e seeing so much of your father.'

'That must have been when I was in the schoolroom--wasn't it?'

He turned suddenly and looked at her. 'I'd forgotten. You know Geoffrey,
and you don't like him. I saw that once before.'

'Once before?' she echoed.

He reminded her of the time she hurried away from Ulland House to
Bishopsmead.

'_I_ wasn't deceived,' he said, with his look of smiling malice. 'You
didn't care two pins about your Cousin Mary and her influenza.'

Vida moved her expressionless face a little to the right. 'I can see
Sophia. But she's listening to the speech;' and Vida herself, with
something of an effort, seemed now to be following the sordid
experiences of a girl that the speaker had befriended some years before.
It was through this girl, the mauve matron said, that she herself had
come into touch with the abject poor. She took a big barrack of a house
in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood, and it became known that there she
received and helped both men and women. 'I sympathized with the men, but
it was the things the women told me that appalled me. They were too bad
to be entirely believed, but I wrote them down. They haunted me. I
investigated. I found I had no excuse for doubting those stories.'

'This woman's a find,' Vida whispered to the chairman.

Ernestine shook her head.

'Why, she's making a first-rate speech!' said Vida, astonished.

'There's nobody here who will care about it.'

'Why do you say that?'

'Oh, all she's saying is a commonplace to these people. Lead-poisoning
was new, to _them_--something they could take hold of.'

'Well, I stick to it, you've got a good ally in this woman. Let her
stand up in Somerset Hall, and tell the people----'

'It wouldn't do,' said the young Daniel, firmly.

'You don't believe her story?'

'Oh, I don't say the things aren't true. But'--she moved uneasily--'the
subject's too prickly.'

'Too prickly for you!'

The girl nodded with an anxious eye on the speaker. 'We sometimes make a
passing reference--just to set men thinking, and there leave it. But it
always makes them furious, of course. It does no good. Either people
know and just accept it, or else they won't believe, and it only gets
them on the raw. I'll have to stop her if----' She leaned forward.

'It's odd your taking it like this. I suppose it's because you're so
young,' said Vida, wondering. 'It must be because for you it isn't
real.'

'No, it's because I see no decent woman c