'Well, I don't know.' More wary than ever, she suspended judgment.
'I noticed none of you paid any attention when the crowd called out—things about——'
Miss Claxton's frown deepened. It was plain she heard the echo of that insistent, never-answered query of the crowd, 'Got your dog-whip, miss?' She waited.
It looked as though Miss Levering lacked courage to repeat it in all its violent bareness.
'——when they called out things—about the encounters with the police. It's those stories, as I suppose you know, that have set so many against the movement.'
No word out of Miss Claxton. She sat there, not leaning back, nor any longer stiffly upright, but hunched together like a creature ready to spring.
'I believed those stories too; but when I had watched you, and listened to you on Sunday,' Miss Levering hastened to add, a little shamefaced at the necessity, 'I said to myself, not' (suddenly she stopped and smiled with disarming frankness)—'I didn't say, "That woman's too well-behaved, or too amiable;" I said, "She's too intelligent. That woman never spat at a policeman.'"
'Spit? No,' she said grimly.
'"Nor bit, nor scratched, nor any of those things. And since the papers have lied about that," I said to myself, "I'll go to headquarters for information."'