“Take off your glasses, and look at it straight,” she went on, without giving Joan time to reply. “What is it in us that ‘inspires’ men? If it’s only advice and sympathy he’s after, what’s wrong with dear old Mrs. Denton? She’s a good walker, except now and then, when she’s got the lumbago. Why doesn’t he get her to ‘inspire’ him?” “He had his own private theatre,” Joan explained, “where Wagner gave his operas. And the King was the sole audience.”!

The waiter came to clear the table. They were almost the last customers left. The man’s tone and manner jarred upon Joan. She had not noticed it before. Joan ordered coffee and the girl, exchanging a joke with the waiter, added a liqueur. “He means it kindly,” laughed Phillips. “He is offering me an excuse to surrender gracefully. We must have a public meeting or two after Christmas, and clear the ground.” They had got into the habit of speaking in the plural.

He had organized volunteer cycle companies of speakers from the towns, young working-men and women and students, to go out on summer evenings and hold meetings on the village greens. They were winning their way. But it was slow work. And Carleton was countering their efforts by a hired opposition that followed them from place to place, and whose interruptions were made use of to represent the whole campaign as a fiasco. And she had promised him. He needed her. The words she had spoken to Madge, not dreaming then of their swift application. They came back to her. “God has called me. He girded His sword upon me.” What right had she to leave it rusting in its scabbard, turning aside from the pathway pointed out to her because of one weak, useless life, crouching in her way. It was not as if she were being asked to do evil herself that good might come. The decision had been taken out of her hands. All she had to do was to remain quiescent, not interfering, awaiting her orders. Her business was with her own part, not with another’s. To be willing to sacrifice oneself: that was at the root of all service. Sometimes it was one’s own duty, sometimes that of another. Must one never go forward because another steps out of one’s way, voluntarily? Besides, she might have been mistaken. That picture, ever before her, of the woman pausing with the brush above her tongue—that little stilled gasp! It may have been but a phantasm, born of her own fevered imagination. She clung to that, desperately. “I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said. “I was just wanting you.”