinking of other people. She
looked injured.</p>

<p>"Naturally, I do not mean that I lead an idle or a
selfish life," she said. "Sport, that is my strong
point&mdash;outdoor sport." I suppose she gathered
that this did not quite fill my conception of human
usefulness, for she added hastily&mdash;"And charity.
Sport and charity&mdash;that is my life."</p>

<p>"You could indulge in both, selling our paper," I
said. I concluded from the haste with which she
went away that she did not agree with me.</p>

<p>"Ah!" said the elderly gentleman, who excused<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
himself quite unnecessarily for buying a paper by
explaining that it was for his wife, "who is quite
foolish about your question,"&mdash;"the great mistake
you ladies make is in not concentrating upon the
educational test. You'd have thousands more on
your side&mdash;myself, in fact&mdash;if you didn't want to
flood the electorate with illiterate&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>An interruption occurred here, as the conductor
of a waiting omnibus whistled to me for a paper and
gave me his confidential opinion that we "were
going to get it soon." The elderly gentleman
turned triumphantly to the nearest newsboy.</p>

<p>"There! What did I say?" he demanded.
"Socialists, every one of them! Socialists!"</p>

<p>The newsboy shrugged his shoulders as he looked
after him, then turned and gave me a wink out of
pure friendliness. "Chronic, ain't it?" he remarked.</p>

<p>Everything, by the way, is "chronic" to my companions
in the paper-selling trade; and I have some
difficulty in not letting the expression, whatever it
may mean, creep into my vocabulary.</p>

<p>The temperance reformer was less easy to rout
because he was so desperately in earnest. It was no
use pointing out to him that we were both travelling
along the same road, really. His was the one and
only possible scheme for regenerating the world, and
the women who actually wanted the power to help
him were wilfully obstructing his path.</p>

<p>"Local option!" he repeated several times with
enthusiasm, describing circles on the pavement with
his umbrella and effectually keeping all possible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
customers at a distance. "Local option! That's
the ticket. Votes for women, indeed!"</p>

<p>I said mildly that I supposed the reform of the
goose was always the fad of the gander, and was
sorry to see that he appeared hurt. "Of course," I
added hurriedly, "I admit that I am the goose."
He still looked offended, but the remark happily put
him to flight after he had spoilt the newspaper trade
at our corner for nearly ten minutes.</p>

<p>The most determined instance of the crank who
sees all the rest of the world as faddists, or worse, is,
I think, the animal faddist. Of course, we all advocate
kindness to animals: but that is different from
being a faddist about it. Still, I admit I am a little
prejudice in the matter, owing to my encounter with
the old lady, the toy dog, and the Kindness-to-pet-animals
Christmas card.</p>

<p>She arrived breathless on the kerb at my side,
having been placed there by a policeman, while
criticism of the toy dog rained plentifully from a
brewer's dray, a bicycle, and a taxicab, all of which
were mixed up in the road through their noble endeavours
not to annihilate the yapping creature.
I came into the situation because I unwound its
chain, which had tied itself round the old lady's
skirts, and placed the thing on her ermine muff. I
received no acknowledgment of all this&mdash;first,
because I picked him up by the head, seeing nothing
else large enough to afford one a grip, and secondly,
because she discovered I was a Suffragette.</p>

<p>"You ought to be locked up in a lunatic asylum,"
she said sternly.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
For a moment I did not see the connection. Then
I made allowances for her age and the peril she had
just gone through and said&mdash;"Oh, no!" as soothingly
as I could.</p>

<p>She put the dog with some difficulty inside her
muff, tail first, which I felt was an indignity it
scarcely deserved, even if it had dislocated the traffic.
"When the world is full of tortured and suffering
dumb animals!" she went on, glaring at the
contents bill that fluttered from my hand.</p>

<p>I wished energetically that dumbness had been
one of the disabilities of the particular tortured
animal she was still trying to back into a hot ermine
muff, for when I tried to say that my only objection
to dumb animals was that they were never dumb,
my remark was drowned in piercing yelps.</p>

<p>At the end of ten minutes I had learnt every
detail of her private and special society for protecting
pampered pets against those who pampered them&mdash;this,
by the way, was not what she called it&mdash;and
of the dear little children who paid their pennies
weekly, and of the Christmas card to advertise the
cause, that she had designed herself. The Christmas
card was extricated from the ermine muff, with
no inconsiderable ingenuity, for the toy dog, making
a wild dash for liberty, very nearly emerged with it;
and my criticism was condescendingly invited. It
is not easy to give an intelligent opinion on a drawing
of a cat, a dog, a donkey, a parrot, a tadpole, a
pony, a pigeon, and a newt; and I found I had said
quite the wrong thing when I murmured that it was
very pretty. Prettiness, I was told sternly, was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
its object. I looked again, and was fortunately
inspired to detect that she had not included a rabbit.
She thought she might squeeze in the rabbit between
the Newfoundland dog and the newt; and after that
I forced my own goods upon her in a determined
manner until she went.</p>

<p>It is sometimes helpful to remind yourself, if you
are the crank who stands at a street corner selling
papers for a cause, that cranks are the salt of the
earth. But, as Henry Harland once wrote in a
frivolous moment&mdash;"<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Il faut souffrir pour être sel.</i>"</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII">VIII</a><br />
Patrolling the Gutter</h2>


<p>"I suppose we had better start," faltered the
tall woman in purple.</p>

<p>"I can't think of a reasonable excuse for delaying
any longer," sighed the girl in green.</p>

<p>"Come along!" said a third, making a great
show of the courage she did not feel.</p>

<p>Nobody came along. Under some pretext or
another we still lingered, though there were ten of
us and the space in our Suffragette shop was uncomfortably
limited. Most people, the even tenor
of whose lives had not been ruffled by the call of a
great cause, might have thought the day an unpropitious
one to choose for patrolling the gutter, even
for the sake of advertising a meeting of rebel women
in the Albert Hall. A strong south-west wind, a
real London drizzle overhead and thick mud underfoot,
could hardly be held to offer striking attractions
to a band of naturally timorous ladies, girt about
with sandwich-boards, preparing to issue forth in
procession into the conventional streets of Kensington.
If we had been less timorous we should probably
have postponed the expedition; but the last fear<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
that rebel women ever learn to overcome is the fear
of being thought afraid, so this was an alternative
that did not suggest itself to anybody.</p>

<p>"I never realized before what it meant to be a
belted knight, but I do now," remarked our literary
member, trying in vain to free her hands from their
cardboard bonds in order to straighten a crooked
hat. "If anything or anybody were to unhorse us
and make us bite the dust&mdash;isn't that what belted
knights were always doing to one another in the
Middle Ages?&mdash;we should have to lie on our
backs, as they did, till some one came and picked
us up."</p>

<p>"I feel like a pantomime super, myself," observed
somebody else, twirling round in order to get a
full-length back view of herself in the glass. "I
shall never get accustomed to the make-up,"
she added ruefully, as she once more swept the
greater part of our stock of pamphlets from the
counter to the floor, and had to stand helpless
and repentant while the shop secretary picked
them up, not for the first time in the course of
these trial man&oelig;uvres.</p>

<p>"If you don't start soon, there will be nothing
saleable left in the place," said the shop secretary
pointedly.</p>

<p>"Well, what are you waiting for?" demanded
the girl in green, trying to infuse a little real impatience
into her tone.</p>

<p>"Courage," confessed the woman in purple,
gloomily.</p>

<p>"Oh, nonsense!" said our literary member,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
without, however, moving any nearer to the door.
"Think of George Herbert:</p>

<div class="poem">God gave thy soul brave wings; put not those feathers<br /></div>
<div class="poem">Into a bed to sleep out all ill weathers."<br /></div>

<p>We all tried to think of George Herbert, but without
marked success.</p>

<p>"I can't think of anything but the ill weather
waiting for us outside and all the people I know in
Kensington," said the tall woman, voicing bluntly
and concisely what the rest of us were feeling.</p>

<p>"Do you think the people we know would ever
recognize us in these things?" asked some one in a
moment of real inspiration; and under the influence
of this new and cheering suggestion we formed up
hastily in single file and really made a start.</p>

<p>The secretary of another local branch, who had
dropped in to seek recruits for a similar poster parade
in her district, observed significantly as we filed
past her that it was most important to be as well
dressed as possible in her neighbourhood. Neither
this, nor the first comment that reached our ears as
we plunged into the street, added particularly to our
good opinion of ourselves.</p>

<p>"Well, I must say you ladies don't think of appearances,
that you don't!" was the comment of
the street. At a less sensitive moment we might
have derived comfort from the tone of admiration
in which this was uttered. As it was, an outrageous
remark that followed did far more to raise our
drooping spirits. This one was made by a girl, wearing
a flaming hat and blouse that not one of us would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
have had the courage to put on before going for a
walk, even if supported by so magnificent a youth as
the one on whose arm she leaned as she criticized.</p>

<p>"Brazen, ain't they?" she said.</p>

<p>After that, it was easy to laugh and go ahead in a
world that could always be counted upon to feed the
most unsatisfied sense of humour. Otherwise, for
the first half-hour or so, I doubt if we should have
felt acutely conscious of anything but the traffic.
Glorious as it may seem to the imaginative to suffer
for a cause, one finds it difficult, when carrying sandwich-boards
in its service, to detach from this distant
and problematic reward the more immediate prospect
of being run down from behind by a skidding
motor-omnibus. In time, no doubt, it would be
possible to acquire the easy swagger of the real
sandwich man, though the real sandwich man would
under no circumstances be submitted, as we were,
to a definite onslaught from every impudent tradesman's
boy who whizzed past us on a tricycle. As it
was, no one could have said that our pace bore the
slightest resemblance to the leisurely saunter of the
professional patroller of the gutter. In spite of
conscientious efforts on our part to maintain the
regulation distance from one another, none of us
could resist the impulse to catch up the next woman
in front; and as our leader, the tall woman in
purple, desired nothing more than to cover the
prescribed route and return to the shelter of home
as quickly as possible, only he who ran could have
read the announcement printed on our boards, as we
raced breathlessly along the edge of the pavement.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
At the same time, we found, nobody had the slightest
difficulty in reading the identity of those who
carried the boards.</p>

<p>"Suffer-a-gettes! Look at 'em!" roared an
omnibus driver.</p>

<p>"Well, why not?" responded a gallant cabman
from the shelter we were approaching. "Why
shouldn't Mrs. Pank'urst 'ave a vote, same as you
an' me? Ain't she got as much sense in her 'ead as
what <em>I</em> 'ave?" He modulated his belligerent shout
to a dulcet undertone as we came alongside. "The
whole of the four-wheel trade is with you, ladies,"
he told us confidentially.</p>

<p>A block in the traffic caused us all to close up for
a moment, and we compared notes hurriedly.</p>

<p>"Not so bad as we expected, is it?" said our
literary comrade, who was one of those to overhear
the friendly remark made by the representative of
the four-wheel trade.</p>

<p>The girl in green reserved her opinion. "It
makes one feel desperately sorry for the poor men
who have to do this sort of thing, not for a cause,
but for a living," she said feelingly.</p>

<p>The girl in green was by nature sentimental.
Having once sold a suffrage paper in the street for
half a day, she found herself incapable ever afterwards
of resisting the appeal of the street hawker,
with the result that her flat became a depôt for
patent toasting-forks, bone collar-studs, and quivering,
iridescent beetles. Her latest conviction that
a human link existed between her and all sandwich-men
received, however, a slight shock as soon as we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
encountered one of these. Melting with compassion,
she tried in a single look to express all she felt
for his hard lot, but was met by a still more eloquent
expression of pity from his eye&mdash;the one that did
not wink&mdash;and became henceforth a little dubious
about that particular human link. We tried, but
without much success, to rekindle her faith in human
links generally, by pointing out that his scorn was
probably aroused by the unprofessional appearance
of her sandwich boards, one of which was slipping
its ribbon moorings as she went by.</p>

<p>Perhaps the most startling conversion we made
in the course of our parade was that of the baby.
Up to that moment it had been a plain and placid,
contented baby, banging its Teddy bear happily
against the side of the perambulator. When it saw
our procession coming along, with flying colours and
flapping boards, it dropped the Teddy bear on the
pavement and emitted an amazing remark that
sounded to all of us, except our literary member,
like "Ga-ga-ga-ga-<em>ga</em>!" Our literary member, being
imaginative, declared that what the baby really
said was&mdash;"Hooray! Votes for Women!"&mdash;and
the baby's nurse, who had to soil her white
cotton gloves by picking the Teddy bear out of the
mud, seemed inclined to agree with her.</p>

<p>"Them 'orrible Suffragettes!" she said crossly;
and remembering the militant countenance of the
baby we had converted, we felt bound to forgive
her for feeling uneasy about the baby's future.
Our triumph was short-lived, however, for we were
scarcely out of hearing of the baby's gurgles when a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
gentleman outside a public-house informed us, with
some difficulty of utterance, that we were a disgrace
to our sex.</p>

<p>"What do they mean, blocking up the King's
'Ighway, undreds and undreds of 'em?" he grumbled
fiercely. As the girl in green observed, he was
not in a condition when it would be fair to challenge
his ability to count.</p>

<p>On the whole, the triumphs won as usual, and the
insults were too funny and pathetic, both at once, to
hurt much. There was the lady who told us very
distinctly what she thought of us, and then dropped
her skirts in the mud, a real feminine sacrifice, to
take one of our handbills, because her hard heart
was melted by the absent-minded smile of our literary
member, who mistook her for a supporter.
There was the clergyman who stood with his hat in
his hand the whole time our procession was going by;
there was the sentimentalist who, after telling each
one of us in turn to go home and mind the baby,
said in a tone of concentrated despair to the last of
us&mdash;"What would you do if you had twins?"
And, of course, there was the messenger-boy who
stood just out of reach and yelled&mdash;"Want yer
rights? Then you won't git 'em! Sooner give 'em
to tomcats, I would!"</p>

<p>By the time we arrived in sight of home, even the
woman in purple had become hardened to the perils
and vicissitudes of the road and smiled quite easily
at the postman who stood at the corner of the street.
But when we found ourselves inside the shop, in full
view of the shop looking-glass, it required all our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
newly won insensibility to stifle an inward consciousness
that the glories of a militant campaign still
remained rather spiritual than actual. Our hair was
damp and straight, our cardboard armour limp and
bent; our skirts were caked with mud, and our
boots strongly resembled those that one sometimes
sees sticking out of river sand at low tide. For
once, our literary comrade refrained from asking us
to turn to George Herbert or anybody else for poetic
consolation.</p>

<p>On the other hand, the postman's criticism became
wildly, disproportionately cheering.</p>

<p>"Votes for women!" he shouted after us with a
sneer, as we slowly passed indoors out of his sight.
"Votes for a few rich women, that's all you're
after!"</p>

<p>Under the circumstances, it was very pleasant to
be mistaken for representatives of the rich and cultured
classes.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="IX" id="IX">IX</a><br />
The Black Spot of the Constituency</h2>


<p>I am inclined to think that the best general is he
who never listens to warnings. Nobody, for
instance, warned us not to hold a meeting in the
Council Schools, where a number of apparently
educated, if very young, gentlemen came to express
their political opinions through the medium of
motor-horns and chemical explosives. The warning
would have made no difference, of course; the point
is that it was never uttered. When, on the other
hand, we announced that we meant to carry our election
campaign into the black spot of the constituency,
where a criminal population congregated
thickly in a few mean streets, warnings came quick
and fast. They were the normal warnings, telling
how the police hesitated to penetrate there after
dark, how it was never safe at any time of day for
a woman to walk there alone, and so on, and so on.
There is a black spot like that in most cities, and
the same things, rightly or wrongly, are generally
said about it. But when you are a pioneer, however
humble a pioneer, you discover that the one
person who may walk with safety in the heart of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
criminal district is the rebel man or woman who is
out fighting for a human cause.</p>

<p>No doubt, the elementary school child looks upon
the Prime Minister who arranges for a general
election to occur during the Christmas holidays as a
sort of fairy godfather; but the pioneer, who hopes
to advance her cause as a by-product of a Parliamentary
election, would find the political situation
considerably simplified by the elimination of the
juvenile element. Anthropologists probably know
all kinds of reasons why the young human creature
always wants to throw things at what he cannot
understand; and if I had to humanize the embryonic
hooligan of our back streets, I believe I should
begin by setting up a mysterious-looking target, a
different one every day, in a prominent place, in order
to gratify this elemental instinct at the least possible
cost to the pioneer. Not having thought of
this simple plan in time, however, those of us who
first penetrated the black spot of our constituency
on a canvassing expedition met with a good deal of
concrete obstruction.</p>

<p>"I am used to banana skins," remarked one canvasser,
on her return to the committee rooms; "I
can even bear mud; and stones are never aimed
with enough determination to matter much; but I
should like to draw the line at red herrings. There
is something so peculiarly atmospheric about red
herrings."</p>

<p>"Chestnuts are worse," said another woman, producing
the one that she had intercepted on its way
towards her face. "When I am advancing a suffrage<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
argument for the hundredth time, there is a
nasty subtle significance about a chestnut."</p>

<p>The tax collector, happening to stroll in just then
to buy a ticket for a meeting, kindly tendered us his
sympathy. He had frequently to endure the same
unfriendly treatment at the hands of children, he
told us, when he visited their homes in his official
capacity. This information did not meet with the
response he evidently expected from us, and realizing
that voteless women could not be reasonably
expected to feel furiously hostile towards anybody
who pelted a tax collector, he admitted a difference
in the point of view and beat a tactful retreat, warning
us as he went to refrain from attempting an
open-air meeting in the criminal district.</p>

<p>"You won't do any good there," he assured us;
"they are too stupid to understand, and they may
make things very unpleasant for you."</p>

<p>This would have been true, perhaps, of an open-air
meeting in a respectable neighbourhood, not to
say of a drawing-room meeting anywhere. In a
respectable, law-abiding district, it is always difficult
and frequently dangerous to hold an open-air meeting.
To begin with, you have to stand for some
time without any audience at all, saying "We are
the Suffragettes; we have come here to talk about
votes for women," over and over again, with an
ingratiating smile, to a policeman with a coldly
detached air, and, perhaps, a young man on the
opposite side of the road, who is longing to listen
but dare not cross over for fear of being identified
with lawless young women whose husbands and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
babies languish untended in the theoretical home.
Afterwards, when these preliminary efforts have
successfully assembled an audience, it is generally
one that is too stupid to understand, and it frequently
makes things unpleasant for the speaker.
All this may be confidently expected to happen in
respectable neighbourhoods, where the standard of
conduct is conventional enough to have brought
unconventionality within the jurisdiction of lynch
law.</p>

<p>In the black spot of our constituency, however,
these familiar difficulties scarcely seemed to exist
for the open-air speaker, least of all the preliminary
difficulty of collecting an audience. The moment
our wagon appeared, flying the tricolour flag that
stood for no party cry and for no party candidate,
the audience came in rushes from all the alleys and
dens in the neighbourhood, and in less than two
minutes one looked down upon a swaying mass of
tattered and slatternly humanity that would have
been horribly pathetic if for one moment it had been
less than human. As it was, one merely realized
that when the narrow barrier of circumstance that
separates the fortunates from the unfortunates of
this world has once been swept away, human points
of contact are multiplied, not diminished.</p>

<p>The audience naturally gave the speaker in the
lorry no time to make philosophic reflections.</p>

<p>"Don't look as though she'd been fed on skilly,
do she?" was a sally that produced instant applause.</p>

<p>"Here, miss!" shouted a young hooligan, pushing
into prominence a good-looking girl whose open,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
laughing face might have belonged to any child of
twenty in any sheltered home. "She's been to
'Olloway; can she have a vote?"</p>

<p>"Not much!" roared the crowd.</p>

<p>Our militant member, distributing leaflets on the
edge of the crowd, smiled on the girl as she went
shuffling off. "I've been to prison myself," she
said, by way of breaking the ice; "what can you
have done at your age to get there?"</p>

<p>The girl threw back her head with another laugh.
"Oh, a drop of beer and a few words with a copper!"
was the easy reply.</p>

<p>After that, it was a simple matter to get into
conversation, and other women, who were not laughing,
gathered round to listen.</p>

<p>"You Suffragettes have made things in the 'jug'
a lot better for us pore women," said one,
more intelligent-looking than the rest. "They
give us chiny mugs now, 'stead of them tins,
and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"I 'ope as you'll git inter Parlyment, that I do!"
chimed in another.</p>

<p>"Yuss! Good luck to you!" cried a chorus of
voices.</p>

<p>They vented their new-found enthusiasm upon a
bibulous gentleman, who was asserting with drowsy
monotony that he didn't want women to have votes,
not he! He wanted them to love, honour, and
obey&mdash;&mdash;</p>

<p>"Stow it!" they broke in impatiently. "Forgettin'
your manners, ain't you?"</p>

<p>The woman in the lorry was telling them why she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
went to prison, two months ago. She soon had her
audience well in hand, human points of contact not
being far to seek in a crowd to whom it was at least
unnecessary to explain that women did not go to
gaol for fun. A passer-by, who happened to drift
there from the prosperous part of the constituency,
stopped to make this hackneyed insinuation and was
well hooted for his pains by a crowd that knew more
than he did of the experiences described by the
speaker. Even the drowsy sentimentalist, realizing,
one might almost suppose, that his proper place
was rather at a drawing-room meeting than at a
street-corner one, went elsewhere in search of love
and obedience; and the crowd of derelicts that
remained, growing more numerous every minute,
pressed closer and closer to the lorry till they
swarmed up the wheels and over the sides and sat
at the feet of the woman who had been where they
had been, and suffered what they had suffered, for a
cause they dimly began to understand because it
appeared to be connected with prison and suffering.
Even their primitive minds could receive an impression
of the woman standing up above them, against
the crude light of the street lamp, standing for something
that was going to bring a little warmth and
brilliance into a cold neutral world, the warmth and
brilliance that they had somehow missed. Emphatically,
these people were not of the stuff that melodrama
and novelettes are made of. They had never
discovered what is sensationally called the romance
of crime, and there was nothing splendid or attractive
in the offences that had sent them to gaol. Some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
day or another, in a dull past, they had exchanged
the dinginess of unemployment for the ingloriousness
of petty crime, that was all.</p>

<p>A woman, bedraggled and dishevelled, strayed
across from the public-house and stood for a moment
gazing vacantly up at the trim little figure of
the woman in the cart. She was past listening to
anything that might be said.</p>

<p>"Shameless!" she commented, and drifted away
again, unheeded. The adjustment of standards was
bewildering; and one felt that here was another
interrupter whose mental attitude was that of the
drawing-room and not of the street corner.</p>

<p>The speaker made an end and asked for questions.
They did not come with any rapidity. People who
have done with the conventions of conduct are not
anxious to know what is to become of the baby and
the washing of the housewife who wants to cast a
vote at a Parliamentary election. There was a
pause; then the speaker declared the meeting closed.
The meeting, however, declined to be closed. The
crowd stood motionless, waiting for more; and they
had it, when a real electioneer, wearing party colours
and bristling with party commonplaces, stepped up
to the fringe of the audience. He brought a breath
of prosperous unreality with him, and when his
objection, the usual apprehensive one about future
women members of Parliament, was aptly answered
from the lorry, the habitués of the place broke into
noisy exultation.</p>

<p>"Nipped 'im in the bud, she has! Give it 'im
agin, miss; give it 'im 'ot!"</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
As it happened, she had to give it to him again
and again, he being one of those hecklers who are
never nipped in the bud, but think that if they ask
the same question often enough they will catch the
speaker unawares in the end. Unable to do this,
after failing to accept or indeed to comprehend the
answer that was patiently repeated four times, the
ingenuous heckler wanted to know if the lady did
not think he could sufficiently safeguard her interests
in Parliament, and went away feeling sure he had
the best of it, but wondering slightly why she
laughed so immoderately at his parting shaft.</p>

<p>The wagon moved slowly off, and the meeting
reluctantly broke up. The woman who had been
speaking looked down upon her slowly dispersing
audience, and tried to draw conclusions.</p>

<p>"One feels at home with these people," she said.
"I wonder why it is?"</p>

<p>"Society has broken down their barriers, and
they haven't learnt to set up new ones," suggested
some one.</p>

<p>"'The saints and the sinners meet in the gaols,'"
quoted our literary member, softly. "Suffragettes
forced to be sinners, and sinners who are not given a
chance to be saints&mdash;oh, it's easy to see why we
two should be fellow-creatures!"</p>

<p>The saints and the sinners, slouching back to their
dens, passed a similar verdict, if differently expressed,
on the woman who had been speaking.</p>

<p>"Good old sport, that's what <em>I</em> call the old gal!"
cried a young fellow, challenging criticism in a
threatening tone.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
"Same 'ere," returned the pretty girl-sinner, or
saint, not laughing this time, as she looked after the
flapping flag that had brought a streak of colour, for
one hour of her turbulent existence, into the black
spot of the constituency.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="X" id="X">X</a><br />
"Votes for Women&mdash;Forward!"</h2>


<p>When our local committee determined, in the
words of the minutes book, to open a shop and
offices in the local main street, "for the dissemination
of suffrage literature," we made up our minds
that we would not be amateur shopkeepers. The
success of our venture, we argued solemnly, depended
on convincing the neighbourhood that we
meant to be taken as seriously as any other tradesman
in the street. Unfortunately, in saying this, we
reckoned without our customer; for, if you attempt
to be taken seriously as a shopkeeper, the one error
to be avoided is that of taking the customer seriously.</p>

<p>Naturally, we began by taking the customer very
seriously. The first one who entered the shop was
instantly confronted with three eager shop assistants,
who asked him breathlessly and in unison what they
might have the pleasure of showing him. He replied
politely that he had known perfectly well what
they might have the pleasure of showing him, before
they asked him what it was, but that their unbroken
front and commercial zeal had entirely put it out of
his head. Two of us thereupon beat a wise retreat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
and left the field to the militant member of our committee,
who promptly told our first customer that she
was sure he wanted a suffrage tie in the colours. He
agreed to this, dubiously at first, afterwards with real
alacrity when she offered him the alternative of a tobacco-pouch,
prettily decorated with a hand-painted
sketch of Holloway Gaol, done from memory.</p>

<p>"I never smoke a pipe," he explained, excusing
himself for his firmness over the tobacco-pouch;
"but I can wear the tie, perhaps, when I call on
people who won't allow me to talk about votes for
women."</p>

<p>"This tie will speak for itself," said the shop
assistant.</p>

<p>"It will," agreed her customer with a warmth
that seemed to us excessive, until we perceived that
the tie was oozing forth in all directions from the
insufficient piece of paper in which it was being
wrapped up.</p>

<p>After the departure of our first customer, we reconsidered
the position. It was evident that as
shopkeepers we started with a distinct handicap,
being ourselves amateurs in selling, whereas no
customer is ever an amateur in buying. A woman
may never have entered a suffrage shop in order to
buy an instructive pamphlet, but most women know
how to pass a pleasant half-hour in a hat shop without
buying anything. We must be on our guard,
we decided, against the customer who came, not to
buy, but to shop, the opportunities open to the
customer for falling short of the shopkeeper's ideal
of her being greatly multiplied when the shop at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
which she shops is one for the dissemination of
suffrage literature and not for the display of spring
millinery. Also, on the initiative of the militant
member of our committee, it was resolved that only
one person at a time should serve any one customer,
and that if a second customer should enter while
everybody was still hunting for the pamphlet the
first customer wanted to buy, somebody should call
"Shop!" in a professional tone up the spiral staircase,
in order to disabuse the minds of both customers
of the notion that we were new at our work.
We found, on carrying this last precept into practice,
that it had a marked effect on the waiting customer,
though very little on the mythical resources of the
spiral staircase.</p>

<p>Having settled down to wait for the customers
who were going to make our shop a thriving business,
we found that the majority of them belonged
to those who went out to shop and not to buy.
Numbers of them, indeed, seemed to be there on the
assumption that if you want to buy something, one
shop is as good as another in which to seek it. A
good deal of useful experience is probably gained
in this way by the one who shops; but when you are
the shopkeeper, you wish it could be gained at somebody
else's expense. We felt this very strongly the
day that our door was burst abruptly open by a
ragged, unkempt gentleman who wanted a soup
ticket.</p>

<p>The childlike confidence of this particular gentleman
in the ability of the Suffragettes to supply his
wants, was at once pathetic and complimentary;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
but the pathos of it did not reveal itself to the
haughty, disapproving lady who was already in the
shop, giving advice to us all. She left at once,
clearly convinced that really good unsought advice
was wasted on people who kept such low company,
an opinion that would have been startlingly confirmed
had she waited long enough to see the ticket-of-leave
man.</p>

<p>The ticket-of-leave man came in to ask if we could
give him a job. Obviously, he belonged to the great
army of those who can do "anything"; we had no
job to give, and told him so&mdash;a little curtly, I am
afraid, as a consequence of many previous interruptions
from those who did not come to buy. He
stood a moment, fumbling at the latch of the door
without raising it; then he turned round again.</p>

<p>"Don't send me away, lady," he pleaded. "I've
been to prison too, same as all of you."</p>

<p>The woman who alone among us answered to this
generic description of a mild and blameless local
committee, came swiftly forward.</p>

<p>"I'm sorry," she said. "What can we do for
you, and what made you come to us?"</p>

<p>The man jerked his hand towards the corner of
the street where a policeman stood on the point.
"Said he couldn't help me himself," was the reply.
"Oh, he spoke kind enough, I'm not complaining of
the coppers&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"No, of course not," agreed our militant member.
"He's especially nice, that one. He's the one that
arrested me in Parliament Square."</p>

<p>Another customer, who was making a genuine<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
purchase, was struck speechless by this calm announcement
on the part of an amiable-looking shop
assistant; but the ticket-of-leave man went on with
his tale unemotionally.</p>

<p>"He said to me&mdash;'You go to the Suffragettes
yonder,' he said; 'they'll help you if anyone can,'
he said. So I came in on the chance like."</p>

<p>We were rather sorry that our friend on the point
sent us no more ticket-of-leave men to vary the
monotony of business life and to add to the circle of
acquaintance of our militant member. She, however,
always maintained that it was an error of
judgment, if not of taste, on our part, to present
the policeman who had once arrested her with the
hand-painted tobacco-pouch, though she admitted
that he might use it for the rest of his life without
discovering what the sketch of Holloway Gaol was
meant for.</p>

<p>The customer who was most destructive of our
peace was the kind of amiable person who, having
completed an infinitesimal purchase, stayed to chat,
monopolizing the one shop chair and barricading a
diminutive counter against anybody else who might
really want to buy something. We greatly preferred
the flippant jester who, attracted by our ingenuous
notice inviting people to come in and ask for
what they did not see in the window, would sometimes
put his head in at the door to ask facetiously
for a vote; but we were rather glad that the humorist
of the street was, as a rule, too short to reach the
latch, and had to satisfy his sense of humour by assuming
that the name of every woman in the shop,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
not excluding the charwoman, was Pankhurst, a quip
that afforded exquisite joy to the little crowd that
loved to hang round our doorway, besides advertising
the object of our shop very nicely. Sometimes,
the limitations of the street repertoire became a
little tiresome. Admitting that the phrase "Votes
for Women" could not be said seriously too often
in a reactionary world, we felt that it was out of
place when hurled as an original remark through the
letter-box by somebody who instantly ran away.
This method of backing a belief in any cause, though
practised in high places, might well be eradicated,
we thought, in very small and very elementary
school children before it was too late; so we caught
one of them, a little girl staggering under the burden
of a large baby, and made her listen to reason. She
was extremely friendly about it, said she didn't see
but what we were right, even if we did smack policemen's
faces, and kindly promised to come and have
a look round, as soon as her little sister was free to
take over the responsibility of the baby.</p>

<p>It became increasingly difficult to sustain our professional
pose as the shop grew more popular, because
kindly old ladies insisted on coming in to ask
if we took our meals regularly, and to beg us not to
fall down the spiral staircase, which looked perilous,
I suppose, to any one who saw us for the first time
steering a tea-tray down its ramifications, but always
seemed to us pleasantly emblematic of our mounting
aspirations. Curiously enough, it was on the day
the shop was photographed that we finally won our
way to the respect of the trade, though at the time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
nothing in our business experience had made us feel
so much like children playing at shop.</p>

<p>Everything in the neighbourhood under the age of
twelve rushed helter-skelter to the spot. As fast as
the photographer swept them to one side of the
pavement, they closed up on the other; and only his
experienced agility and a lightning camera enabled
him to procure a picture that did not resemble an
advertisement of the Children's Holiday Fund. All
this was in the nature of a Roman holiday for the
neighbourhood, but we, summoned to the doorstep
to form part of the picture, felt it was to be counted
among the lesser sacrifices that have to be made for
a cause. The bystanders, of course, did not take
this view of our behaviour.</p>

<p>"Look at 'em," said one of these, just as we were
miserably submitting to being grouped in self-conscious,
affectionate attitudes that did not remotely
convey the business-like relations of a business-like
committee. "That's what they like!
Votes for women, indeed!"</p>

<p>Fixed by the glassy eye of the camera, we were
unable to reply to this; so our scornful critic went
away, doubtless confirmed in his belief that there is
no higher reward for a rebel woman than that of
standing in a thin blouse, at a street corner, to be
photographed, blown about by a cutting east wind,
jostled by yelling children, and exposed to the chance
of recognition at any minute by some disapproving
friend or relative.</p>

<p>"Nobody will ever look upon us as real people in
business, after that," sighed one of our shop assistants<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
when we regained comparative privacy behind
the counter.</p>

<p>"Nobody," acquiesced our militant member,
gloomily. "And only this morning, I was really
feeling like a genuine tradesman when I took down
the shutters and agreed with the man next door that
trade will never improve as long as this Government
is in power."</p>

<p>"Our trade certainly won't," agreed a chorus of
anti-Government agitators.</p>

<p>The door was suddenly flung open, and a boy came
in and flung a sovereign on the counter.</p>

<p>"Could you oblige Mr. Bunting with change,
please, miss?" he asked briskly.</p>

<p>That was all. There was no condescension in his
tone. There was no impudence in his manner. He
did not ask if we wanted our rights now, or if we
would sooner wait till we got them. He did not say
he had no wish to see women sitting in <em>his</em> Parliament.
He just stood there, as shopman to shopman,
waiting to effect a trade transaction that raised us,
once and for all, beyond the level of amateurs.</p>

<p>Nothing approaching a sovereign's worth of
change was in the chocolate-box hopefully described
by us as the till; but our militant member, now as
ever, knew how to rise to a great occasion. She
looked up from the column of figures she had hastily
pretended to be adding up when the shop bell
tinkled, seemed to take in the boy's request with
difficulty, called "Forward, dear, please!" in a
languid tone up the spiral staircase, then returned
to the column of figures. No lady of business experience<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
in any shop or any post office could have
been more exasperatingly irrelevant.</p>

<p>The rest of us looked fearfully at the boy in front
of the counter. He was kicking his heels together
and whistling tunelessly. Her procedure had, indeed,
not erred in a single detail; and he saw nothing
aggressive in her behaviour. Henceforth we
knew we could count on being treated in the trade
as equals.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="XI" id="XI">XI</a><br />
The Person who cannot Escape</h2>


<p>The lady of the manor seemed gently amused
when I criticized the architecture of the
cottage in which I had taken rooms, on the farther
side of the village.</p>

<p>"It is not picturesque, like those that belong to
us," she admitted; "and I always think it was a
little unwise of Horace to let that piece of land for
building purposes without having the plans submitted
to us first. Still, the land was no good for
anything else, not even for allotments; and if we
had stipulated for gables and things of that sort we
might have it still on our hands, a prey to taxation."</p>

<p>"I'm not thinking of the outside," I said; "it's
the inside that matters when you have to live in a
place. Nor am I thinking of myself, being in a
position to leave whenever I find it impossible to
endure the discomfort another minute&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"My dear," said the lady of the manor, looking
concerned, "is it as bad as that? I told you it was
absurd to expect to find rooms in a primitive place
like this&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"I am not thinking of myself," I repeated, "but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
of poor Mr. and Mrs. Jim Bunce, who have to live
there always because there isn't another cottage in
the place, to say nothing of all the little Bunces,
three boys and a little&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"Oh!" she smiled, instantly reassured; "don't
worry about them. They are not writing books, like
their lodger. You must remember that the poor do
not feel things, as you and I do; otherwise, they
would appreciate nice houses when they get them.
Only think how disheartened Horace and I were
over those sweet gabled cottages we re-fronted for
them down by the marsh&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"Were those the ones you told me on no account
to go to?" I interrupted, presuming unkindly on an
old friendship.</p>

<p>I was told not to be unreasonable. "Naturally,
I advised you to go to a newer place where the sanitation
would be better," said my hostess. "I am
sorry you don't like the Bunces' house, but that is
your own fault for not coming here when you were
invited."</p>

<p>"It seems to me rather more the fault of the man
who built the Bunces' house," I represented, still
unreasonably, as I gathered from her expression.
"Have you seriously studied its front elevation?
A child could draw it on a slate:&mdash;two rooms upstairs,
two rooms downstairs; two windows upstairs,
two windows downstairs; chimneys anywhere you
like, but never in direct communication with fireplaces,
as the lodger discovers when the fire is
lighted in the sitting-room."</p>

<p>"It is no use trying to teach these people anything,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
murmured the lady of the manor; "of
course, damp wood, badly laid&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"It reminds me," I continued, "of a dolls' house
I once had, made out of a packing-case, neatly
divided into four compartments, with a staircase
jammed against one side of it and brought to an
abrupt termination by the doorstep. The staircase
is exactly like my dolls' house one, so steep that a
false step lands one straight in the front garden
with no conscious interval for falling. Mrs. Jim
kindly provides against this contingency by leaving
the front door always open," I added hastily, in
deference to a look of renewed concern.</p>

<p>The lady of the manor agreed that there was
something in what I said about the defects of
modern architecture. "They do not build as they
once did," she observed sententiously; "but then,
the peasantry is not what it used to be. If the
poor were still thrifty and hard-working, and did
their own brewing and baking&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"How can they?" I interposed. "You should
see Mrs. Bunce's daily attempt to cook me a milk-pudding
in an oven that never bakes anything
equally on both sides, and sometimes refuses to
bake at all. Oh! I never know what or why the
poor are supposed to brew, but I do know that
they cannot bake in the houses they are obliged to
live in."</p>

<p>"My dear," was the reply I received to all this,
"you have only yourself to blame for seeking impossibilities
in a country cottage, when you might
have settled down with your typewriter in the blue<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
room over the library, and had your meals regularly.
I do not pity you in the least."</p>

<p>"I do not pity myself," I said. "The person
to be pitied is the person who cannot escape, never
the person who can."</p>

<p>As I walked back to the cottage that was built
on the plan of a dolls' house, I wondered how long
it would be before I availed myself of my privilege
of escape. When I first became Mrs. Jim Bunce's
lodger, a polite fiction existed that I was to dwell
apart in the two front rooms, away from the family,
a detached and superior position that might have
made the writing of books a possibility. Unfortunately,
this magnificent isolation had to yield
to the force of numbers. There was only a sketchy,
ill-fitting door between me and the kitchen, and I
shared to some extent in the family joys and
sorrows&mdash;they were generally sorrows&mdash;even
when this was closed. More often it gave way before
sudden pressure, and burst open to admit a
crawling baby, followed by an assortment of small
boys, pigs, chickens, puppies, and anything else that
was young and undisciplined, brought up tempestuously
at the rear by Mrs. Bunce and a broom. The
writing of books did not thrive under these conditions,
nor in the more strenuous moments that followed
when the baby girl, bored and whimpering,
had been carried off and set upon the flagstones
under my window with nothing more thrilling to
engage her attention than a piece of firewood.</p>

<p>The baby for once was not crying when I arrived
back at my rooms, a state of grace that was accounted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
for when I came upon her mother, who
was laying my tea, with the baby tucked under
one arm.</p>

<p>"She be that okkard I canna keep her quiet
another way," was Mrs. Jim's simple explanation
of her feat of skill.</p>

<p>It seemed an opportunity to make friends with
the greatest disturber of my peace, and I rashly
flirted with the baby until it was converted into the
firmest of allies. Nothing, as it turned out, could
have been more destructive of my future hopes of
accomplishing work. If it was difficult to write
when the baby cried, it became impossible when the
baby laughed. I cannot recommend the game of
"peep-bo" to any one who seriously wishes to combine
business and recreation, though the baby's
mother seemed to regard it habitually from this point
of view. I have seen her play "peep-bo" while she
mixed puddings, fed pigs or boys, washed clothes,
scrubbed floors, buried a dead chicken, or parcelled
out the weekly income into its amazing weekly
budget. Perhaps she led a less chequered existence
during the month I stayed with her; for without
acquiring her agility in doing housework with the
baby under one arm, I became an expert in distracting
the baby's attention from an insistent
tooth, and found this far harder work than any job
I was ever paid for. I came to the conclusion
that one does not know much about hard work until
one has lived with somebody whose work is never
done and never paid for.</p>

<p>This was particularly impressed upon me one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
evening, when, having put the children to bed,
fed every live thing that clamoured in the thickly
populated back yard, cleared away her husband's
supper and watched him start for the village club,
Mrs. Bunce told me she was going to step across the
road to do the week's washing for a sick neighbour.
This little act of humanity, mentioned so casually
as to divest it of the slightest taint of charity, kept
her at the wash-tub till past midnight; and at five
the next morning I heard her go downstairs to get
her man's breakfast. After that, one felt it would
be an immense relief to hear her grumble. She
never did; and there were moments when I began to
see points in the comfortable theory held by the
lady of the manor with regard to the insensibility of
"these people."</p>

<p>There was the day, for instance, when the baby,
after crying fretfully for two hours, took to battering
a saucepan lid with a tin spoon. I had borne
its wails with set teeth, but this new and excruciating
din took me into the back room, bent on remonstrance.
I was met with a beatific smile from Mrs.
Jim, who was peeling potatoes at the sink.</p>

<p>"Bless her heart!" she said placidly. "That
be the first time as ever she's been quiet this
morning!"</p>

<p>Finally came the day when stolid, undemonstrative
Mrs. Bunce upset all theories as to the wonderful
patience of the poor. The lady of the manor
called with an annual invitation to a mothers' tea.
It was Saturday afternoon, and the weekly house-cleaning
was in full swing. The inopportune visitor,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
stepping over a heap of small boys whose
tangled arms and legs suggested the interior of a
fisherman's worm-can, came next upon the baby,
who, in her week-end pinafore, was still hopefully
sucking a spoon that had once held jam. The
jam was distributed impartially over the baby's
countenance, and no one could pretend she was
looking her best, a criticism that might have been
applied with equal truth to her mother, who was
engaged in cleaning the kitchen flues. The general
effect of Mrs. Bunce's home was certainly not that
of the picturesque cottage interior so dear to the
imagination of those who live remotely in manor-houses;
and it was easy to see that this lady of the
manor welcomed such a heaven-sent opportunity
of being feudal, as she alluded in a perfectly kind
and courteous manner to the disarranged condition
of the kitchen stove and the mottled complexion
of the baby.</p>

<p>She gave her invitation as a sort of consolation
prize at the end, and went away without waiting to
hear if it was accepted&mdash;as in the good old days,
I suppose, when a refusal would have been met
with the <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">oubliette</i>. I walked up the road with her,
and learned how necessary it was to speak out
now and then; otherwise these young mothers
grew so careless and slovenly. The idea of slovenliness
in connection with this particular young
mother, who to my knowledge did the work of all
the servants in the manor-house, in addition to
being a wife and a mother and a dressmaker, left
me incapable of speech.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
Mrs. Jim Bunce, who had remained silent and
immovable while the duty of the rich in speaking
plainly to the poor was being fulfilled, sat playing
with the baby on her lap when I returned to the
house. There was just time to reflect that she had
chosen a curious moment at which to suspend
her weekly attack upon the flues, before she gave
me a further surprise.</p>

<p>"You wouldna think as I didn't never want to
have a girl when I had this one, would ye, miss?"
she jerked out abruptly.</p>

<p>Still failing to understand that anything unusual
was happening, I said something stupid and polite
about a personal preference for little girls. She
smiled across at me rather queerly as she started
suddenly to her feet and caught the baby to her
with a quick, passionate gesture that made it cry
out with astonishment.</p>

<p>"It bain't that," she said roughly. "I didna
want to bring another woman into it."</p>

<p>She stood there, looking at me fiercely, and the
baby gave another whimper to express its outraged
sense of the fitness of things. There was nothing
heroic in the woman's figure; I think her hair
was coming down, and there was soot about her,
and her blouse wore a general air of bulgy disorder.
At her feet lay strewn the symbols of inartistic
toil, a hairless stove broom, a cracked saucer with a
mess of blacklead in it, some indescribable bits of
rag. Over it all hung the sickly smell of stale,
unventilated air, mingled with the fumes of damp
and smouldering wood. It was assuredly not the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
setting for a great situation. Yet, as we stood
there, looking at each other, in the little hush that
fell upon us after that outburst of the rebel mother,
I found myself wondering if I had ever known how
great situations are made.</p>

<p>The baby struggled to escape from an embrace
it did not understand; and, of course, the baby
was right. Mrs. Jim Bunce recognized the call of
convention, and acknowledged it by giving a sound
scolding to those portions of her family that happened
to be within reach. The flues were attacked
afresh with tempestuous energy; the baby was
left sobbing and neglected in one corner, the
sprawling boys scurried to another. I was told as
plainly as looks could tell that my place on a Saturday
afternoon was not the home.</p>

<p>I decided that this was not the moment to explain
to Mrs. Jim Bunce that an age was dawning in which
women would be glad instead of afraid "to bring
another woman into it."</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="XII" id="XII">XII</a><br />
The Daughter who stays at Home</h2>


<p>"I suppose you think," Penelope threw at me
with unnecessary vehemence, "that it is
only the daughter who lives away from home who
is really a rebel."</p>

<p>"On the contrary," I said, "most rebellion is
bred in the home. Napoleon said&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>"Oh, I know what Napoleon said," interrupted
Penelope. "At least, I know the kind of thing he
must have said, if you want to quote it. Seriously,
I don't think you know what it feels like to be the
daughter who comes back to live at home, after
being handicapped by a modern education. You
see, the daughter has gone on, and the home hasn't.
It isn't mother's fault, because she naturally thought
she was fitting me for home life when she let me take
a college course in housewifery. But what is the
use of knowing all about the chemistry of cooking
and the science of house-cleaning, if you have to
apply it in a home that has stayed in the same place
for a hundred years? Everything and everybody is
against one, from the abominable kitchen-range to
the cook who has been with mother ever since she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
was married. You are going to say Napoleon
again."</p>

<p>"I was going to say," was the cautious reply she
received to this, "that the only victories which leave
no regret are those that are gained over ignorance."</p>

<p>"Who said that?" demanded Penelope suspiciously.</p>

<p>"Napoleon," I admitted.</p>

<p>"Now that we have got rid of Napoleon," proceeded
Penelope, coldly, "perhaps you will take
some interest in&mdash;oh, what rubbish to say that
about the victories that are gained over ignorance!
All the victories you win at home are victories over
ignorance, and they always leave regret behind, always,
always! That is why it is much worse to win
than to lose, when you fight at home, ever so much
worse!"</p>

<p>"Having got rid of Napoleon," I said soothingly,
"why do we not talk as though we had? Tell me
what is wrong with your mother's house, from the
college point of view."</p>

<p>Penelope stopped looking crestfallen, and chuckled.
"It is all creepers outside and old sinks inside,"
she exclaimed concisely. "But when I said
that to mother, she didn't understand one bit. She
even seemed a little hurt. I didn't mean to hurt anybody's
feelings, naturally; I was trying to be funny.
Do you think," she added irrelevantly, "that there
was ever a time when my grandmother called my
mother new-fangled?"</p>

<p>Knowing Penelope's mother, I said I thought this
possible; knowing Penelope, I went on to suggest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
that tact was an excellent substitute for humour in
the home.</p>

<p>"I know," she sighed. "But it is only in books
that the daughter of the house is a monument of
tact and goes about her household duties, rattling
an enormous bunch of keys and singing snatches of
gay song. I don't know how you sing snatches of
anything, but if it in the least resembles what Sarah
sings when she is cleaning plate, I am very glad that
only one of us does it. Of course, there is mother's
old bunch of keys if I want to rattle as I walk; but
as soon as I found out that only two of these opened
anything, I took off those two and tied them together
with a piece of ribbon. Even mother admitted the
wisdom of suppressing five-and-twenty keys that
belonged to no existing locks; but Cook regards my
piece of unofficial key ribbon as one more proof of
new-fangled ways. You don't know how difficult it
is to be a daughter of the house with success when
half the house knew you as a baby, and the other
half wishes it had never known you and your new-fangled
ways at all."</p>

<p>I asked for details of the new-fangled ways, and
the unsuccessful daughter of the house cheered up
slightly. "You should have seen their faces," she
said, "when I drew up a time-table of meals for
a whole week in advance, to save wasting Cook's
time, and mine, every morning. Cook nearly gave
notice."</p>

<p>To my objection that somebody's unusual appetite
or the arrival of an unexpected guest would upset
the time-table for the rest of the week, she retorted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
that the same might be said of the time-table for any
one day. "In both cases you would merely send out
for something extra," she represented. "But I
can't induce Cook to see that. She says it has never
been done that way, and&mdash;oh, you know the rest!
It's so queer, isn't it, that people think there is something
abnormal and unfeminine about you if you get
the housekeeping done in ten minutes instead of
spreading it over the whole morning? Besides,
when I set out to make a list of meals for a whole
week, I choose a moment when I am feeling hungry
and therefore inspired. That gives one a chance of
inventing something new; but if I go into the
kitchen directly I have eaten a large breakfast,
the thought of more meals is intolerable, and I
say 'Yes' to all the dull old dishes that Cook
suggests."</p>

<p>The housework led to more rebellion, she proceeded
to complain. "I did my best to persuade
Sarah that if she would do the cleaning in a labour-saving
sort of way she would probably have time
to go for a walk every day before luncheon. That
caused a revolution." Pressed for particulars of the
revolution, Penelope chuckled again. "First, there
was Cook, who said she had never been in any place
where the housemaid went for a walk before luncheon;
she further intimated that she could not stay
in a place where the housemaid, etc., etc. Then
there was mother, who said that, of course, she
would not dream of interfering when I was doing
everything so nicely, and all that; but if I went away
at any time it would be very awkward for her, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
she couldn't have the maids going for walks at all
hours of the day, with no one to see where they
went. I pointed out to her that I should not dream
of seeing where they went, if I were at home,
also that they already went out on stated evenings,
when it might be even more desirable and
was certainly less possible to see where they
went. Mother was just beginning to understand&mdash;mother
is splendid, really, you know!&mdash;when Sarah
spoiled everything by declaring that nothing would
induce her to go out in the morning. She had never
been expected to do such a thing in any other
place, and she wasn't going to be put upon now.
If she could have another evening instead and
an extra Sunday&mdash;well, after that, all was sound
and confusion, and mother issued from the
struggle kind but triumphant. Since the plate-cleaning
episode, which followed close upon the
revolution, I have felt a mere flattened failure of a
daughter."</p>

<p>The plate-cleaning episode had been caused by the
attempted introduction of a cleaning-cloth, which
dispensed with the necessity for plate powder or
metal paste. "Sarah seemed quite pleased about
it at first," said Penelope with a sigh. "She
pretended to understand perfectly when I explained
how nice it would be to have a clean and empty
housemaid's cupboard, instead of having every
shelf crowded with plate-brushes and bits of sodden
rag and tins of sticky brass paste, and that horrid
saucer full of plate powder that sprinkles pink dust
over everything when it gets dry. You know that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
kind of cupboard, don't you? Well, Sarah took
to the idea like a lamb, and everything was going
splendidly when mother caught her rubbing up the
drawing-room candlesticks with my new patent
cloth; and because I couldn't prove on the spur
of the moment that the Sheffield plate would be
none the worse for it fifty years hence, mother said
she had the utmost confidence in my judgment,
but she could not help feeling that the old way
was safer. After that, I found Cook putting the
cloth on the fire with the tongs, while Sarah hoped
impressively at the top of her voice that she hadn't
given herself blood-poisoning by using the nasty-smelling
thing. So now all the old pink saucers
and tins and things have reappeared in the housemaid's
cupboard, and the plate-cleaning once more
occupies the whole of the morning, and the brass
occupies another and the stair-rods another, to
say nothing of all the useless copper pots and pans
on the kitchen chimney-piece that Cook never
uses, but won't let me put away&mdash;oh, we are jogging
along quite comfortably now in the dear old
way of a hundred years ago!"</p>

<p>The sequel to this occurred about a week later,
when I went to call on Penelope's mother and found
ladders placed against the front of the house,
and the trailing creepers of ages given over to the
ministrations of the local nurseryman.</p>

<p>"Yes," said Penelope's mother, complacently,
"they should have been cut before. Creepers are
unhealthy things; they shut out light and air and
spoil the window architecture. As Penelope says,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
the outside is the only part of any house on which
the architect has expended either skill or attention,
so it is a pity to hide it."</p>

<p>I said something polite down her ear-trumpet
about new ways of looking at these things; and
Penelope's mother smiled in agreement. "Some
people do not know how to move with the times,"
she said. "Because a thing was done in a certain
way a hundred years ago, let it be done in that
way for ever and ever, they say. Yet, by bringing
intelligence to bear upon the common things of
every day, even toil may become a pleasure, and
duty&mdash;well, duty almost ceases to exist. Of
course, I am speaking figuratively," she added
hastily, as if she felt she had gone too far.</p>

<p>Not knowing exactly how duty could be a figure
of speech, or how, indeed, it could ever be anything
else, I remained silent before this reincarnation of
the earliest Victorian lady I know; and Penelope's
mother took up the silver teapot&mdash;not, however,
to pour out tea, but to point out to me its shining
surface.</p>

<p>"In my housemaid's cupboard," she said proudly,
"you will find no pieces of sodden rag, no tins of
sticky brass paste, or that unpleasant saucer that
sprinkles pink dust over everything within reach.
We have banished all that in favour of&mdash;ah, Penelope,
my dear, run and ask Sarah for one of my
new cleaning-cloths, will you?"</p>

<p>In the doorway stood Penelope, mockery shining
from her eyes.</p>

<p>"And you dare to tell me that tact is more useful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
in the home than a sense of humour!" she cried,
in a voice that thrilled with scorn.</p>

<p>"At all events," I retorted, "you must admit
that Napoleon&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>Penelope went hastily to fetch her mother's new
cleaning-cloth.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII">XIII</a><br />
The Game that wasn't Cricket</h2>


<p>Down the alley where I happen to live, playtime
draws a sharp line between the sexes. It
is not so noticeable during working hours, when
girls and boys, banded together by the common
grievance of compulsory education, trot off to school
almost as allies, even hand-in-hand in those cases
where protection is sought from the little girl by
the little boy who raced her into the world and
lost&mdash;or won&mdash;by half a length. But when
school is over sex antagonism, largely fostered by
the parent, immediately sets in. Knowing the size
of the average back yard in my neighbourhood,
I have plenty of sympathy for the mother who
wishes to keep it clear of children. But I always
want to know why, in order to secure this privacy,
she gives the boy a piece of bread-and-dripping and
a ball, while the girl is given a piece of bread-and-dripping
and a baby. And I have not yet decided
which of the two toys is the more destructive of my
peace.</p>

<p>Every evening during the summer, cricket is
played just below my window in the hour preceding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
sunset. Cricket, as played in my alley, is less
noisy than football, in which anything that comes
handy as a substitute for the ball may be used,
preferably an old, jagged salmon-tin. But cricket
lasts longer, the nerves of the parents whose windows
overlook the cricket ground being able to
stand it better. As the best working hour of my
day is destroyed equally by both, I have no feeling
either way, except that the cricket, as showing a
more masterly evasion of difficulties, appeals to me
rather more. It is comparatively easy to achieve
some resemblance to a game of football even in a
narrow strip of pavement bordered by houses, where
you can place one goal in the porch of the model
dwellings at the blind end of the alley, and the other
goal among the motor traffic at the street end. But
first-class cricket is more difficult of attainment when
the field is so crowded as to make it hard to decide
which player out of three or four has caught
you out, while your only chance of not being run
out first ball is to take the wicket with you&mdash;always
a possibility when the wicket is somebody's
coat that has a way of getting mixed up with the
batsman's feet.</p>

<p>In spite of obstacles, however, the cricket goes
on every evening before sunset; and all the while,
the little girl who tripped to school on such a gay
basis of equality with her brother only a few hours
back, sits on the doorstep minding the baby. I
do not say that she actively objects to this; I
only know with acute certainty that the baby objects
to it, and for a long time I felt that it would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
be at least interesting to see what would happen
if the little girl were to stand up at the wicket
for a change while her brother dealt with the
baby.</p>

<p>And the other evening this did happen. A
mother, making one of those sorties from the domestic
stronghold, that in my alley always have
the effect of bringing a look of guilt into the faces
of the innocent, shouted something I did not hear,
picked up the wicket, cuffed somebody's head with
it and made him put it on, gave the baby to a
brother, and sent his sister off to the oil-shop with a
jar in one hand and a penny tightly clasped in the
other. The interruption over, the scattered field
re-formed automatically, somebody else's jacket
was made into a mound, and cricket was resumed
with the loss of one player, who, by the way,
showed an astonishing talent for minding the
baby.</p>

<p>Then the little girl came back from the oil-shop.
I know not what spirit of revolt entered suddenly
her small, subdued soul; perhaps the sight of a
boy minding the baby suggested an upheaval of the
universe that demanded her instant co-operation;
perhaps she had no distinct idea in her mind beyond
a wish to rebel. Whatever her reasons, there
she stood, <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'hat'">bat</ins> in hand, waiting for the ball, while
the baby crowed delightedly in the unusual embrace
of a boy who, by all the laws of custom, was unsexing
himself.</p>

<p>Another instant, and the air was rent with sound<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
and fury. In front of the wicket stood the Spirit
of Revolt, with tumbled hair and defiant eyes,
breathless with much running, intoxicated with
success; around her, an outraged cricket team,
strong in the conventions of a lifetime, was protesting
fiercely.</p>

<p>What had happened was quite simple. Grasping
in an instant of time the only possible way of
eluding the crowd of fielders in the narrow space,
the little impromptu batswoman had done the obvious
thing and struck the ball against the wall
high over their heads, whence it bounded into the
open street and got lost in the traffic. Then she
ran till she could run no more. Why wasn't it
fair? she wanted to know.</p>

<p>"'Cause it ain't&mdash;there!" was one illuminating
reply.</p>

<p>"'Cause we don't never play that way," was
another upon which she was quick to pounce.</p>

<p>"You never thought of it, that's why!" she retorted
shrewdly.</p>

<p>She was desperately outnumbered. It was magnificent,
but it wasn't cricket; moreover, her place
was the doorstep, as she was speedily reminded
when the door reopened and avenging
motherhood once more swooped down upon the
scene. A shake here, a push there&mdash;and the boy
was back again at the wicket, while a weeping baby
lay unheeded on the lap of a weeping Spirit of
Revolt.</p>

<p>And the queer thing is that the innovation made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
by the small batswoman in her one instant of wild
rebellion has now been adopted by the team that
plays cricket down my alley, every evening before
sunset.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span></p>




<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV">XIV</a><br />
Dissension in the Home</h2>


<p>"I should be delighted to get up a meeting
for you in my house," said the enthusiastic
new recruit. "I always have said that women who
paid rates and taxes&mdash;I beg your pardon? Oh,
speakers&mdash;of course, speakers! Well, they must
be the very best you have; people get so easily bored,
don't they? And that's so bad for the cause." She
reflected an instant, then fired off the names of three
famous Suffragettes and was astonished to hear that
the well-known leaders rarely had time to address
drawing-room meetings.</p>

<p>"Isn't that rather a mistake?" she suggested,
with the splendid effrontery of the new recruit.
"It is so important to attract the leisured woman
who won't go to public meetings for fear of being
stuck with a hatpin. I'm really afraid my crowd
won't come unless they see a name they know on
the cards." Finding that this made no appeal to
one who had heard it often before, she asked in a resigned
tone if a window breaker would be available.
"If I could put on the invitation card&mdash;'Why
I broke a Prime Minister's window, by One who
has done it,' they'd come in flocks. No, it wouldn't
matter <em>much</em> if she had broken somebody else's window.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
As long as she had broken something&mdash;do
<em>you</em> speak, by the way? Your voice is hardly
strong enough, perhaps?"</p>

<p>The suffrage organiser, hoarse with having held
two open-air meetings a day for the past week, admitted
that she did speak sometimes. "I've been
to prison too, if that is any good," she added cynically.</p>

<p>The cynicism was unperceived. "Have you?
But that will be perfectly delightful! Can I
promise them that you will speak about picking
oakum and doing the treadmill? Oh, don't they?
I thought all the Suffragettes picked oakum in Holloway,
and that was why they&mdash;never mind!
You've really eaten skilly, and that ought to fetch
them, if anything will. The Chair? Oh, I really
don't think I <em>could</em>;&mdash;I should die of terror, I
know I should. What should I have to do? Yes,
I suppose I could tell them why I want a vote. I
always have said that women who paid rates and
taxes&mdash;yes, Wednesday at nine o'clock. You'll
come and dine first, won't you? It's so good for
the unconverted to meet you at dinner, just to see
that you do know how to hold a knife and fork.
My husband is so very much opposed; I like to do
all I can in a <em>quiet</em> way to show him that the Suffragettes
are <em>not</em> all&mdash;can't you really? Well,
come as early as you can; I shall be simply dead
with nervousness if I'm left unsupported. By the
way, you'll wear your most feminine frock, won't
you? I hope you don't mind my mentioning it, but
it is so important to impress the leisured woman&mdash;to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
say nothing of my husband! I am so anxious to
avoid causing dissension in the home; I think that
would be <em>wrong</em>, don't you? Of course, I shall let
them all think that you may turn up in goloshes and
spectacles; it will make the contrast all the greater,
and that is so good for the cause!"</p>

<p>"Mrs. Fontenella wants to give a drawing-room
meeting," said the organiser, when she returned to
the office. "She seems to have a curious set of
friends who look upon suffrage as a sort of music
hall entertainment; so she wants me to speak because
I have picked oakum in Holloway, and you,
because you have broken something. I think she
must be an Anti by birth."</p>

<p>"Oh, no," answered the woman who had broken
something. "She is really a Suffragette by birth,
and only an Anti by marriage. I am glad we have
won her back again."</p>

<p>"Then why does she talk as if we were all
mountebanks?" asked the other, unconvinced.</p>

<p>The breaker of Government plate glass shook her
head slowly. "I don't know," she said. "I think,
perhaps, it may be because she has lived eleven
years with somebody from whom she is obliged to
conceal what she really feels about things."</p>

<p>"She isn't obliged to conceal anything; nobody
is!" cried the organiser, hotly. "If these people
had the courage to show fight&mdash;"</p>

<p>"They have&mdash;when the fight is worth it," struck
in the older woman. "Those are just the people
whose courage is inexhaustible, when real courage
is required. I don't know why it is so, unless it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
is that they haven't wasted it over things that don't
matter, and so they have a reserve fund to draw
upon for a great occasion. That's the best of a
cause like ours&mdash;it furnishes them with the great
occasion."</p>

<p>"Mrs. Fontenella's reserve fund must be colossal,"
said the organiser, still unconvinced.</p>

<p>The audience that was lured to Mrs. Fontenella's
house on Wednesday evening by a prospect of meeting
two eccentric females who had been to gaol&mdash;doubtless
because they richly deserved it&mdash;was
composed of the elements that usually go to make
up such audiences. It was very rich, very idle, very
limited; it was polite by education and rather insolent
by nature; and, with the exception of one or
two of the men, who nursed an academic belief
in the woman's vote because they hoped that under
masculine influence it might be used to strengthen
the right political party, it was not interested in politics.
The men were there because they thought it
was a sporting idea of the most popular hostess in
their set to pretend to be a Suffragette; and the
women were there to show their disapproval of a
shrieking minority, who, for the sake of notoriety,
were rapidly destroying the ideal of womanhood
that had been implanted in every Englishman's
breast by his mother;&mdash;at least, those were the
reasons they gave one another for being there, as
they sat in rows on gilded upright chairs, waiting
for the fun to begin. When it did begin, they experienced
a distinct sensation of having been cheated
of their entertainment.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
It was not that they found it difficult to recognise
the most popular hostess they knew in the
apologetic lady who stood up, glittering with gems,
against an expensive background of hothouse plants,
and read out platitudes from a type-written paper
in a high-pitched, jerky voice; though everything
was wrong in that opening speech from the Chair.
It was flippant without being funny; it threw up
defences where it should have attacked; it jarred
where it should have conciliated. One at least of
the two women who shared the platform with her,
chafing under the huge mistake of her speech, felt
inclined to agree with the audience that the speaker
was only pretending to be a Suffragette. It was not
this that disappointed the audience, however. It had
expected nothing else from one of its own set, who
was obviously unfitted both by nature and upbringing
to sustain a part that she had only assumed because
it was something new&mdash;just as she might
have hired a pianola or a gramophone when these
two were novelties. But it was not fair to invite
people to meet two hooligans who had fought with
policemen, and then to confront them with two normal
looking, normally dressed women, of whom it
was impossible to believe anything that was not
consistent with breeding and good form. Disappointment
grew when the faltering little speech of
the Chairman came to an end, and the younger of
the two Suffragettes, with a fleeting glance at her
notes, rose to her feet. A woman who had picked
oakum and defied wardresses&mdash;their hostess had
omitted no detail likely to attract her "crowd"&mdash;had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
no right to a soft, humorous voice, or to an
educated accent. Entertainment there was of a
sort; for the most obdurate Anti-suffragist could
scarcely have remained proof against the wit and
good temper of the girl who stood there, undaunted
by the atmosphere of opposition that filled the room,
turning the laugh against her opponents with every
point that she made. Still, it was not the kind of
entertainment they had been led to expect, and a
certain amount of discomfiture mingled with the
laughter and the applause that she won by the time
she sat down.</p>

<p>Then the older woman, the one who had broken
windows, took her place. There was nothing conciliatory,
nothing amusing in what she said. She
did not raise a laugh once; she uttered no sort of
appeal; she never so much as hinted at an apology
for what she and other women like her had felt impelled
to do. She made some of her listeners
angry; some of them she moved deeply; others she
greatly perplexed; but she left none of them precisely
where they had been when she began to speak,
and when she sat down there was hardly any applause.
Nearly every man in the room was staring
at his boots; the women played with their lace and
their rings, avoiding one another's eyes. A few
were horribly ashamed of having tears in theirs.</p>

<p>The Chairman did not rise for a moment or two.
She was scribbling something rapidly on a piece of
paper, which she twisted up and sent down the
length of the brilliantly lighted room to a man who
stood lounging carelessly in the doorway. He untwisted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
it with extreme deliberation, crushed it up
in his hand when he had read it, and looked his
wife straight in the eyes, across the backs of the
waiting people in the chairs. She met his look for
just two seconds before she stood up and cleared
her throat.</p>

<p>The rows of people in the chairs stirred with a
sensation of relief. Eloquence and wit, they knew,
were not in the repertory of Mrs. Fontenella when
she was posing as a Suffragette; but at least she
could be counted upon not to make them feel uncomfortable.
When she stood there silent, gripping
the table with both hands and looking straight
down the room, along the road that her twisted
scrap of paper had taken to the man in the doorway,
they began to think something was a little wrong.</p>

<p>Did she, realising that the last speaker had overstepped
the limits of good taste, feel incapable of
dealing with the situation? It was certainly a little
awkward for her to continue to occupy the Chair,
under the circumstances.</p>

<p>"Ask for questions," prompted the organiser
who sat on her left; and she pushed the agenda
paper towards her, thinking she was nervous and
could think of nothing to say.</p>

<p>Mrs. Fontenella was not nervous. She glanced
round at her prompter with a reassuring smile and
brushed aside the agenda paper. Then she faced
the crowd she had brought there under false pretences,
and gave them the second shock they had
received that evening.</p>

<p>"Friends," she said, in a voice that no longer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
faltered or apologised, a voice that was pitched exactly
right and held her listeners strangely, "the
last speaker has told us that another deputation of
women will try to reach the presence of the Prime
Minister, next week. You know what that means&mdash;almost
certain imprisonment for the women who
go on that deputation, but also a certain chance for
every one of us to do something towards winning
a great reform. I am going on that deputation.
Which of you will come with me?"</p>

<p>Those who managed furtively to look round at
the man in the doorway, were extremely puzzled
by the interested smile he wore.</p>

<hr class="tb" />

<p>"You were right about that woman, and I was
utterly wrong," confessed the organiser, as she
walked away from the house with the other speaker.
"I do hope she won't have a bad time with that
Anti husband of hers!"</p>

<p>"You never know," said her companion, who
had seen the interested smile of the man in the
doorway. "That's the blessed thing about marriage;&mdash;you
never know."</p>

<p>"What!" exclaimed the younger woman. "Do
you mean to say he is a Suffragette by birth, too?"</p>

<p>"No," was the reply. "I should say he was an
Anti by birth; but I think he may be a Suffragette
by marriage, though I doubt if he or his wife had
found it out until to-night."</p>

<p>In a long and brilliantly lighted drawing-room,
desolate with its rows of empty chairs, the popular
hostess who was also a Suffragette stood alone with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
the man whose smile had puzzled every one who
saw it, half-an-hour ago, except the woman who
had broken windows.</p>

<p>"It's simply magnificent of you," said his wife.</p>

<p>He took a walk round and moved some of the
expensive hothouse plants. "I hate these things,"
he said. "Why do we have them? Let's open
some more windows and get rid of the smell."</p>

<p>She laughed, and watched him go across to
manipulate blinds and bolts. "You are always the
same man I married, even when you are quite different,
as you were this evening," she remarked,
with equal inconsequence.</p>

<p>"You're not the same woman as the one I married!"
he shot back at her.</p>

<p>"But I am!" she cried. "I am, I am! And
that's the whole point!"</p>

<p>He looked round at her, the smile back in his
face. "Perhaps it is," he said. "Perhaps it is.
Pity we've both missed it for eleven years, isn't it?"<br/></p>


<h2>THE END<br/><br/></h2>




<div class="center"><h2>THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN</h2>

<h3>BY
WINWOOD READE</h3></div>

<p class="center"><i>Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 15 cents</i></p>

<p class="center"><i>A Biographical Sketch of the Author and an Estimate of his<br />
Work. Also Portrait Frontispiece</i></p>

<p>Some of the Topics:</p>

<p>Egypt&mdash;Western Asia&mdash;The Greeks&mdash;The Macedonians&mdash;The
Natural History of Religion&mdash;The Israelites&mdash;The Jews&mdash;The
Character of Jesus&mdash;The Character of Mahomet&mdash;Ancient
Europe&mdash;The Slave Trade&mdash;Abolition in Europe&mdash;Abolition
in America&mdash;Animal Period of the Earth&mdash;The Future
of the Human Race&mdash;The Religion of Reason and Love.<br/></p>


<div class="center"><h2>SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS</h2>

<h2>Some Uninvited Messages</h2>

<h3>BY
W. J. GHENT</h3></div>

<p class="center"><i>$1.00 net. Postage 15 cents</i></p>

<p>"Socialism and Success" bears a pertinent message "To
the Seekers of Success," "To the Reformers," "To the
Retainers," "To Some Socialists," "To Mr. John Smith,
Workingman," and "To the Sceptics and Doubters."
Every reader will find food for thought in its keen analysis
of motives, its fearless criticism, and its pointed suggestion.
Although a socialist, Mr. Ghent is not blind to the faults and
weaknesses of the socialist movement, and he states them
frankly.</p>

<p>This is a book that will cause controversy, a book that
hits hard at human foibles, a book that will win high praise
and severe censure. No socialist or non-socialist can afford
to miss the live argument and pithy suggestion contained in
its pages.<br/></p>


<div class="center"><h2>
BERNARD SHAW<br />
AS ARTIST-PHILOSOPHER<br />
</h2>

<h3><small>BY</small> RENEE M. DEACON</h3></div>

<p class="center"><i>Cloth. 16mo. $1.00 net. Postage 10 cents</i></p>

<p>*<sub><big>*</big></sub>* A brief account of the Shavian philosophy, in which
the main trend of Bernard Shaw's thought is clearly indicated,
and his attitude toward life is revealed.</p>

<p>*<sub><big>*</big></sub>* "Perhaps the best examination of Bernard Shaw
that has been published in English."&mdash;<cite>Dundee Advertiser.</cite></p>

<p>"Full of quick and suggestive ideas. Many will gain a
new and perhaps a truer view of Shaw, his work and his intentions,
through this thoughtful work."&mdash;<cite>Chicago Record-Herald.</cite><br/></p>


<div class="center"><h2>SOCIALISM AND SUPERIOR BRAINS</h2>

<h3><small>BY</small> BERNARD SHAW</h3></div>

<p class="center"><i>Cloth. 16mo. 75 cents net. Postage 10 cents</i></p>

<p>Portrait frontispiece by the author. A new book by
Bernard Shaw, dealing with the following topics:</p>

<ul><li>The Able Author.</li>
<li>The Able Inventor.</li>
<li>Ability at Supply-and-Demand Prices.</li>
<li>The Ability that Gives Value for Money.</li>
<li>Waste of Ability and Inflation of Its Prices by the Rich.</li>
<li>Artificial Rent of Ability.</li>
<li>Artificial Ability.</li>
<li>How Little Really Goes to Ability, etc., etc.</li>
</ul>

<p>"Written with that matchless virility for which Mr. Shaw
is so famous. Socialism has never had, and probably never
will have, a better and abler exponent and defender."&mdash;<cite>Dundee Advertiser.</cite><br/></p>

<div class="center"><h2>
MODERN WOMAN AND HOW TO<br />
MANAGE HER<br />
</h2>

<h3>BY
WALTER M. GALLICHAN</h3></div>

<p class="center"><i>Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 10 cents</i></p>

<p>*<sub><big>*</big></sub>* "It is from the man's point of view, of course&mdash;and Mr.
Gallichan has done it well and interestingly.... Every husband
should get this book&mdash;and every wife with any common sense at
all."&mdash;<cite>The Bookman</cite> (London).</p>

<p>SOME OF THE TOPICS DISCUSSED</p>

<ul><li>The Duel in Love</li>
<li>The War in Wedlock</li>
<li>The Battle in Politics</li>
<li>The Strife in Breadwinning</li>
<li>The Feud in the Family, etc.</li>
</ul>

<p>"A book for a host of men to read, and one that a number of them
will chuckle heartily over. An education in itself for almost all
men, and, we would say, the modern woman."&mdash;<cite>Tourist Magazine.</cite></p>

<p>"A keen, clear-eyed study of many important questions relating to
women and, therefore, to the life of to-day and the life of the future."&mdash;<cite>Book
News Monthly.</cite></p>

<p>"Has many unusual features and is never dull."&mdash;<cite>New Orleans Picayune.</cite></p>

<p>"Should be in every household."&mdash;<cite>Boston Herald.</cite></p>

<p>"Very amusing."&mdash;<cite>The Smart Set.</cite></p>

<p>"A volume that will stimulate thought and provide discussion. It
is never dull."&mdash;<cite>San Francisco Bulletin.</cite><br /><br /></p>


<div class="footnotes"><h2>FOOTNOTES:</h2>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> Since the above was written children's courts have been
established.</p></div></div>


<hr style="width: 65%;" />

<div class="tnote"><h3>Transcriber's Notes:</h3> <p>Obvious punctuation errors
repaired.</p>

<p>The remaining corrections made are indicated by dotted lines under the
corrections. Scroll the mouse over the word and the original text will <ins
title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'apprear'">appear</ins>.</p>

<p>Table of Contents: Error in original lists 'Chapter XIII.' as starting
on page 119; changed to 118 for actual starting page in book.</p>

<p>Page 7: word 'due' added to text (impossibility due to)</p>

<p>Page 120: word 'hat' changed to 'bat'</p></div>

<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42136 ***</div>
</body>
</html>
generated by cgit v1.2.3 (git 2.25.1) at 2026-04-05 07:20:13 +0000