since out of sight meant also out of reach. Altogether it was one of the
most successful and popular exhibitions that the Academy had held for
many years. Then the fair agitators fell back on some of their earlier
methods; they wrote sweetly argumentative plays to prove that they ought
to have the vote, they smashed windows to show that they must have the
vote, and they kicked Cabinet Ministers to demonstrate that they'd better
have the vote, and still the coldly reasoned or unreasoned reply was that
they'd better not. Their plight might have been summed up in a
perversion of Gilbert's lines--

"Twenty voteless millions we,
Voteless all against our will,
Twenty years hence we shall be
Twenty voteless millions still."

And of course the great idea for their master-stroke of strategy came
from a masculine source. Lena Dubarri, who was the captain-general of
their thinking department, met Waldo Orpington in the Mall one afternoon,
just at a time when the fortunes of the Cause were at their lowest ebb.
Waldo Orpington is a frivolous little fool who chirrups at drawing-room
concerts and can recognise bits from different composers without
referring to the programme, but all the same he occasionally has ideas.
He didn't care a twopenny fiddlestring about the Cause, but he rather
enjoyed the idea of having his finger in the political pie. Also it is
possible, though I should think highly improbable, that he admired Lena
Dubarri. Anyhow, when Lena gave a rather gloomy account of the existing
state of things in the Suffragette World, Waldo was not merely
sympathetic but ready with a practical suggestion. Turning his gaze
westward along the Mall, towards the setting sun and Buckingham Palace,
he was silent for a moment, and then said significantly, 'You have
expended your energies and enterprise on labours of destruction; why has
it never occurred to you to attempt something far more terrific?'

"'What do you mean?' she asked him eagerly.

"'Create.'

"'Do you mean create disturbances? We've been doing nothing else for
months,' she said.

"Waldo shook his head, and continued to look westward along the Mall.
He's rather good at acting in an amateur sort of fashion. Lena followed
his gaze, and then turned to him with a puzzled look of inquiry.

"'Exactly,' said Waldo, in answer to her look.

"'But--how can we create?' she asked; 'it's been done already.'

"'Do it _again_,' said Waldo, 'and aga