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“And the proofs still not come?” said Mrs. Seal, putting
both her elbows on the table, and propping her chin on
her hands, as Mary began to pour out tea. “It’s too bad—
too bad. At this rate we shall miss the country post. Which
reminds me, Mr. Clacton, don’t you think we should circularize
the provinces with Partridge’s last speech? What?
You’ve not read it? Oh, it’s the best thing they’ve had in
the House this Session. Even the Prime Minister—”
But Mary cut her short.
“We don’t allow shop at tea, Sally,” she said firmly. “We
fine her a penny each time she forgets, and the fines go
to buying a plum cake,” she explained, seeking to draw
Katharine into the community. She had given up all hope
of impressing her.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Seal apologized. “It’s my
misfortune to be an enthusiast,” she said, turning to
Katharine. “My father’s daughter could hardly be anything
else. I think I’ve been on as many committees as most
people. Waifs and Strays, Rescue Work, Church Work, C. O.
S.—local branch—besides the usual civic duties which
fall to one as a householder. But I’ve given them all up
for our work here, and I don’t regret it for a second,” she
added. “This is the root question, I feel; until women
have votes—”
“It’ll be sixpence, at least, Sally,” said Mary, bringing
her fist down on the table. “And we’re all sick to death of
women and their votes.”
Mrs. Seal looked for a moment as though she could
hardly believe her ears, and made a deprecating “tut-tuttut”
in her throat, looking alternately at Katharine and
Mary, and shaking her head as she did so. Then she remarked,
rather confidentially to Katharine, with a little
nod in Mary’s direction:
“She’s doing more for the cause than any of us. She’s
giving her youth —for, alas! when I was young there
were domestic circumstances—” she sighed, and stopped
short.
Mr. Clacton hastily reverted to the joke about luncheon,
and explained how Mrs. Seal fed on a bag of biscuits
under the trees, whatever the weather might be, rather,
Katharine thought, as though Mrs. Seal were a pet dog
who had convenient tricks.
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“Yes, I took my little bag into the square,” said Mrs.
Seal, with the self-conscious guilt of a child owning some
fault to its elders. “It was really very sustaining, and the
bare boughs against the sky do one so much GOOD. But I
shall have to give up going into the square,” she proceeded,
wrinkling her forehead. “The injustice of it! Why
should I have a beautiful square all to myself, when poor
women who need rest have nowhere at all to sit?” She
looked fiercely at Katharine, giving her short locks a little
shake. “It’s dreadful what a tyrant one still is, in spite of
all one’s efforts. One tries to lead a decent life, but one
can’t. Of course, directly one thinks of it, one sees that
all squares should be open to every one. Is there any
society with that object, Mr. Clacton? If not, there should
be, surely.”
“A most excellent object,” said Mr. Clacton in his professional
manner. “At the same time, one must deplore
the ramification of organizations, Mrs. Seal. So much excellent
effort thrown away, not to speak of pounds, shillings,
and pence. Now how many organizations of a philanthropic
nature do you suppose there are in the City of
London itself, Miss Hilbery?” he added, screwing his mouth
into a queer little smile, as if to show that the question
had its frivolous side.
Katharine smiled, too. Her unlikeness to the rest of
them had, by this time, penetrated to Mr. Clacton, who
was not naturally observant, and he was wondering who
she was; this same unlikeness had subtly stimulated Mrs.
Seal to try and make a convert of her. Mary, too, looked
at her almost as if she begged her to make things easy.
For Katharine had shown no disposition to make things
easy. She had scarcely spoken, and her silence, though
grave and even thoughtful, seemed to Mary the silence
of one who criticizes.
“Well, there are more in this house than I’d any notion
of,” she said. “On the ground floor you protect natives,
on the next you emigrate women and tell people to eat
nuts—”
“Why do you say that ‘we’ do these things?” Mary interposed,
rather sharply. “We’re not responsible for all the
cranks who choose to lodge in the same house with us.”
Mr. Clacton cleared his throat and looked at each of the
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young ladies in turn. He was a good deal struck by the
appearance and manner of Miss Hilbery, which seemed to
him to place her among those cultivated and luxurious people
of whom he used to dream. Mary, on the other hand, was
more of his own sort, and a little too much inclined to order
him about. He picked up crumbs of dry biscuit and put them
into his mouth with incredible rapidity.
“You don’t belong to our society, then?” said Mrs. Seal.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said Katharine, with such ready
candor that Mrs. Seal was nonplussed, and stared at her
with a puzzled expression, as if she could not classify her
among the varieties of human beings known to her.
“But surely “ she began.
“Mrs. Seal is an enthusiast in these matters,” said Mr.
Clacton, almost apologetically. “We have to remind her
sometimes that others have a right to their views even if
they differ from our own… . “Punch” has a very funny
picture this week, about a Suffragist and an agricultural
laborer. Have you seen this week’s “Punch,” Miss Datchet?”
Mary laughed, and said “No.”
Mr. Clacton then told them the substance of the joke,
which, however, depended a good deal for its success
upon the expression which the artist had put into the
people’s faces. Mrs. Seal sat all the time perfectly grave.
Directly he had done speaking she burst out:
“But surely, if you care about the welfare of your sex at
all, you must wish them to have the vote?”
“I never said I didn’t wish them to have the vote,”
Katharine protested.
“Then why aren’t you a member of our society?” Mrs.
Seal demanded.
Katharine stirred her spoon round and round, stared
into the swirl of the tea, and remained silent. Mr. Clacton,
meanwhile, framed a question which, after a moment’s
hesitation, he put to Katharine.
“Are you in any way related, I wonder, to the poet
Alardyce? His daughter, I believe, married a Mr. Hilbery.”
“Yes; I’m the poet’s granddaughter,” said Katharine, with
a little sigh, after a pause; and for a moment they were
all silent.
“The poet’s granddaughter!” Mrs. Seal repeated, half to
herself, with a shake of her head, as if that explained
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what was otherwise inexplicable.
The light kindled in Mr. Clacton’s eye.
“Ah, indeed. That interests me very much,” he said. “I
owe a great debt to your grandfather, Miss Hilbery. At
one time I could have repeated the greater part of him
by heart. But one gets out of the way of reading poetry,
unfortunately. You don’t remember him, I suppose?”
A sharp rap at the door made Katharine’s answer inaudible.
Mrs. Seal looked up with renewed hope in her eyes,
and exclaiming:
“The proofs at last!” ran to open the door. “Oh, it’s only
Mr. Denham!” she cried, without any attempt to conceal
her disappointment. Ralph, Katharine supposed, was a
frequent visitor, for the only person he thought it necessary
to greet was herself, and Mary at once explained the
strange fact of her being there by saying:
“Katharine has come to see how one runs an office.”
Ralph felt himself stiffen uncomfortably, as he said:
“I hope Mary hasn’t persuaded you that she knows how
to run an office?”
“What, doesn’t she?” said Katharine, looking from one
to the other.
At these remarks Mrs. Seal began to exhibit signs of
discomposure, which displayed themselves by a tossing
movement of her head, and, as Ralph took a letter from
his pocket, and placed his finger upon a certain sentence,
she forestalled him by exclaiming in confusion:
“Now, I know what you’re going to say, Mr. Denham!
But it was the day Kit Markham was here, and she upsets
one so—with her wonderful vitality, always thinking of
something new that we ought to be doing and aren’t—
and I was conscious at the time that my dates were mixed.
It had nothing to do with Mary at all, I assure you.”
“My dear Sally, don’t apologize,” said Mary, laughing.
“Men are such pedants—they don’t know what things
matter, and what things don’t.”
“Now, Denham, speak up for our sex,” said Mr. Clacton
in a jocular manner, indeed, but like most insignificant
men he was very quick to resent being found fault with
by a woman, in argument with whom he was fond of
calling himself “a mere man.” He wished, however, to
enter into a literary conservation with Miss Hilbery, and
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thus let the matter drop.
“Doesn’t it seem strange to you, Miss Hilbery,” he said,
“that the French, with all their wealth of illustrious names,
have no poet who can compare with your grandfather?
Let me see. There’s Chenier and Hugo and Alfred de
Musset—wonderful men, but, at the same time, there’s a
richness, a freshness about Alardyce—”
Here the telephone bell rang, and he had to absent
himself with a smile and a bow which signified that, although
literature is delightful, it is not work. Mrs. Seal
rose at the same time, but remained hovering over the
table, delivering herself of a tirade against party government.
“For if I were to tell you what I know of back-stairs
intrigue, and what can be done by the power of the purse,
you wouldn’t credit me, Mr. Denham, you wouldn’t, indeed.
Which is why I feel that the only work for my father’s
daughter—for he was one of the pioneers, Mr. Denham,
and on his tombstone I had that verse from the Psalms
put, about the sowers and the seed… . And what wouldn’t
I give that he should be alive now, seeing what we’re
going to see—” but reflecting that the glories of the
future depended in part upon the activity of her typewriter,
she bobbed her head, and hurried back to the
seclusion of her little room, from which immediately issued
sounds of enthusiastic, but obviously erratic, composition.
Mary made it clear at once, by starting a fresh topic of
general interest, that though she saw the humor of her
colleague, she did not intend to have her laughed at.
“The standard of morality seems to me frightfully low,”
she observed reflectively, pouring out a second cup of
tea, “especially among women who aren’t well educated.
They don’t see that small things matter, and that’s where
the leakage begins, and then we find ourselves in difficulties—
I very nearly lost my temper yesterday,” she went
on, looking at Ralph with a little smile, as though he
knew what happened when she lost her temper. “It makes
me very angry when people tell me lies—doesn’t it make
you angry?” she asked Katharine.
“But considering that every one tells lies,” Katharine
remarked, looking about the room to see where she had
put down her umbrella and her parcel, for there was an
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intimacy in the way in which Mary and Ralph addressed
each other which made her wish to leave them. Mary, on
the other hand, was anxious, superficially at least, that
Katharine should stay and so fortify her in her determination
not to be in love with Ralph.
Ralph, while lifting his cup from his lips to the table,
had made up his mind that if Miss Hilbery left, he would
go with her.
“I don’t think that I tell lies, and I don’t think that
Ralph tells lies, do you, Ralph?” Mary continued.
Katharine laughed, with more gayety, as it seemed to
Mary, than she could properly account for. What was she
laughing at? At them, presumably. Katharine had risen,
and was glancing hither and thither, at the presses and
the cupboards, and all the machinery of the office, as if
she included them all in her rather malicious amusement,
which caused Mary to keep her eyes on her straightly and
rather fiercely, as if she were a gay-plumed, mischievous
bird, who might light on the topmost bough and pick off
the ruddiest cherry, without any warning. Two women
less like each other could scarcely be imagined, Ralph
thought, looking from one to the other. Next moment, he
too, rose, and nodding to Mary, as Katharine said goodbye,
opened the door for her, and followed her out.
Mary sat still and made no attempt to prevent them
from going. For a second or two after the door had shut
on them her eyes rested on the door with a straightforward
fierceness in which, for a moment, a certain degree
of bewilderment seemed to enter; but, after a brief hesitation,
she put down her cup and proceeded to clear away
the tea-things.
The impulse which had driven Ralph to take this action
was the result of a very swift little piece of reasoning,
and thus, perhaps, was not quite so much of an impulse
as it seemed. It passed through his mind that if he missed
this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have to
face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room
again, demanding an explanation of his cowardly indecision.
It was better, on the whole, to risk present discomfiture
than to waste an evening bandying excuses and
constructing impossible scenes with this uncompromising
section of himself. For ever since he had visited the
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Hilberys he had been much at the mercy of a phantom
Katharine, who came to him when he sat alone, and answered
him as he would have her answer, and was always
beside him to crown those varying triumphs which were
transacted almost every night, in imaginary scenes, as he
walked through the lamplit streets home from the office.
To walk with Katharine in the flesh would either feed
