Two Sides of the Face: Midwinter Tales

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

She had been deceived. The man, whoever he was, had dismissed her when every moment was precious, and was himself not even trying to help. Nay, it might be…

She fought down the horror of it and rushed up the stair to fight the thing, man or devil, and save her mistress. On her way she fumbled for the scissors in her pocket. As she broke into the garret the barber, leaving the bundle to swing from its rope, stepped off the stool and, darting to a corner of the room, seemed to stand at bay there. Kirstie sprang toward the stool and hacked at the rope. As the body dropped she faced around on the man's corner, meaning to kill or be killed.

But there was no man in the corner. Her eyes searched into its dusk, and met only the shadow of the sloping attic. He had gone without a sound. There had been no sound in the room but the thud of Mrs. Johnstone's body, and this thud seemed to Kirstie to be taken up and echoed by the blow of her own forehead upon the boards as she fell across the feet of her mistress.

THE MAZED ELECTION (1768).

A PASSAGE FROM THE ORAL HISTORY OF ARDEVORA.

I.

Woman Suffrage? It's surprising to me how light some folks will talk— with a Providence, for all they know, waiting round the corner to take them at their word. I put my head in at the Working Man's Institute last night, and there was the new Coastguard officer talking like a book, arguing about Woman Suffrage in a way that made me nervous. "Look 'ee here," he was saying, "a woman must be either married, or unmarried, or otherwise. Keep they three divisions clear in your heads, and then I'll ask you to follow me—" And all the company sitting round with their mouths open. I came away: I couldn't stand it. It put me in mind how my poor mother used to warn me against squinting for fun. "One of these days," she'd say, "the wind'll take and change sudden while you're doing it; and there you'll be fixed and looking fifty ways for Sunday until we meet in the land of marrow and fatness."

And here in Ardevora, of all places!—where the womenkind be that masterful already, a man must get into his sea-boots before he can call his soul his own. Why, there was a woman here once that never asked for a vote in her life, and yet capsized an Election for Parliament—candidates, voters, and the whole apple-cart—as easy as you might turn over a plate. Did you ever hear tell of Kitty Lebow and her eight tall daughters? No; I daresay not. The world's old and losing its memory when it begins to talk of Woman Suffrage.

This Kitty, or Christian, or Christiana Lebow was by birth a Bottrell: and a finer family than the Bottrells, by their own account, you wouldn't find in all England. Not that it matters whether they came over with William the Norman, nor whether they could once on a time ride from sea to sea on their own acres. For Kitty was the last to carry the name, and she left it in Ardevora vestry the day she signed marriage with Paul Lebow (or, as he wrote it, Lebeau—"b-e-a-u,"): and the property had gone generations before. As she said 'pon her death-bed, "five-foot-six of church-hay will hold the only two achers left to me," she being a little body and very facetious to the last, and meaning her legs, of course.