She hurried onward with bent head, trying to escape them. She felt so small, so helpless. Almost she cried out in her despair. “You feel you must beat that drum,” he suggested. “Beat it louder and louder and louder till all the world shall hear it.”!

“I do not know,” he answered her. “I don’t seem to care.” “Why did you give it up?” asked Joan.

Joan expressed her thanks. She would like to have had more talk with the stern old lady, but was prevented by the entrance of two new comers. The first was Miss Lavery, a handsome, loud-toned young woman. She ran a nursing paper, but her chief interest was in the woman’s suffrage question, just then coming rapidly to the front. She had heard Joan speak at Cambridge and was eager to secure her adherence, being wishful to surround herself with a group of young and good-looking women who should take the movement out of the hands of the “frumps,” as she termed them. Her doubt was whether Joan would prove sufficiently tractable. She intended to offer her remunerative work upon the Nursing News without saying anything about the real motive behind, trusting to gratitude to make her task the easier. “There’ll be nothing more,” explained Joan. “So long as my friendship is of any assistance to Robert Phillips in his work, he’s going to have it. What use are we going to be in politics—what’s all the fuss about, if men and women mustn’t work together for their common aims and help one another?” “Oh, the plainer you make it that you don’t want them, the more sport they think it,” interrupted the girl with a laugh.