Afterwards Miss Alimony recalled that guilty start, and the still more
guilty start that had happened, when presently she went out of the room
again and returned with a lamp, for the winter twilight was upon them.
Afterwards, too, she was to learn what had become of the service end of
her small poker, the little iron club, which she missed almost as soon
as Lady Harman had gone....

Lady Harman had taken that grubby but convenient little instrument and
hidden it in her muff, and she had gone straight out of Miss Alimony's
flat to the Post Office at the corner of Jago Street, and there, with
one simple effective impact, had smashed a ground-glass window, the
property of His Majesty King George the Fifth. And having done so, she
had called the attention of a youthful policeman, fresh from Yorkshire,
to her offence, and after a slight struggle with his incredulity and a
visit to the window in question, had escorted him to the South Hampsmith
police-station, and had there made him charge her. And on the way she
explained to him with a newfound lucidity why it was that women should
have votes.

And all this she did from the moment of percussion onward, in a mood of
exaltation entirely strange to her, but, as she was astonished to find,
by no means disagreeable. She found afterwards that she only remembered
very indistinctly her selection of the window and her preparations for
the fatal blow, but that the effect of the actual breakage remained
extraordinarily vivid upon her memory. She saw with extreme distinctness
both as it was before and after the breakage, first as a rather
irregular grey surface, shining in the oblique light of a street lamp,
and giving pale phantom reflections of things in the street, and then as
it was after her blow. It was all visual impression in her memory; she
could not recollect afterwards if there had been any noise at all. Where
there had been nothing but a milky dinginess a thin-armed, irregular
star had flashed into being, and a large triangular piece at its centre,
after what seemed an interminable indecision, had slid, first covertly
downward, and then fallen forward at her feet and shivered into a
hundred fragments....

Lady Harman realized that a tremendous thing had been done--irrevocably.
She stared at her achievement open-mouthed. The creative lump of iron
dropped from her hand. She had a momentary doubt whether she had really
wanted to break that window at all; and then she unde