Dinner was announced. Roger took Miss Lenning. Mrs. Heseltine sat at his left. Miss Lenning was a determined young woman with no nonsense about her. Roger asked if her speech had gone well.
"Pretty well," she said. "I was on a wagon in the Park. A lot of loafers rushed the wagon once or twice. It's the sort of thing London loafers delight to do."
"Yes," said Roger. "That is because the part of London near the parks is not serious. It is a part given up to pleasure-mongers and their parasites. The crowds there don't believe in anything, they won't help anything, they can't understand anything. In the East of London you would probably get attention. I suppose the police sniggered and looked away?"
"You talk as though you had been at it yourself," said Miss Lenning.
"Been at it? Yes. Of course I have. But not very much, I'm afraid. I used to speak fairly regularly. Then at your big meeting in the Park I got a rotten egg in the jaw, which gave me blood poisoning. I had to stop then, because ever since then I've been behindhand with my work. A London crowd is a crowd of loafers loafing. But a crowd in a northern city, in Manchester, or Leeds, or Glasgow, is a very different thing. They are a different stock. They are working men, interested in things. Here they are idlers delighting in a chance of rowdyism. They are without chivalry or decent feeling. They go to boo and jeer, knowing that the police won't stop them. I think you women are perfectly splendid to do what you do, and have done."
"Oh, one doesn't mind going to prison," said Miss Lenning. "I've been three times now. Besides, we shall know how to reform the prisons when we get the vote. What makes my blood boil are the insults I get in the streets from the sort of men whose votes are responsible for disgraces like the war." She stopped. "What is your line?" she asked.
"I'm a writer."
"Why don't you write a play or a novel about us?"
"Because I don't believe in mixing art with propaganda. My province is to induce emotion. I am not going to use such talent as I have upon intellectual puzzles proper to this time. This is the work of a reformer or a leader-writer. My work is to find out certain general truths in nature, and to express them, in prose or verse, in as high and living a manner as I can. That seems absurd to you?"
"Not absurd exactly," she said, "but selfish."