e exclaimed.

She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her
eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she
seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. "Lillah
runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road," she continued.
"She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it's
now the biggest of its kind in England. You can't think what those women
are like--and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of the
day and night. I've often been with her. . . . That's what's the matter
with us. . . . We don't _do_ things. What do you _do_?" she demanded,
looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile. Rachel had scarcely
listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and unhappy. She
had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her work in the
Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love affairs.

"I play," she said with an affection of stolid composure.

"That's about it!" Evelyn laughed. "We none of us do anything but play.
And that's why women like Lillah Harrison, who's worth twenty of you and
me, have to work themselves to the bone. But I'm tired of playing," she
went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her arms above her head.
Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.

"I'm going to do something. I've got a splendid idea. Look here, you
must join. I'm sure you've got any amount of stuff in you, though you
look--well, as if you'd lived all your life in a garden." She sat up,
and began to explain with animation. "I belong to a club in London. It
meets every Saturday, so it's called the Saturday Club. We're supposed
to talk about art, but I'm sick of talking about art--what's the good
of it? With all kinds of real things going on round one? It isn't as if
they'd got anything to say about art, either. So what I'm going to tell
'em is that we've talked enough about art, and we'd better talk about
life for a change. Questions that really matter to people's lives, the
White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And
when we've made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves
into a society for doing it. . . . I'm certain that if people like
ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to policemen
and magistrates, we could put a stop to--prostitution"--she lowered her
voice at the ugly word--"in six months. My idea is that men and wome