eaf, and the daughter was out. With
great difficulty I got her to see by my card that my name was Spence.
"Are you Jessie Spence?" I shook my head. "No; Katie." "Are you Mary
Spence?" Another headshake, "No; I am Katie." "Then who are you?" She
could understand the negative by the headshaking, but not anything
else. I wanted a piece of paper or a slate badly, but the daughter came
in and made her mother understand that I was the middle Spence girl,
and then the old lady said, "It is a very hot country you come from,"
her only idea apparently of wonderful Australia. And to think that in
times long past some intriguing aunts tried very hard to arrange a
marriage between my father and the deaf young lady who had about 600
pounds a year in land in and near Melrose. She might have been my
mother! The idea was appalling! None of her children inherited the
deafness, and they took a fair proportion of good looks from their
father, for the mother was exceedingly homely. A brightlooking grandson
was on the rug looking through a bound volume of Punch, as my nephew in
Australia loved to do. The two mothers were school companions and
playmates.

My return to London introduced me to a wider range of society. I had
admissions to the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons from Sir
Charles Dilke, Professor Pearson's friend, and I had invitations to
stay for longer or shorter periods with people various in means, in
tastes, and in interests. To Mr. Hare I was especially drawn, and I
should have liked to join him and his family in their yearly walking
tour, which was to be through the Tyrol and Venice; but Aunt Mary
protested for two good and sufficient reasons. The first was that I
could not walk 16 or 20 miles a day, even in the mountains, which Katie
Hare said was so much easier than on the plains; and the second was
that to take six weeks out of my visit to the old country was a great
deal too much. If it could have done any good to proportional
representation I might have stood out; but it could not. For that I
have since travelled thousands of miles by sea and by land; and, though
not on foot, I have undergone much bodily fatigue and mental strain,
but in these early days of the movement it had only entered the
academic stage. My "Plea for Pure Democracy" had been written at a
white heat of enthusiasm. I do not think I ever before or since reached
a higher level. I took this reform more boldly than Mr. Mill, who
sought by giving e