Rebel women

ds with the

ng a steward's button to a woman dressed in black, who sat in the front row

ifferent glance

pose it is. I've never been t

. "Quite an experience for you, th

arred indescribably, and spoke in an eager undertone to a large s

iously. "I've just been talking

he's not their sort. Besides, they all wear green or purple, or both. I'm up to thei

n by the side door, and it won't do her any harm. They've got so o

e must make allowances. He did not say for what or for who

humour, a girl in grey, with a fur cap and muff, was allowed to pass in without any special scrutiny. She moved very deliberately along the front c

ar impression of the feminine voice; and the audience, strung up to

bserved to her neighbour, a lady in tight black satin who wore the badge of some Wome

a trifle apprehensive after the way those dreadful creatures we

," she said. "A splendid gathering, that would have been a glorious triumph for the Party, if it hadn't been for those--" She pause

sparkle lit up her eyes again. "Our minister called

d the lady in tight bla

agreed the g

Suffragettes. The wife of the man at the door, a homely little woman with a plea

r thirty extra stewards at the last minute, because the detectives wired that two of the

le buttons?" asked the woman on her left. "I wo

lot of women, does my husband; says he hasn't any objection to their having a vote, either, only they ought to be ashamed of themselves for going on so about it. I don't hold with votes myself. It's only men that's got all that idle time on their hands, and if they're respectable married men, there's nothing else to occupy them but politics. But for a wo

it is," said the wom

g everywhere," she said. "I can't listen if I sit idle. Not that I want to list

, and seemed to convey the singular idea that freedom had been invented and patented within recent years by a particular political party; but the indifferent expression of the woman in black changed and softened a

ic splendour about that,

the other steward. It was a relief, indeed, to talk about something ordinary with a m

e looked round the magnificent old County Hall, and along the densely packed rows of restless modern men and women, and then back a

find," he added, narrowing his eyes a little to look at her, "that the Middl

front, gradually closed round them until the gangways were entirely blocked at that end of the hall. One lady, who complained that she could not see the platform for stewards, instantly found herself placed under observation, an

woman in black, which locked and unlocked ceaselessly, though she leaned back in her chair with

at his side, whispering in his ear.

out me, even to deal with two Suffragettes who may not be here; a

o with him, as she looked after him, half disappointed, half contemptuou

ce, all the impressiveness of it, all the ironic absurdity. At the time, it felt like holding one's breath for interminable minutes while unfa

ction in her eyes because for her there was no hero, the woman in the front row, who had never been to a political meeting before, felt a moment's amazement at her own temerity in coming there, alone with one other, to defy an

an delivered carefully prepared compliments, and the great man sorted slips of paper. Then two women, out of the hundred or so who had been adm

ituation should be met with affability, argued something wrong with the situation or something wrong with the man. There was a false note, too, in that second roar, and it stopped so unexpectedly that one man was left cheering alone in

rds on the alert, made heads go round. The speaker felt the strain, shuffled his notes, stumbled once or twice. Yet, as the tension tightened to breaking-point, the woman in th

me wag said amiably, "Turn him out!" and there was laughter. The man, a well-known local Socialist, repeated his objection, and

rds, none of whom had shown one sign of wishing to do o

en his words again became audible he had gone on to another point. His next interrupter was a Tariff Reformer, at whose expense he was courteously humorous. The emotional a

that about liberty, seeing all that behind the commonplace of democracy, should surely understand where others had failed even to tolerate. She felt disproportionately irritated by the click of knitting-needles, wondering how any woman could occupy mind and fingers with wo

er seemed to have heard before. "If you think so much of justic

l that moment. She was a woman who had known loneliness very early, when it came to her in an uncongenial nursery; she knew it still, in some houses, where everything was wrong, from

d the look of it all; and to her own perplex

he said. She thought of plays she had seen, dealing with the French Revolution, very bad plays most of them, she reminded herself as she was dragged this way and that by excited gentlemen, divided in opinion as to the door by which she was to be ejected. The sea of distorted faces past which they took her, the memory of the knitting-needles, even the intolerable smile of the great man as he made little jokes about her for the amusement of the

resisting by, seemed a little thing in comparison with those torn strips of lace. Apparently, she was not alone in this eccentric adjustment of proportions; for the little fussy steward who, unbalanced to the point of irresponsi

market-place. Everything looked very big, very still, out there, after the banality and the bad staging of the play from which she had just made her unrehearsed exit. In the clearness of thought that came to her, freed at last of hands that dragged at her and v

rwards somewhat flamboyantly put it, to "worship from afar the apostle of progress and democracy, almost as the servants of the gods might wait at Olympic banquets for crumbs to fall from the rich man's

the top of the steps, as she leaned motionless

me like that! However did you come to b

free speech and all that fal-lal nonsense, and then--! I wouldn

it? Coming here on p

ey tear them to pieces? Now, you listen to me, James. You brought me here to-night because you said I'd got to be m

eps, her chin in the air. "If that's politics," she called back to him from the p

, her cap lopped over one eye, and she held her hand to her throat where the collar had been wrenched at; but her eyes shone with their unalterable co

ss; the police say we may hold a meeting there. Oh, I know you never have, but you can co

o a political meeting till she went to be thrown out of one, walked across the market-place to shake hands wit

ssuring an interested crowd that she st