“Did you ever try, Dad?” she asked. “It would help, undoubtedly,” the girl answered. “I don’t see any other way of getting hold of them.”!

“Madge has fallen in love with him, and her judgment is not to be relied upon,” he said. “I suppose you couldn’t answer a straight question, if you tried.” CHAPTER I

At Girton it was more by force of will, of brain, that she had to make her position. There was more competition. Joan welcomed it, as giving more zest to life. But even there her beauty was by no means a negligible quantity. Clever, brilliant young women, accustomed to sweep aside all opposition with a blaze of rhetoric, found themselves to their irritation sitting in front of her silent, not so much listening to her as looking at her. It puzzled them for a time. Because a girl’s features are classical and her colouring attractive, surely that has nothing to do with the value of her political views? Until one of them discovered by chance that it has. “What’s he like in himself?” he asked her. “You’ve been seeing something of him, haven’t you?” “This poor, little choked-up thing,” he said, “against which we are sitting; it’s for want of men and women drawing water, of children dabbling their hands in it and making themselves all wet, that it has run dry.”