"Ask Madame Beattie," said Alston, with more distaste than he could keep out of his voice. "I saw her last night on the outskirts of his crowd, sitting in Denny's hack."
"Speaking?" asked Jeff. "She'd have spoken, if she got half a chance."
Alston laughed quietly.
"Moore got the better of her. He was in his car. All he had to do was to make off. She made after him, but he's got the whip-hand, with a car."
The next night, doubtless taught the advisability of vying with her enemy, Madame Beattie, to the disgust of Esther, came down cloaked and muffled to the chin and took the one automobile to be had for hire in Addington. She was whirled away, where Esther had no idea. She was whirled back again at something after ten, hoarse yet immensely tickled. But Reardon knew what she had done and he telephoned it to Esther. She was making speeches of her own, stopping at street corners wherever she could gather a group, but especially running down to the little streets by the water where the foreign labourers came swarming out and cheered her.
"It's disgraceful," said Esther, almost crying into the telephone. "What is she saying to them?"
"Nobody knows, except it's political. We assume that," said Reardon. "All kinds of lingo. They tell me she knows more languages than a college professor."
"Find out," Esther besought him. "Ask her. Ask whom you shall vote for. It'll get her started."
That seemed to Reardon a valuable idea, and he actually did ask her, lingering before the door one night when she came out to take her car. He put her into it with a florid courtesy she accepted as her due—it was the best, she thought, the man had to offer—and then said to her jocosely:
"Well, Madame Beattie, who shall I vote for?"