t it.

Miss Hallard was home from the School of Art before her. In the
bedroom which they shared in a house on Strand-on-Green, she was
combing out her short hair, her blouse discarded, her thin arms bent
at acute angles, and between her lips a Virginian cigarette.

"Wet?" she said laconically, without turning round.

"Dripping." Sally threw her hat on the bed.

"If you bought umbrellas instead of cheap silk petticoats--"

"I knew you'd say that," said Sally.

"Was it raining when you walked from the tram?"

"No. It's stopped now. But it was up in town, and all the 'buses were
full up inside."

"Cheerful," said Miss Hallard.

She twisted her hair into some sort of shape and secured it
indiscriminately with pins.

This girl is the revolutionary. Hers is the type that has been the
revolutionary through all ages. It will be revolutionary to the end,
no matter what force may be in power. She has little or nothing to
do with the class to which Sally Bishop belongs. Her temperament is
the corrective which Nature always uses for the natural functions
of her own handiwork--Sally Bishop is Nature herself, enlisted into
this civil warfare because she must. In her revolutionary ideas, Miss
Hallard follows the temperament of her inclinations. Whatever
position women might hold, she would have disagreed with it. She is
one of those of whom--like some strange animal that one sees,
following instincts which seem the very reverse to Nature's
needs--one wonders what her place in the scheme of things can be.

Of this type are those whom the straining of a vocabulary has
called--Suffragette. They are merely Nature's correctives. Of
definite change in the position of women they will effect nothing.
They are not regulars in the great army; only the wandering
adventurers who take up arms for any cause, that they may be in the
noise of the battle. It is the paid army--the regular troops--who
finally place the standard upon the enemy's heights; for it is only
the forces of Life itself that, in this life, are unconquerable.

This, then, is Miss Hallard--adventuress in a great philosophy. Her
thin lips, her shifting, disconcerting eyes, set deep beneath the
brows; the long and narrow face, the high forehead on which the hair
hangs heavily; that thin, reedy body, that ill-formed, unnatural
breast which never was meant to suckle a child or nurse the drooping
of a man's head--all these are the signs of her calling. A woman--by
the i