“Did I laugh?” said Joan. “They were His last words, too,” he answered: “‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’”!

“It comes to the same thing, doesn’t it, dear?” she answered. “They are there, anyhow. And that is how He knows those who are willing to serve Him: by their being pitiful.” At Girton it was more by force of will, of brain, that she had to make her position. There was more competition. Joan welcomed it, as giving more zest to life. But even there her beauty was by no means a negligible quantity. Clever, brilliant young women, accustomed to sweep aside all opposition with a blaze of rhetoric, found themselves to their irritation sitting in front of her silent, not so much listening to her as looking at her. It puzzled them for a time. Because a girl’s features are classical and her colouring attractive, surely that has nothing to do with the value of her political views? Until one of them discovered by chance that it has.

CHAPTER XI “Will it shock you, Dad?” she asked. “It was a foolish notion,” she said, “that of the Manchester school: that men and women could be treated as mere figures in a sum.”