omen had a distinctive sphere it was, at any rate, an enlarging sphere,
and no one who believed in the doctrine of evolution could logically
deny the vote to women "ultimately," however much they might be disposed
to doubt the advisability of its immediate concession. It was a refusal
of expediency, he said, and not an absolute refusal. The youth with his
hair like Russell cleared his throat and said rather irrelevantly that
he knew a man who knew Thomas Bayard Simmons, who had rioted in the
Strangers' Gallery, and then Capes, finding them all distinctly pro-Ann
Veronica, if not pro-feminist, ventured to be perverse, and started a
vein of speculation upon the Scotchman's idea--that there were still
hopes of women evolving into something higher.

He was unusually absurd and ready, and all the time it seemed to Ann
Veronica as a delightful possibility, as a thing not indeed to be
entertained seriously, but to be half furtively felt, that he was being
so agreeable because she had come back again. She returned home through
a world that was as roseate as it had been gray overnight.

But as she got out of the train at Morningside Park Station she had a
shock. She saw, twenty yards down the platform, the shiny hat and broad
back and inimitable swagger of Ramage. She dived at once behind the
cover of the lamp-room and affected serious trouble with her shoe-lace
until he was out of the station, and then she followed slowly and with
extreme discretion until the bifurcation of the Avenue from the field
way insured her escape. Ramage went up the Avenue, and she hurried
along the path with a beating heart and a disagreeable sense of unsolved
problems in her mind.

"That thing's going on," she told herself. "Everything goes on, confound
it! One doesn't change anything one has set going by making good
resolutions."

And then ahead of her she saw the radiant and welcoming figure of
Manning. He came as an agreeable diversion from an insoluble perplexity.
She smiled at the sight of him, and thereat his radiation increased.

"I missed the hour of your release," he said, "but I was at the
Vindicator Restaurant. You did not see me, I know. I was among the
common herd in the place below, but I took good care to see you."

"Of course you're converted?" she said.

"To the view that all those Splendid Women in the movement ought to have
votes. Rather! Who could help it?"

He towered up over her and smiled down at her in his fatherly way