One evening, on her way home from a theatre, she met Flossie. “Can’t stop now,” said Flossie, who was hurrying. “But I want to see you: most particular. Was going to look you up. Will you be at home to-morrow afternoon at tea-time?” “My first public appearance,” explained Mrs. Denton. “I teased my father into taking me with him. We represented Great Britain and Ireland. I suppose I’m the only one left.”!

Men sitting by the roadside in the mud, gnawing at unsavoury food; men squatting by the ditches, examining their sores, washing their bleeding feet in the muddy water, replacing the muddy rags about their wounds. There were the others. The men and women not in the lime-light. The lone, scattered men and women who saw no flag but Pity’s ragged skirt; who heard no drum but the world’s low cry of pain; who fought with feeble hands against the wrong around them; who with aching heart and troubled eyes laboured to make kinder the little space about them. The great army of the nameless reformers uncheered, unparagraphed, unhonoured. The unknown sowers of the seed. Would the reapers of the harvest remember them?

Looking back it was easy enough to smile, but the agony of many nights when she had lain awake for hours battling with her childish terrors had left a burning sense of anger in Joan’s heart. Poor mazed, bewildered Mrs. Munday, preaching the eternal damnation of the wicked—who had loved her, who had only thought to do her duty, the blame was not hers. But that a religion capable of inflicting such suffering upon the innocent should still be preached; maintained by the State! That its educated followers no longer believed in a physical Hell, that its more advanced clergy had entered into a conspiracy of silence on the subject was no answer. The great mass of the people were not educated. Official Christendom in every country still preached the everlasting torture of the majority of the human race as a well thought out part of the Creator’s scheme. No leader had been bold enough to come forward and denounce it as an insult to his God. As one grew older, kindly mother Nature, ever seeking to ease the self-inflicted burdens of her foolish brood, gave one forgetfulness, insensibility. The condemned criminal puts the thought of the gallows away from him as long as may be: eats, and sleeps and even jokes. Man’s soul grows pachydermoid. But the children! Their sensitive brains exposed to every cruel breath. No philosophic doubt permitted to them. No learned disputation on the relationship between the literal and the allegorical for the easing of their frenzied fears. How many million tiny white-faced figures scattered over Christian Europe and America, stared out each night into a vision of black horror; how many million tiny hands clutched wildly at the bedclothes. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, if they had done their duty, would have prosecuted before now the Archbishop of Canterbury. “No,” Joan admitted. “I went to Rodean at Brighton when I was ten years old, and so escaped it. Nor were you,” she added with a smile, “judging from your accent.” “Yah, socialist,” commented Madge, who was busy with the tea things.