displaying cheeks more than usually crimson, and placing
a jam-pot emphatically upon the table. But, for the
moment, she was unable to launch herself upon one of
those enthusiastic, but inconsequent, tirades upon liberty,
democracy, the rights of the people, and the iniquities
of the Government, in which she delighted. Some
memory from her own past or from the past of her sex
rose to her mind and kept her abashed. She glanced furtively
at Mary, who still sat by the window with her arm
upon the sill. She noticed how young she was and full of
the promise of womanhood. The sight made her so uneasy
that she fidgeted the cups upon their saucers.
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“Yes—enough work to last a lifetime,” said Mary, as if
concluding some passage of thought.
Mrs. Seal brightened at once. She lamented her lack of
scientific training, and her deficiency in the processes of
logic, but she set her mind to work at once to make the
prospects of the cause appear as alluring and important
as she could. She delivered herself of an harangue in
which she asked a great many rhetorical questions and
answered them with a little bang of one fist upon another.
“To last a lifetime? My dear child, it will last all our
lifetimes. As one falls another steps into the breach. My
father, in his generation, a pioneer—I, coming after him,
do my little best. What, alas! can one do more? And now
it’s you young women—we look to you—the future looks
to you. Ah, my dear, if I’d a thousand lives, I’d give them
all to our cause. The cause of women, d’you say? I say the
cause of humanity. And there are some”—she glanced
fiercely at the window—”who don’t see it! There are some
who are satisfied to go on, year after year, refusing to
admit the truth. And we who have the vision—the kettle
boiling over? No, no, let me see to it—we who know the
truth,” she continued, gesticulating with the kettle and
the teapot. Owing to these encumbrances, perhaps, she
lost the thread of her discourse, and concluded, rather
wistfully, “It’s all so simple.” She referred to a matter
that was a perpetual source of bewilderment to her—the
extraordinary incapacity of the human race, in a world
where the good is so unmistakably divided from the bad,
of distinguishing one from the other, and embodying what
ought to be done in a few large, simple Acts of Parliament,
which would, in a very short time, completely
change the lot of humanity.
“One would have thought,” she said, “that men of University
training, like Mr. Asquith—one would have thought that
an appeal to reason would not be unheard by them. But
reason,” she reflected, “what is reason without Reality?”
Doing homage to the phrase, she repeated it once more,
and caught the ear of Mr. Clacton, as he issued from his
room; and he repeated it a third time, giving it, as he
was in the habit of doing with Mrs. Seal’s phrases, a dryly
humorous intonation. He was well pleased with the world,
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however, and he remarked, in a flattering manner, that
he would like to see that phrase in large letters at the
head of a leaflet.
“But, Mrs. Seal, we have to aim at a judicious combination
of the two,” he added in his magisterial way to check
the unbalanced enthusiasm of the women. “Reality has to
be voiced by reason before it can make itself felt. The
weak point of all these movements, Miss Datchet,” he continued,
taking his place at the table and turning to Mary
as usual when about to deliver his more profound cogitations,
“is that they are not based upon sufficiently intellectual
grounds. A mistake, in my opinion. The British public
likes a pellet of reason in its jam of eloquence—a pill of
reason in its pudding of sentiment,” he said, sharpening
the phrase to a satisfactory degree of literary precision.
His eyes rested, with something of the vanity of an
author, upon the yellow leaflet which Mary held in her
hand. She rose, took her seat at the head of the table,
poured out tea for her colleagues, and gave her opinion
upon the leaflet. So she had poured out tea, so she had
criticized Mr. Clacton’s leaflets a hundred times already;
but now it seemed to her that she was doing it in a
different spirit; she had enlisted in the army, and was a
volunteer no longer. She had renounced something and
was now—how could she express it?;—not quite “in the
running” for life. She had always known that Mr. Clacton
and Mrs. Seal were not in the running, and across the
gulf that separated them she had seen them in the guise
of shadow people, flitting in and out of the ranks of the
living—eccentrics, undeveloped human beings, from
whose substance some essential part had been cut away.
All this had never struck her so clearly as it did this afternoon,
when she felt that her lot was cast with them for
ever. One view of the world plunged in darkness, so a
more volatile temperament might have argued after a
season of despair, let the world turn again and show another,
more splendid, perhaps. No, Mary thought, with
unflinching loyalty to what appeared to her to be the
true view, having lost what is best, I do not mean to
pretend that any other view does instead. Whatever happens,
I mean to have no presences in my life. Her very
words had a sort of distinctness which is sometimes pro
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duced by sharp, bodily pain. To Mrs. Seal’s secret jubilation
the rule which forbade discussion of shop at teatime
was overlooked. Mary and Mr. Clacton argued with a
cogency and a ferocity which made the little woman feel
that something very important—she hardly knew what—
was taking place. She became much excited; one crucifix
became entangled with another, and she dug a considerable
hole in the table with the point of her pencil in
order to emphasize the most striking heads of the discourse;
and how any combination of Cabinet Ministers
could resist such discourse she really did not know.
She could hardly bring herself to remember her own
private instrument of justice—the typewriter. The telephone-
bell rang, and as she hurried off to answer a voice
which always seemed a proof of importance by itself, she
felt that it was at this exact spot on the surface of the
globe that all the subterranean wires of thought and
progress came together. When she returned, with a message
from the printer, she found that Mary was putting
on her hat firmly; there was something imperious and
dominating in her attitude altogether.
“Look, Sally,” she said, “these letters want copying.
These I’ve not looked at. The question of the new census
will have to be gone into carefully. But I’m going home
now. Good night, Mr. Clacton; good night, Sally.”
“We are very fortunate in our secretary, Mr. Clacton,”
said Mrs. Seal, pausing with her hand on the papers, as
the door shut behind Mary. Mr. Clacton himself had been
vaguely impressed by something in Mary’s behavior towards
him. He envisaged a time even when it would become
necessary to tell her that there could not be two
masters in one office—but she was certainly able, very
able, and in touch with a group of very clever young
men. No doubt they had suggested to her some of her
new ideas.
He signified his assent to Mrs. Seal’s remark, but observed,
with a glance at the clock, which showed only
half an hour past five:
“If she takes the work seriously, Mrs. Seal—but that’s
just what some of your clever young ladies don’t do.” So
saying he returned to his room, and Mrs. Seal, after a
moment’s hesitation, hurried back to her labors.
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CHAPTER XXI
Mary walked to the nearest station and reached home in
an incredibly short space of time, just so much, indeed,
as was needed for the intelligent understanding of the
news of the world as the “Westminster Gazette” reported
it. Within a few minutes of opening her door, she was in
trim for a hard evening’s work. She unlocked a drawer
and took out a manuscript, which consisted of a very few
pages, entitled, in a forcible hand, “Some Aspects of the
Democratic State.” The aspects dwindled out in a cries-
cross of blotted lines in the very middle of a sentence,
and suggested that the author had been interrupted, or
convinced of the futility of proceeding, with her pen in
the air… . Oh, yes, Ralph had come in at that point. She
scored that sheet very effectively, and, choosing a fresh
one, began at a great rate with a generalization upon the
structure of human society, which was a good deal bolder
than her custom. Ralph had told her once that she couldn’t
write English, which accounted for those frequent blots
and insertions; but she put all that behind her, and drove
ahead with such words as came her way, until she had
accomplished half a page of generalization and might
legitimately draw breath. Directly her hand stopped her
brain stopped too, and she began to listen. A paper-boy
shouted down the street; an omnibus ceased and lurched
on again with the heave of duty once more shouldered;
the dullness of the sounds suggested that a fog had risen
since her return, if, indeed, a fog has power to deaden
sound, of which fact, she could not be sure at the present
moment. It was the sort of fact Ralph Denham knew. At
any rate, it was no concern of hers, and she was about to
dip a pen when her ear was caught by the sound of a step
upon the stone staircase. She followed it past Mr. Chippen’s
chambers; past Mr. Gibson’s; past Mr. Turner’s; after which
it became her sound. A postman, a washerwoman, a circular,
a bill—she presented herself with each of these
perfectly natural possibilities; but, to her surprise, her
mind rejected each one of them impatiently, even apprehensively.
The step became slow, as it was apt to do at
the end of the steep climb, and Mary, listening for the
regular sound, was filled with an intolerable nervous
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ness. Leaning against the table, she felt the knock of her
heart push her body perceptibly backwards and forwards—
a state of nerves astonishing and reprehensible in a stable
woman. Grotesque fancies took shape. Alone, at the top
of the house, an unknown person approaching nearer and
nearer—how could she escape? There was no way of escape.
She did not even know whether that oblong mark
on the ceiling was a trap-door to the roof or not. And if
she got on to the roof—well, there was a drop of sixty
feet or so on to the pavement. But she sat perfectly still,
and when the knock sounded, she got up directly and
opened the door without hesitation. She saw a tall figure
outside, with something ominous to her eyes in the look
of it.
“What do you want?” she said, not recognizing the face
in the fitful light of the staircase.
“Mary? I’m Katharine Hilbery!”
Mary’s self-possession returned almost excessively, and
her welcome was decidedly cold, as if she must recoup
herself for this ridiculous waste of emotion. She moved
her green-shaded lamp to another table, and covered
“Some Aspects of the Democratic State” with a sheet of
blotting-paper.
“Why can’t they leave me alone?” she thought bitterly,
connecting Katharine and Ralph in a conspiracy to take
from her even this hour of solitary study, even this poor
little defence against the world. And, as she smoothed
down the sheet of blotting-paper over the manuscript,
she braced herself to resist Katharine, whose presence
struck her, not merely by its force, as usual, but as something
in the nature of a menace.
“You’re working?” said Katharine, with hesitation, perceiving
that she was not welcome.
“Nothing that matters,” Mary replied, drawing forward
the best of the chairs and poking the fire.
“I didn’t know you had to work after you had left the
office,” said Katharine, in a tone which gave the impression
that she was thinking of something else, as was,
indeed, the case.
She had been paying calls with her mother, and in between
the calls Mrs. Hilbery had rushed into shops and
bought pillow-cases and blotting-books on no percep
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tible method for the furnishing of Katharine’s house.
Katharine had a sense of impedimenta accumulating on
all sides of her. She had left her at length, and had come
on to keep an engagement to dine with Rodney at his
rooms. But she did not mean to get to him before seven
o’clock, and so had plenty of time to walk all the way
from Bond Street to the Temple if she wished it. The flow
of faces streaming on either side of her had hypnotized
her into a mood of profound despondency, to which her
expectation of an evening alone with Rodney contributed.
They were very good friends again, better friends,
they both said, than ever before. So far as she was concerned
this was true. There were many more things in
him than she had guessed until emotion brought them
forth—strength, affection, sympathy. And she thought
of them and looked at the faces passing, and thought
how much alike they were, and how distant, nobody feeling
anything as she felt nothing, and distance, she
thought, lay inevitably between the closest, and their
intimacy was the worst presence of all. For, “Oh dear,”
she thought, looking into a tobacconist’s window, “I don’t
care for any of them, and I don’t care for William, and
people say this is the thing that matters most, and I
can’t see what they mean by it.”
She looked desperately at the smooth-bowled pipes,
and wondered—should she walk on by the Strand or by
the Embankment? It was not a simple question, for it
concerned not different streets so much as different
streams of thought. If she went by the Strand she would
force herself to think out the problem of the future, or
