nd solved. Colour came into their cheeks, assurance into their
faded manners, sense and sensibility into their talk; and whatever
happened afterwards they were never crammed back again into the
prison of Victorian spinsterhood. They learnt rough cooking, skilled
confectionery, typewriting, bicycling, jiu-jitsu perhaps. "The
maidens came, they talked, they sang, they read; till she not fair
began to gather light, and she that was became her former beauty
treble" sang in prophecy, sixty years before, the greatest of poets
and the poet-prophet of Woman's Emancipation. Many a woman has
directly owed the lengthened, happier, usefuller life that became
hers from 1910-1911-1912 onwards to the Suffrage movement for the
Liberation of Women.

The crises of 1912 moreover were not so acute as bitterly to envenom
the struggle in the way that happened during the two following
years. There was always some hope that the Ministry might permit the
passing of an amendment to the Franchise Bill which would in some
degree affirm the principle of Female Suffrage. It is true that a
certain liveliness was maintained by the Suffragettes. The W.S.P.U.
dared not relax in its militancy lest Ministers should think the
struggle waning and Woman already tiring of her claims. The vaunted
Manhood Suffrage Bill had been introduced by an anti-woman-suffrage
Quaker Minister and its Second reading been proposed by an equally
anti-feminist Secretary of State--this was in June-July, 1912; and
no member of the Cabinet had risen to say a word in favour of the
Women's claims. Still, something might be done in Committee, in the
autumn Session--if there were one--or in the following year. There
was a simmering in the Suffragist ranks rather than any alarming
explosion. In March, before Vivie went to Brussels, Mrs. Pankhurst
had carried out a window-smashing raid on Bond Street and Regent
Street and the clubs of Piccadilly, during which among the two
hundred and nineteen arrests there were brought to light as
"revolutionaries" two elderly women surgeons of great distinction
and one female Doctor of Music. In revenge the police had raided the
W.S.P.U. offices at Clifford's Inn, an event long foreseen and
provided against in the neighbouring Chancery Lane.

The Irish Nationalist Party had shown its marked hostility to the
enfranchisement of women in any Irish Parliament and so a few
impulsive Irish women had thrown things at Nationalist M.P.'s
without hurting the