'No,' Vida helped her out with a laughing whisper; 'I agree she doesn't look big enough or bad enough or old enough or bold enough to be the mother of young women renowned for their dreadfulness. But as soon as she opens her mouth no doubt we'll smell the brimstone. I wish she'd begin her raging. Why are they waiting?'
'It's only five minutes past,' said the lady with the literature. 'I think they're waiting for Mr. Lothian Scott. He's ill. But he'll come!' As though the example of his fidelity to the cause nerved her to more earnest prosecution of her own modest duty, she called out, 'Leaflets! Citizenship of Women, by Lothian Scott!'
'Wot do they give ye,' inquired a half-tipsy tramp, 'fur 'awkin' that rot about?'
She turned away quite unruffled. 'Citizenship of Women, one penny.'
'I hope you do get paid for so disagreeable a job—forgive my saying so,' said Vida.
'Paid? Oh, no!' she said cheerfully. 'I'm too hard at work all week to help much. And I can't speak, so I do this. Leaflets! Citizenship——'
'Is that pinched-looking creature at the end,'—Mrs. Fox-Moore detained the pamphlet-seller to point out a painfully thin, eager little figure sitting on the ledge of the plinth and looking down with anxious eyes at the crowd—'is that one of them?'
'Oh, yes. I thought everybody knew her. That's Miss Mary O'Brian.'
She spoke the name with an accent of such protecting tenderness that Vida asked—
'And who is Miss Mary O'Brian?' But the pamphlet-seller had descried a possible customer, and was gone.