The Judge

lf, but for the sake of the Cause...." But that small worry was just one dark leaf floating on the quick sunlit river of her mind, for she was very happy a

chattering anticipant people, and up to the gallery packed with faces dyed yellowish drab by the near unmitigated gas sunburst, and she smiled brilliantly. All these people were directing their attention and enthusiasm to the same end as herself: would feel no doubt the same tightness of throat as the heroic women came on the platform, and wo

the mother of the famous rebels Brynhild, Melissa, and Guendolen, and herself a heroine, lifted a pale face where defiance dwelt among the remains of dark loveliness like a beacon lit on a grey castle keep; and Mrs. Mark Lyle, a white and golden wonder in a beautiful bright dress, moved swimmingly about and placed herself on a chair l

amen, and he was staring at the tumult as if he regarded noise as a mutiny of inferiors against his preference for calm. By his side a short-sighted steward bent interminably over his ticket. "The silly gowk!" fumed Ellen. "Can the woman not read? It looks s

s, "he is as susceptible to spiritual beauty and will take heed of Mrs. Ormiston!" With that, she tried herself to look at Mrs. Ormiston, but found she could not help watching the clever way he went on cleaning the goggles while his eyes and attention were fixed otherwhere. There was something ill-tempered about his movements which made her want to go dancingly across and say teasing things to him. Yet when a smile at some private thought suggested by the speech broke his attention, and he

speeches lucent with reason and untremulously spoken, by things that would require no change of quality but only rearrangements to be instantly commemorable by art; and yet this Scotch woman, moving with that stiffness of the mental joints which nations which suffer from it call conscientiousness, had managed to turn a sacramental gathering of the faithful into a steamy short-tempered activity, like washing-day. "Think shame on yourself, Ellen Melville!" she rebuked herself. "She's a better woman than ever you'll be, with the grand work she's done at the Miller's Wynd Dispensary." But that the

earing the sounds of a battlefield, the clash of arms, the curses hurled at an implacable and brutish enemy, the sights of the dying-for already some had died; and with a passion that preserved her words from the common swift mortality of spoken things she told stories of her followers' brave deeds which seemed to remain in the air and deck the hall like war-tattered standards. She spoke of the women who were imprisoned at Birmingham for interrupting Mr. Asquith's meeting, and how they lay now day and night in the black subterranean prison cells, huddled on the

's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life with the chill on, but it did not sadden her to have her reluctant views confirmed by the woman she thought the wisest in the world, for she felt an exaltation that she was afraid must make her eyes look wild. It had always appeared to her that certain things which in the main were sombre, such as deep symphonies of a

tiful shapes out of the mist; beneath it lay the Gardens, a moat of darkness, raising to the lighted street beyond terraces planted with rough autumn flowers that would now be close-curled balls curiously trimmed with dew, and grass that would make placid squelching noises under the feet; and at the end of the Gardens were the two Greek temples that held the town's pictures-the Tiepolo, which shows

ot overcome a fancy that the anklebones which projected in geological-looking knobs on each side of Miss Coates's large flat brogues were a natural offensive weapon like the spurs of a cock; and she was afraid also in her soul. Miss Coates was plainly, from her yellow but animated pallor, from her habit of wearing her blouse open at the neck to show a triangle of chest over which the horizontal bones lay like the bars of a gridiron, a mature specimen of a type that Ellen had met in her school-days. There had been several girls at John Thompson's, usually bleached and ill-favoured victims of an?mia or spinal curvature, who had seemed to be compelled by something within themselves to spend their whole energies in trying, by extravagances of hair-ribbon and sidecombs and patent leather belts, the collection of actresses' postcards, and

e was Mr

had not then known the might of cruelty. Indeed, she had not believed that anybody had ever hurt anybody deliberately, except long-dead soldiers sent by mad kings to make what history books, to mark the unusual horror of the event, called massacres. She had begun to know better late last Monday afternoon. She had returned to her little room

ere was no sound of his breath. "Good mercy on us!" she said to herself. "Is it his wraith, and has he come to harm in London?" But the dark patch of his face moved, and he began his long demonstration to her that a man need not be dead to be dreadful. "Is there anything you want of me, Miss Melville?" the clipped voice had asked. It was, so plainly the cold answer to an ogle that she gazed

were still intellectual refuges. But very few. Every day Mr. Philip convinced her how few and ineffectual. He never now, when he had finished dictating, said, "That's all for the present, thank you," but let an awkward space of silence fall, and then enquired with an affectation of patience, "And what are you waiting on, Miss Melville?" He treated her infrequent errors in typing as if she was a simpering girl who was trying to buy idleness with her charm. And he was speaking ill of her. That she knew from Mr. Mactavish James's kindnesses, which brightened the moment but always made the estimate of her plight more dreary, since just so might a gaoler in a brigand's cave bring a prisoner scraps of sweeter food and drink when the talk of her de

ried as she clapped, but fortunately there was Mrs. Mark Lyle yet to speak. She watched the advance to the edge of the platform of that tall, beautiful figure in the shining dress which it would have been an understatement to call sky-blue, unless one predicated that the sky was Italian, and rejoiced that nature had so approp

this thing was that men did to women. There was certainly some definite thing. Children, she was sure, came into the world because of some kind of embrace; and she had learned lately, too, that women who were very poor sometimes let men do this thing to them for money: such were the women whom she saw in John Square, when she came back late from a meeting or a concert, leaning against the garden-railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal my

a medical volume which she knew from the words on its cover would tell her all the things about which she was wondering. She had laid her fingers between its leaves, but a shivering had come upon her, and she ran downstairs very quickly and washed her hands. These memories made her feel restless and unhappy, and she drove her attention back to the platform and beautiful Mrs. Mark Lyle. But there came upon her a fantasy that she was standing again in the garret with that book in her hands, and that Mr. Philip was le

ing birds would fly out of woods and perch on the rigging, and brown men would come and run aloft and wreathe the masts with flowers, and shy women with long, loose, black hair would steal out and offer palm-wine in conches, while he smiled aloofly and was gracious. It would not matter where he sailed; at no port in the world would sorrow wait for him, and everywhere there would be pride and honour and stars pinned to his rough coat by grateful kings. And

s the hall at hi