Miss Levering smiled down at her. "What a funny little person you are.
Do you know who I am?"
"No."
"It hasn"t ever occurred to you to ask?"
The face turned to her with a half roguish smile. "Oh, I thought you looked all right."
"I"m the person who had the interview with your friend, Miss Claxton."
As no recollection showed in the face, "At Queen Anne"s Gate," she added.
"I don"t think I knew about that," said Ernestine, absently. Then alert, disdainful, "Fancy the member for Wrotton saying---- Yes, we went to see him this morning."
"Oh, that is very exciting! What was he like?"
"Quite a feeble sort of person, I thought."
"Really!" laughed Miss Levering.
"He talked such nonsense to us about that old Plural Voting Bill. His idea seemed to be to get us to promise to behave nicely while the overworked House of Commons considered the iniquity of some men having more than one vote--they hadn"t a minute this session to consider the much greater iniquity of no women having any vote at all! Of course he said he _had_ been a great friend to Woman Suffrage, until he got shocked with our tactics." She smiled broadly. "We asked him what he"d ever done to show his friendship."
"Well?"
"He didn"t seem to know the answer to that. What strikes me most about men is their being so illogical."
Lady John Ulland had been openly surprised, even enthusiastically grateful, at discovering before this that Vida Levering was ready to help her with some of the unornamental duties that fall to the lot of the "great ladies" of England.
"I don"t know what that discontented creature, her sister, means by saying Vida is so unsympathetic about charity work."
Neither could Lady John"s neighbour, the Bishop, understand Mrs.
Fox-Moore"s reproach. Had not his young kinswoman"s charity concerts helped to rebuild the chantry?
"Such a _nice creature_!" was Lord John"s contribution. Then, showing the profundity of his friendly interest, "Why doesn"t she find some nice fella to marry her?"
"People don"t marry so early nowadays," his wife rea.s.sured him.
Lord Borrodaile, to whom Vida still talked freely, he alone had some understanding of the changed face life was coming to wear for her. When he found that laughing at her failed of the desired effect, he offered touching testimony to his affection for her by trying to understand. It was no small thing for a man like Borrodaile, who, for the rest, found it no easier than others of his cla.s.s rightly to interpret the modern scene as looked down upon from the narrow lancet of the mediaeval tower which was his mind.
When she got him to smile at her report of the humours of the populace, he did so against his will, shaking his long Van d.y.k.e head, and saying--
"It spoils the fun for me to think of your being there. I have a quite unconquerable distrust of eccentricity."
"There"s nothing the least original about my mixing with "The People,"
as my sister would call them. The women of my world would often go slumming. The only difference between me and them may be that I, perhaps, shall go a little farther, that"s all."
"Well, I devoutly hope you won"t!" he said, with unusual emphasis. "Let the proletariat attend to the affairs of the proletariat. They don"t need a woman like you."
"They not only need--what"s more, they are getting, all kinds! It"s that, more than anything else, that shows their strength. The miracle it is, to see the way they all work together! Women, the poorest and most ignorant (except of hardship), working shoulder to shoulder with women of substance and position. Oh, yes, they are winning over that sort, teachers and university graduates--a whole group who would be called Intellectuals if they were men--all doing what men have said women could never do--pulling together. And, oh! that reminds me," she said suddenly, smiling as one who has thought of a capital joke at her companion"s expense: "it"s my duty to warn you. I went with your daughter to lunch at her Country Club, and they were all discussing the Suffrage! A good dozen! And Sophia--well, Sophia came out in a new light. I want you, please, to believe _I"ve_ never talked to her."
"Oh," said Borrodaile, with an unconscious arrogance, "Sophia doesn"t wait to be talked to. She takes her own line. Politics are a tradition with our women. I found her reading the parliamentary debates when she was fourteen."
"And your boys, are they equally----?"
He sighed. "The world has got very topsy-turvy. All my girls are boys--and all my boys are girls."
"Well, Sophia can take care of the Country Club! I remember how we scoffed when she organized it."
"It"s had precisely the effect I expected. Takes her away from her own home, where she ought to be----"
"Who wants her at home?"
Unblushingly he answered, "_I_ do."
"Why, you"re never there yourself." He blinked. "When you aren"t in your garden you"re----"
"Here?" he laughed.
"I don"t myself," she went on, "_I_ don"t belong to any clubs----"
"I should hope not, indeed! Where should I go for tea and for news of the workings of the Zeitgeist?" he mocked.
"But I begin to see what women"s clubs are for."
"They"re for the dowdy, unattached females to meet and gossip in, to hold feeble little debates in, to listen to pettifogging little lectures, and imagine they"re _dans le mouvement_."
"They are to accustom women to thinking and acting together. While you and I have been laughing at them, they"ve been building up a huge machinery of organization, ready to the hand of the chief engineer who is to come."
"Horrible thought!"
"Well, horrible or not, I don"t despise clubs any more. They"re largely responsible for the new corporate spirit among women."
He pulled himself out of the cavernous comfort of his chair, and stood glooming in front of the screen that hid the fireless grate.
"Clubs, societies, leagues, they"re all devices for robbing people of their freedom. It"s no use to talk to me. I"m one of the few individualists left in the world. I never wanted in my life to belong to any body." Her pealing laughter made him explain, smiling, "To any corporation, was what I meant."
"No, no. You got it right the first time! The reason that, in spite of my late perversities, you don"t cast me off is because I"m one of the few women who don"t make claims."
"It is the claim of the community that I resent. I want to keep clear of all complication. I want to be really free. I could never have pledged myself to any Church or any party."
"Perhaps"--she smiled at him--"perhaps that"s why you are a beautiful and ineffectual angel."
"The reason I never did is because I care about liberty--the thing itself. You are in danger, I see, of being enamoured of the name. In thought women are always half a century or so behind. What patriot"s voice is heard in Europe or America to-day? Where is the modern Kossuth, Garibaldi? What poet goes out in these times to die at Missolonghi? Just as men are finding out the vanity of the old dreams, the women seem to be seizing on them. The ma.s.s of intelligent men have no longing for political power. If a sort of public prominence is thrust on men"--he shrugged as if his shoulders chafed under some burden--"_in their hearts_ they curse their lot. I suppose it"s all so new to the woman she is amused. She even--I"m _told_"--his lifted hand, with the closed fingers suddenly flung open, advertised the difficulty a sane person found in crediting the uncanny rumour--"I"m _told_ that women even like public dinners."
"Well, you do."
"I?"