The secretary, at a sign from Miss Tolley, made a memorandum of it. “Do the women really crush their feet?” asked Joan.!

Ought there not to be a school for reformers, a training college where could be inculcated self-examination, patience, temperance, subordination to duty; with lectures on the fundamental laws, within which all progress must be accomplished, outside which lay confusion and explosions; with lectures on history, showing how improvements had been brought about and how failure had been invited, thus avoiding much waste of reforming zeal; with lectures on the properties and tendencies of human nature, forbidding the attempt to treat it as a sum in rule of three? “We have been meaning to call on you so often,” panted Mrs. Phillips. The room was crowded and the exertion of squeezing her way through had winded the poor lady. “We take so much interest in your articles. My husband—” she paused for a second, before venturing upon the word, and the aitch came out somewhat over-aspirated—“reads them most religiously. You must come and dine with us one evening.”

After a while, her eyes opened. Joan drew her chair nearer and slipped her arm in under her, and their eyes met. “I don’t know,” answered the woman. “I believe that would do her more good than anything else. If she would listen to it. She seems to have lost all will-power.” She very much wanted to look at him, but she would not. It seemed to her quite a time before he replied.