He was silent for a while, with a quiet look on his face. 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.!

But even that did not help her. It seemed in some mysterious way to be no longer her room, but the room of someone she had known and half forgotten: who would never come back. It gave her the same feeling she had experienced on returning to the house in London: that the place was haunted. The high cheval glass from her mother’s dressing-room had been brought there for her use. The picture of an absurdly small child—the child to whom this room had once belonged—standing before it naked, rose before her eyes. She had wanted to see herself. She had thought that only her clothes stood in the way. If we could but see ourselves, as in some magic mirror? All the garments usage and education has dressed us up in laid aside. What was she underneath her artificial niceties, her prim moralities, her laboriously acquired restraints, her unconscious pretences and hypocrisies? She changed her clothes for a loose robe, and putting out the light drew back the curtains. The moon peeped in over the top of the tall pines, but it only stared at her, indifferent. It seemed to be looking for somebody else. Her father had wished her to go. Arthur’s death had stirred in him the old Puritan blood with its record of long battle for liberty of conscience. If war claimed to be master of a man’s soul, then the new warfare must be against war. He remembered the saying of a Frenchwoman who had been through the Franco-Prussian war. Joan, on her return from Paris some years before, had told him of her, repeating her words: “But, of course, it would not do to tell the truth,” the old lady had said, “or we should have our children growing up to hate war.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Joan. “I came down to see Dad. I didn’t know you were back.” She spoke with some asperity; and his face fell. “You see, it makes company for me,” explained Mary. “Don’t come with me,” she said. “There’s a cab stand in the Avenue. I shall walk to Sèvres and take the train.”