overnments were the most abominable bloodstained tyrants of our times?
"Though, mind you, I'd be with the Liberal Party myself if they'd only
give us the vote." It was rather like going for a walk with a puppy
barking at one's heels, but he liked it. Through her talk he noticed
little things about her. She had had very little to do with men,
perhaps she had never walked with a man before, for she did not
naturally take the wall when they crossed the road. Her voice was soft
and seemed to cling to her lips, as red-haired people's voices often do.
Her heels did not click on the pavements; she walked noiselessly, as
though she trod on grass.

Suddenly she clapped her bare hands. "Ah, if you're a sympathiser you
must join the Men's League for Women's Suffrage. You will? Oh, that's
fine! I've never brought in a member yet...." She paused, furious with
herself, for she was so very young that she hated ever to own that she
was doing anything for the first time. It was her aim to appear
infinitely experienced. Usually, she thought, she succeeded.

To end the silence, so that she might say something to which he could
listen, he said, "I was converted long before to-night, you know. My
mother's keen on the movement."

"Is she?" She searched her memory. "Yet I don't know the name. Does she
speak, or organise?"

"Oh, she doesn't do anything in public. She lives very quietly in a
little Essex village," he answered, speaking with an involuntary
gravity, an effect of referring to pain, that made her wonder if his
mother was an invalid. She hoped it was not so, for if Mrs. Yaverland
was anything like her son it was terrible to think of her lying in the
stagnant air of ill-health among feeding-cups and medicine bottles and
weaktasting foods. The lot of the sick and the old, whom she conceived
as exceptional people specially scourged, drew tears from her in the
darkness, and she looked across the road at the tall wards which the
infirmary thrust out like piers from its main corridor. "Ah, the poor
souls in there!" she breathed, looking up at the rows of windows which
disclosed the dreadful pale wavering light that lives in sick-rooms. "It
makes you feel guilty, being happy when those poor souls are lying there
in pain." Yaverland did not seek to find out why she had said it, any
more than he asked himself how this night's knowledge of her was to be
continued, or what she meant the end of it to be, though he was aware
that those quest