“By Jove,” she exclaimed. “Why did I never think of it. With a red flag and my hair down, I’d be in all the illustrated papers. It would put up my price no end. And I’d be able to get out of this silly job of mine. I can’t go on much longer. I’m getting too well known. I do believe I’ll try it. The shouting’s easy enough.” She turned to Joan. “Are you going to take up socialism?” she demanded. “I want to,” she answered. “It isn’t all curiosity. I think it’s time for women to insist on seeing war with their own eyes, not trust any longer to the pictures you men paint.” She smiled.!

“It’s you women that make war,” he continued. “Oh, I don’t mean that you do it on purpose, but it’s in your blood. It comes from the days when to live it was needful to kill. When a man who was swift and strong to kill was the only thing that could save a woman and her brood. Every other man that crept towards them through the grass was an enemy, and her only hope was that her man might kill him, while she watched and waited. And later came the tribe; and instead of the one man creeping through the grass, the everlasting warfare was against all other tribes. So you loved only the men ever ready and willing to fight, lest you and your children should be carried into slavery: then it was the only way. You brought up your boys to be fighters. You told them stories of their gallant sires. You sang to them the songs of battle: the glory of killing and of conquering. You have never unlearnt the lesson. Man has learnt comradeship—would have travelled further but for you. But woman is still primitive. She would still have her man the hater and the killer. To the woman the world has never changed.” “Is there no hope?” asked Mary.

“But the Greek ideal could not have been the right one, or Greece would not so utterly have disappeared,” suggested Mr. Allway. “Unless you reject the law of the survival of the fittest.” “What has become of them?” persisted Miss Tolley. He did not answer for some time. She had begun to wonder if he had heard.