y as she
hastened in the opposite direction. Already some sense seemed to reach
her of the hopelessness of expecting Vida's return.

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

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

CHAPTER VII

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

Of course it was absolutely essential to disguise the object of the
o