Susan’s simple right-down mind stopped for a moment with something very like a sob, baffled by the contradictions of the situation.
“So I came,” she said, with a forced bright smile.
“I’m glad you came,” said Lady Harman. “I wanted to see you. And you know, Susan, I know very little—very little indeed—of Sir Isaac’s business.”
“I quite believe it, my lady. I’ve never for one moment thought you——I don’t know how to say it, my lady.”
“And indeed I’m not,” said Lady Harman, taking it as said.
“I knew you weren’t,” said Susan, relieved to be so understood.
And the two women looked perplexedly at one another over the neglected curtains Susan had come to “see to,” and shyness just snatched back Lady Harman from her impulse to give Susan a sisterly kiss. Nevertheless Susan who was full of wise intuitions felt that kiss that was never given, and in the remote world of unacted deeds returned it with effusion.
“But it’s hard,” said Susan, “to find one’s own second sister mixed up in a strike, and that’s what it’s come to last week. They’ve struck, all the International waitresses have struck, and last night in Piccadilly they were standing on the kerb and picketing and her among them. With a crowd cheering.... And me ready to give my right hand to keep that girl respectable!”
And with a volubility that was at once tumultuous and effective, Susan sketched in the broad outlines of the crisis that threatened the dividends and popularity of the International Bread and Cake Stores. The unsatisfied demands of that bright journalistic enterprise, The London Lion, lay near the roots of the trouble. The London Lion had stirred it up. But it was only too evident that The London Lion had merely given a voice and form and cohesion to long smouldering discontents.
Susan’s account of the matter had that impartiality which comes from intellectual incoherence, she hadn’t so much a judgment upon the whole as a warring mosaic of judgments. It was talking upon Post Impressionist lines, talking in the manner of Picasso. She had the firmest conviction that to strike against employment, however ill-paid or badly conditioned, was a disgraceful combination of folly, ingratitude and general wickedness, and she had an equally strong persuasion that the treatment of the employees of the International Bread and Cake Stores was such as no reasonably spirited person ought to stand. She blamed her sister extremely and sympathized with her profoundly, and she put it all down in turn to The London Lion, to Sir Isaac, and to a small round-faced person called Babs Wheeler, who appeared to be the strike leader and seemed always to be standing on tables in the branches, or clambering up to the lions in Trafalgar Square, or being cheered in the streets.