"You are exceedingly vulgar," she said, "but since you insist on that figure of speech, you in America have waited a long time for the bath, and if you continue your present methods you won't get it before you need it."
II
Now that they had thought of it, they were all frantic for fear Mrs. Cobden-Fitzjames and the Woman's Liberty League might think of it, too, kidnap the Prime Minister, and leave us a miserable president of the Local Government Board or a wretched under-secretary of something or other.
The plan we evolved before the meeting broke up was to send a wire to Mrs. Gresham, the Premier's daughter, that he had been delayed, and to meet a later train. Then, Daphne's motor would meet the proper train—he was to arrive somewhere between seven and eight in the evening—carry his Impressiveness to Harcourt Hall and deliver him into the hands of the enemy. As Violet Harcourt-Standish voiced it: the motor gone, the railway miles away, what can he do? He will keep awake, because he will have slept in the train going down, and we can give him a cold supper. Nothing heavy to make him drowsy. Perhaps it would be better not to give him anything. (Hear! Hear!) Then, six speeches, each an hour long. At the end of that time we can promise him something to eat and a machine to take him to West Newbury on one condition. Every one looked up. "He must sign an indorsement of Suffrage for Women." (Loud applause.)
"Why not have a table laid," I suggested, "and show it to him? Let him smell it, so to speak. Visualise your temptation. You know,—'And the devil——'"
"This is the Prime Minister, Madge," Daphne broke in shortly, "and you are not happy in your Scriptural references."
Things went along with suspicious smoothness. Daphne really took the onus of the whole thing, and, of course, I helped her.
We all got new clothes, for everybody knows that if you can attract a man's eye you can get and maybe hold his ear. And Daphne wrote a fresh speech, one she had thought out in jail. It began, "Words! Words!! Words!!!" She wrote a poem, too, called the Song of the Vote, with the meter of the Song of a Shirt, and she wanted me to recite it, but even before I read it I refused.
The gown Mother had ordered for me at Paquin's on her way to the Riviera came just in time, a nice white thing over silver, with a square-cut neck and bits of sleeves made of gauze and silver fringe. Daphne got a pink velvet, although she is stout and inclined to be florid. She had jet butterflies embroidered over it, a flight of them climbing up one side of her skirt and crawling to the opposite shoulder, so that if one stood off at a distance she had a curiously diagonal appearance, as if she had listed heavily to one side.
By hurrying we got to Ivry on Thursday evening, and I was in a blue funk. Daphne was militantly cheerful, and, in the drawing-room after dinner, she put the finishing touches to her speech. It was warm and rainy, and I wandered aimlessly around, looking at hideous English photographs and wondering if picking oakum in an English jail was worse than making bags—and if they could arrest me, after all. Could they touch an American citizen? (But was I an American citizen? Perhaps I should have been naturalised, or something of that kind!) And I thought of Mother at Florence, in the villa on the Via Michelangelo—Mother, who classes Suffragists with Anti-Vaccinationists and Theosophists.