"Nobody can doubt your zeal, Lady Fanny."
"Only my discretion? Oh, I've long left that to take care of itself.
What are you here for?"
"To look after my ward."
Lady Fanny eyed him again.
"Of course! I had forgotten. Well, she'll be all right."
"What are you really preparing to do to-morrow?"
"Force our way into the House of Commons!"
"Which means—get into an ugly scrimmage with the police, and put your cause back another few years?"
"Ah! I can't talk to you, if you talk like that! There isn't time," she threw back, with laughing affectation, and nodding to him, she fluttered off to a distant table where a group of girls were busy making black and orange badges. But her encounter with him seemed to have affected the hive. Its buzz sank, almost ceased.
Winnington indeed suddenly discovered that all eyes were fixed upon him—that he was being closely and angrily observed. He was conscious, quickly and strangely conscious, of an atmosphere of passionate hostility, as though a pulse of madness ran through the twenty or thirty women present. Meredithian lines flashed into memory—