ance a Suffragist, she did not for
one moment imagine that with the coming of votes for women the whole
industrial and social problem of the country would be solved. Unlike
many women, she was quite content to work under a man, and although she
was well able to think for herself on all vital questions, she liked to
hear and assimilate the opinions of the men with whom she came in
contact.

She preferred men, indeed, to women; and her attitude towards them,
though never in the least familiar, held a good comradeship, a kind of
large tolerance which annoyed and irritated those of her girl
acquaintances who looked upon men as their natural enemies and the
enemies of all feminine progress.

Shrewd, competent, fully assured of her own ability to face the world
alone, Miss Loder had never thought seriously of marriage. She delighted
in her independence, was proud of the fact that she was able to command
a good salary, and her habit of mind was too genuinely practical to
allow of any weak leanings towards romance. She did not wish to marry.
She had none of the fabled longing for domesticity, as exemplified in a
well-kept house and a well-filled nursery, with which the average man
endows the normal woman. She looked on children, indeed, mainly as the
materials on whom this or that system of education might be tested; and
she was really of too cold, too self-sufficing a nature to feel the need
of any love other than that of relation or friend.

But since she had worked for Owen Rose, Millicent had begun to change
her views. At first she had merely been attracted by his brilliance, as
any clever girl might have been, had found it stimulating to work with
him, and had been pleased and proud when he selected her to be his
coadjutor in the task of writing his first book. She had been, in truth,
so keenly interested in the author that she had overlooked the man; and
it is a fact that until she came down, at his request, to his house to
work there, away from the busy office, his personality had been so vague
to her that she could not even have described his appearance with any
accuracy.

But the sight of his home, the stately old house set in its spacious
gardens and surrounded by magnificent trees, had shaken Millicent out of
her intellectual reverie into a very shrewd and wide-awake realization
of the man himself.

In his own home he shook off the conventions of the office, became more
human, more approachable; and no woman, l