“I’ll give him your message,” said Joan. “But I don’t see him exchanging his principles even for your support. I admit it’s important.” “Of course you know best, dear,” she admitted. “Perhaps I am a bit too fond of bright things.”!

And yet every now and then he would be arresting. In his prime, Joan felt, he must have been a great preacher. Even now, decrepit and wheezy, he was capable of flashes of magnetism, of eloquence. The passage where he pictured the Garden of Gethsemane. The fair Jerusalem, only hidden from us by the shadows. So easy to return to. Its soft lights shining through the trees, beckoning to us; its mingled voices stealing to us through the silence, whispering to us of its well-remembered ways, its pleasant places, its open doorways, friends and loved ones waiting for us. And above, the rock-strewn Calvary: and crowning its summit, clear against the starlit sky, the cold, dark cross. “Not perhaps to us the bleeding hands and feet, but to all the bitter tears. Our Calvary may be a very little hill compared with the mountains where Prometheus suffered, but to us it is steep and lonely.” He laughed. “You will find all your pet reforms depend upon it, when you come to work them out,” he said. “You can’t have a minimum wage without a minimum price.”

“I am thinking about him and his work,” Joan answered. Her hand sought Hilda’s and held it. “There are things you don’t understand. Men and women can’t help each other in the way you think. They may try to, and mean no harm in the beginning, but the harm comes, and then not only the woman but the man also suffers, and his work is spoilt and his life ruined.” He sat for a minute tattooing with his fingers on the table, before speaking. She remembered, as she was taking her leave, what she had come for: which was to invite Joan to dinner on the following Friday.