and was trampled into the gutter. A little Cockney
recovered it, and made ridiculous attempts to get to her and replace it.

"You must arrest me!" she gasped, breathlessly, insisting insanely on a
point already carried; "you shall!"

The police-station at the end seemed to Ann Veronica like a refuge from
unnamable disgraces. She hesitated about her name, and, being prompted,
gave it at last as Ann Veronica Smith, 107A, Chancery Lane....

Indignation carried her through that night, that men and the world
could so entreat her. The arrested women were herded in a passage of
the Panton Street Police-station that opened upon a cell too unclean for
occupation, and most of them spent the night standing. Hot coffee
and cakes were sent in to them in the morning by some intelligent
sympathizer, or she would have starved all day. Submission to the
inevitable carried her through the circumstances of her appearance
before the magistrate.

He was no doubt doing his best to express the attitude of society toward
these wearily heroic defendants, but he seemed to be merely rude and
unfair to Ann Veronica. He was not, it seemed, the proper stipendiary at
all, and there had been some demur to his jurisdiction that had ruffled
him. He resented being regarded as irregular. He felt he was human
wisdom prudentially interpolated.... "You silly wimmin," he said over
and over again throughout the hearing, plucking at his blotting-pad
with busy hands. "You silly creatures! Ugh! Fie upon you!" The court was
crowded with people, for the most part supporters and admirers of the
defendants, and the man with the light eyelashes was conspicuously
active and omnipresent.

Ann Veronica's appearance was brief and undistinguished. She had nothing
to say for herself. She was guided into the dock and prompted by a
helpful police inspector. She was aware of the body of the court,
of clerks seated at a black table littered with papers, of policemen
standing about stiffly with expressions of conscious integrity, and
a murmuring background of the heads and shoulders of spectators close
behind her. On a high chair behind a raised counter the stipendiary's
substitute regarded her malevolently over his glasses. A disagreeable
young man, with red hair and a loose mouth, seated at the reporter's
table, was only too manifestly sketching her.

She was interested by the swearing of the witnesses. The kissing of the
book struck her as particularly odd, and then the