for the
last half-hour to get her knife into her. (Odd, for she had admired the
Blackadder girl and her fighting gestures.) It was inconceivable that
she should have to answer to that absurd committee for her honour. It
was inconceivable that Rosalind, her friend, should not help her.

Yet it had happened. With all her platform eloquence Rosalind couldn't,
for the life of her, get out one heroic, defending word. From the moment
when the Gilchrist woman had pounced, Rosalind had simply sat and
stared, like a rabbit, like a fish, her mouth open for the word that
would not come. Rosalind was afraid to stand up for her. It was
dreadful, and it was funny to see Rosalind looking like that, and to
realize the extent of her weakness and her obstinacy.

Yet Rosalind had not changed. She was still the school-girl slacker who
could never do a stroke of work until somebody had pushed her into it,
who could never leave off working until stopped by the same hand that
had set her going. Her power to go, and to let herself rip, and the
weakness that made her depend on Dorothy to start her were the qualities
that attracted Dorothy to Rosalind from the beginning. But now she was
the tool of the fighting Suffrage Women. Or if she wasn't a tool, she
was a machine; her brain was a rapid, docile, mechanical apparatus for
turning out bad imitations of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and the two
Blathwaites. Her air of casual command, half-swagger, half-slouch, her
stoop and the thrusting forward of her face, were copied sedulously from
an admired model.

Dorothy found her pitiable. She was hypnotized by the Blathwaites who
worked her and would throw her away when she was of no more use. She
hadn't the strength to resist the pull and the grip and the drive of
other people. She couldn't even hold out against Valentina Gilchrist and
Maud Blackadder. Rosalind would always be caught and spun round by any
movement that was strong enough. She was foredoomed to the Vortex.

That was Dorothy's fault. It was she who had pushed and pulled the
slacker, in spite of her almost whining protest, to the edge of the
Vortex; and it was Rosalind, not Dorothy, who had been caught and sucked
down into the swirl. She whirled in it now, and would go on whirling,
under the impression that her movements made it move.

The Vortex fascinated Dorothy even while she resisted it. She liked the
feeling of her own power to resist, to keep her head, to beat up against
the rush of