“That’s the pity of it,” he said. “You’re wasting the most important thing about you, your personality. You would do more good in a drawing-room, influencing the rulers, than you will ever do hiding behind a pen. It was the drawing-room that made the French Revolution.” She waited till they had reached a quiet road leading to the hills.!

“I like the houses, too,” he said. “There’s a character about them. You don’t often find such fine drawing-rooms in London.” “Yah, socialist,” commented Madge, who was busy with the tea things.

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 was a long silence. Joan felt the tears trickling between her fingers. “And this is Hilda,” concluded Mrs. Phillips. “She ought to be in bed if she hadn’t a naughty Daddy who spoils her.”