The stone hall was still vibrating to the voices of the last departed guests. Joan was seated on a footstool before the fire in front of Mrs. Denton’s chair. “There’s a chemist’s shop in the next street. We’d better take him there,” suggested the one who had first spoken to her. And she thanked them and followed them.!

“Abominably rude,” she answered, “you’ve defied my warnings, and treated my embassy with contempt.” She turned to him and their eyes met. “I should have despised you, if you hadn’t,” she added. Joan answered with a faint smile. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I didn’t forget that argument in case it hadn’t occurred to the Lord.”

“God knows I didn’t want it, speaking personally,” said a German prisoner one day, with a laugh. “I had been working at a printing business sixteen hours a day for seven years. It was just beginning to pay me, and now my wife writes me that she has had to shut the place up and sell the machinery to keep them all from starving.” She had written him at the beginning of the war, telling him of her wish to get out to the front, and he thought that now he might be able to help her. She threw herself into the suffrage movement. It satisfied her for a while. She had the rare gift of public speaking, and enjoyed her triumphs. She was temperate, reasonable; persuasive rather than aggressive; feeling her audience as she went, never losing touch with them. She had the magnetism that comes of sympathy. Medical students who came intending to tell her to go home and mind the baby, remained to wonder if man really was the undoubted sovereign of the world, born to look upon woman as his willing subject; to wonder whether under some unwritten whispered law it might not be the other way about. Perhaps she had the right—with or without the baby—to move about the kingdom, express her wishes for its care and management. Possibly his doubts may not have been brought about solely by the force and logic of her arguments. Possibly the voice of Nature is not altogether out of place in discussions upon Humanity’s affairs.