it any more! I must go. I have had happy times here--I love the
work--I am very glad to earn the money, for my people want it. But I
must go. My heart--my conscience won't let me stay!'

She turned from him, with an unconscious gesture which seemed to the
Squire to be somewhat mingled with that of the great Victory
towering behind her, and went quickly back to her table, where she
began with trembling hands to put her papers together.

The Squire tried to laugh it off.

'And all this,' he said with a sneer, 'because I tied up a few
gates!'

She made no reply. He was conscious of mingled dismay and fury.

'You will stay your month?' he inquired at last, coldly. 'You don't
propose, I imagine, to leave me at a moment's notice?'

She was bending over her table, and did not look up.

'Oh yes, I will stay my month.'

He sat speechless, watching her. She very quickly finished what she
was doing, and taking up her note-book, and some half-written
letters, she left the room.

'A pretty state of things!' said the Squire, and thrusting his long
hands into his pockets he began to pace the library, in the kind of
temper that may be imagined--given the man and the circumstances.

The difference, however, between this occasion and others lay in the
fact that the penalties of temper had grown so unjustly heavy. The
Squire felt himself hideously aggrieved. Abominable!--that he should
be hindered in his just rights and opinions by this indirect
pressure from a woman, whom he couldn't wrestle with and floor, as
he would a man, because of her sex. That was always the way with
women. No real equality--no give and take--in spite of all the
suffrage talk. Their weakness was their tyranny. Weakness indeed!
They were much stronger than men. God help England when they got the
vote! The Greeks said it--Euripides said it. But, of course, the
Greeks have said everything! Hecuba to Agamemnon, for instance, when
she is planning the murder of the Thracian King:

'Leave it to me!--and my Trojan women!'

And Agamemnon's scoffing reply--poor idiot!--'How can _women_ get
the better of men?'

And Hecuba's ghastly low-voiced 'In a _crowd_ we are
terrible!'--[Greek: deinon to plethos]--as she and her women turn
upon the Thracian, put out his eyes, and tear his children limb from
limb.

But _one_ woman might be quite enough to upset a quiet man's way of
living! The moral pressure of it was so iniquitous! Your convictions
or your life! It w