“I suppose you are not coming, Cyril?” said Susie, later, putting on her gloves. “We are dining with the Gainsboroughs after the meeting; without dressing.”
“No, your subjects are too deep for me, Sue,” he replied. “I’ll have something ready to wet your whistle when you come back, and keep up the fire and let the cat out and that sort of thing.”
“Strickland will see to all that, dear,” she said. “I think you had better go to bed if you feel tired. I expect one of the maids will be up to make tea if we want it.”
When they arrived at the Town Hall they were shown into a small room where the general committees of charitable institutions were often held. Reports were read, giving an outline of the year’s work and a statement of the financial position and requirements; an attempt was made to rouse public interest, accounts were then passed and votes of thanks to the principal helpers and the chairman were proposed, seconded and carried. Susie had been asked to second the vote of thanks to the committee.
The audience consisted of a large number of her personal friends, a few dowdily dressed women with serious, lined faces, whom she knew by sight, and dreaded a little for their habit of turning up at tea-parties and saying tactless things about the behaviour of young girls in the Park after sunset, the cruelty of parents and the tendency of wives to drink to excess, in spite of industrious husbands. Very often they introduced these subjects just when she herself had been expounding the perfection of the mother instinct or the disastrous result of confidence in a young and innocent mind. They had a way of referring to crime as if it were a flaw in a work of art, rather than a snare set by wicked poachers for the Almighty’s pet rabbits. A few of the outside public were also present, with the usual vacant faces, perfunctory clothes, thin hair, and those curious eyes of the English stranger, which, if they are indeed windows of the soul, certainly do not belong to a country where romances are carried on at the lattice. Those eyes suggest Nottingham lace curtains and an aspidistra behind the dim panes which the owner never approaches, unless there is a street accident or a ring at the bell. They enclose many human preoccupations, but nothing that is likely to be shared with the passersby.
Susie faced the eyes, the friendly eyes, the business-like eyes and the aspidistra eyes. The chairman had called on her to second the vote of thanks, after a short-sighted glance round to make sure she was there. Her dimple, the little crease in the satin cushion of her cheek, appeared, and she smiled, catching the attention of the first few rows.
“Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,” she began, “I think it extremely kind of you to ask me to second this vote of thanks, because you are all so busy and I am not used to speaking, nor experienced enough in your work to be of very much help. But in thanking our splendid committee for all they have done, I want to try and tell everybody if I can, how deeply I feel that we all ought to do a great deal more to help these poor women. Vice is so pitifully easy to women in a great city like this (murmured approval was heard at the back). I am not going to say anything against men. We are the wives and mothers and sisters of men, and the responsibility lies with us (slight signs of cynicism from an aspidistra eye in the fifth row). But what I say is this. All our influence is necessarily—must necessarily be—of no use so long as our girls are wilfully misled by the idea that their love and innocent confidence will be understood and valued at its true worth by the naturally coarser and rougher nature. (“How thankful I am father didn’t come!” thought Teresa.) Men go into the world and become accustomed to hardness and cruelty, especially in foreign countries, with which a great port like this is constantly in touch. They drink and quarrel, and their poor homes have so little beauty to encourage them. Is it to be wondered at that a young girl who dreams of romance and her own little home and the sound of baby feet should refuse to believe that these things are of less value to the rough sailor or soldier or merchant, drunk with wine and full of strong passions that have no place in her finer nature? (The chairman, the treasurer and a doctor, who happened to be there, were gazing meditatively at the electric light fixtures, the desk, the floor, anywhere that would afford a sufficiently obscure resting-place for any involuntary expression of opinion on their faces. They felt a friendly approval of Susie as a nice, tender-hearted little woman, but all the same they hoped she would wind up soon.) What I feel so much is this, that although great sympathy and great patience with these poor girls must be shown, and although they must, of course, be taught to see the dreadful evil that they do, yet until wives and mothers and sisters impress their men with a better understanding of a woman’s feeling about these things, and make them see that the finer and higher view is not necessarily foolish and sentimental—that they hurt us by coarse jokes and rough actions, by mistaking love of motherhood for vulgar flirtation—that until they see all this in its true light it is useless to expect that trust will not be betrayed and happy girls flung back into these Homes, ruined and disgraced. Marriage may mean so much to a girl. It is surely worth an effort from us, who have had our trials and difficulties and misunderstandings, to bring home to the boys who are growing up a sense of those qualities which they lack by nature. I have much pleasure in seconding this vote of thanks to our committee.”
She sat down amidst whole-hearted applause from her friends and several of the aspidistra-eyed. The ladies whom she feared gave a few business-like taps with one hand upon the other and fidgeted impatiently. Everything that interested them in the meeting was over and most of them had other engagements or voluminous documents at home to attend to.
The vote of thanks to the chairman and his reply only occupied another ten minutes, and then there was tea in the Lady Mayoress’s parlour.
“What a splendid speech you made,” said Mrs. Eric Manley, coming up to Susie. “I don’t know that I go quite as far as you do about the innocence of girls, but still——”