“I didn’t know,” she said. “It is so interesting to be told. I thought all the brave sort went to prison, and had breakfast together when they were let out. I am sure I have read about their having breakfast together.”
A faint smile quivered on her mouth. She was aware that Cousin Amy thought her very stupid, and there was a delicate pleasure in appearing quite idiotic like this. It made Cousin Amy dance with irritation in her inside, and explain more carefully yet.
“Yes, dear Millie,” she said, “but their having breakfast together has not much to do with their objects——”
“I don’t know about that,” said Harry; “there is a club at Cambridge to which I belong, whose object is to dine together.”
“Then it is very greedy of you, dear,” said Mrs. Ames, “and the Suffragettes are not like that. They go to prison and do all sorts of unladylike things for the sake of their convictions. They want to be treated justly. For years they have asked for justice, and nobody has paid the least attention to them; now they are making people attend. I assure you that until I began reading about them, I had very little sympathy with them. But now I feel that all women ought to know about them. Certainly what I have read has opened my eyes very much, and there are a quantity of women of very good family indeed who belong to them.”
Harry pulled his handkerchief out of the sleeve of his dress-coat; he habitually kept it there. Just now the Omar Khayyam Club was rather great on class distinctions.
“I do not see what that matters,” he said. “Because a man’s great-grandmother was created a duchess for being a king’s mistress——”
Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Ames got up simultaneously; if anything Mrs. Ames got up a shade first.
“I do not think we need go into that, Harry,” said Mrs. Ames.
Millie tempered the wind.