ng person from the muddle
of the world, and to set them for a week in a pattern which must
catch the eyes of Cabinet Ministers, and the eyes once caught, the old
arguments were to be delivered with unexampled originality. Such was
the scheme as a whole; and in contemplation of it she would become quite
flushed and excited, and have to remind herself of all the details that
intervened between her and success.

The door would open, and Mr. Clacton would come in to search for a
certain leaflet buried beneath a pyramid of leaflets. He was a thin,
sandy-haired man of about thirty-five, spoke with a Cockney accent, and
had about him a frugal look, as if nature had not dealt generously with
him in any way, which, naturally, prevented him from dealing generously
with other people. When he had found his leaflet, and offered a few
jocular hints upon keeping papers in order, the typewriting would stop
abruptly, and Mrs. Seal would burst into the room with a letter which
needed explanation in her hand. This was a more serious interruption
than the other, because she never knew exactly what she wanted, and
half a dozen requests would bolt from her, no one of which was clearly
stated. Dressed in plum-colored velveteen, with short, gray hair, and a
face that seemed permanently flushed with philanthropic enthusiasm,
she was always in a hurry, and always in some disorder. She wore two
crucifixes, which got themselves entangled in a heavy gold chain upon
her breast, and seemed to Mary expressive of her mental ambiguity. Only
her vast enthusiasm and her worship of Miss Markham, one of the pioneers
of the society, kept her in her place, for which she had no sound
qualification.

So the morning wore on, and the pile of letters grew, and Mary felt, at
last, that she was the center ganglion of a very fine network of nerves
which fell over England, and one of these days, when she touched the
heart of the system, would begin feeling and rushing together and
emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks--for some such
metaphor represents what she felt about her work, when her brain had
been heated by three hours of application.

Shortly before one o'clock Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal desisted from their
labors, and the old joke about luncheon, which came out regularly
at this hour, was repeated with scarcely any variation of words.
Mr. Clacton patronized a vegetarian restaurant; Mrs. Seal brought
sandwiches, which she ate beneath the