ndage practice; giving to her soft and gentle action
an air of energy inimical to her three unmarried daughters. And not even
Louie had the heart to tell her that all her knitting had to be
unravelled overnight, to save the wool.

"A set of silly women, getting in Kitchener's way, and wasting khaki!"

Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal affair, as
if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other women were
interfering with them.

Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all the men.
The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and her followers
received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain from violence during
the period of the War. And instantly, in the first week of war, the
Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies (already organized and
disciplined by seven years' methodical resistance) presented their late
enemy, the Government, with an instrument of national service made to
its hand and none the worse because originally devised for its torture
and embarassment.

The little vortex of the Woman's Movement was swept without a sound into
the immense vortex of the War. The women rose up all over England and
went into uniform.

And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches and
puttees of the Women's Service Corps. She had joined a motor-ambulance
as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that Anthony had given to it.
Dorothea really had a chance of being sent to Belgium before the end of
the month. Meanwhile she convoyed Belgian refugees from Cannon
Street Station.

She saw nothing before her as yet. Her mind was like Cannon Street
Station--a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the horror and misery
of Belgium poured and was congested.

Cannon Street Station. Presently it was as if she were spending all of
her life that counted there; as if for years she had been familiar with
the scene.

Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the blurred
transparency of the roof. Iron rails running under the long roof, that
was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a greyish light,
filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps, opaque white globes,
hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By night a bluish light, and
large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again to a
ghastly, ruinous life.

The iron breasts of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing under the
immense fanlight of the open arc