"It's wonderful!" said little Miss Toogood, the lame dressmaker, as they turned a corner of the shrubbery, and the rambling south front rose before them,—"wonderful!—when you think of the people that used to live here! Why, old Lady Blanchflower looked upon you and me, Miss Jackson, as no better than earwigs! I sent her a packet of our leaflets once by post. Well—she never used to give me any work, so she couldn't take it away. But she got Mrs. David Jones at Thring Farm to take away hers, and Mrs. Willy Smith, the Vet's wife, you remember?—and two or three more. So I nearly starved one winter; but I'm a tough one, and I got through. And now there's one of us sits in the old lady's place! Isn't that a sign of the times?"
"But of course!" said her companion, whose face expressed a kind of gloomy ardour. "We're winning. We must win—sometime!"
The cheerfulness of the words was oddly robbed of its effect by the tragic look of the speaker. Miss Toogood's hand pressed her arm.
"I'm always so sorry"—murmured the dressmaker—"for those others—those women—who haven't lived to see what we're going to see, aren't you?"
"Yes," assented the other, adding—with the same emotional emphasis—"But they've all helped—every woman's helped! They've all played their parts."
"Well, I don't know about Lady Blanchflower!" laughed Miss Toogood, happily.
"What did she matter? The Antis are like the bits of stick you put into a hive. All they do is to stir up the bees."
Meanwhile Marion Andrews was mostly silent, glancing restlessly however from side to side, as though she expected some spy, some enemy—her mother?—to emerge upon them from the shadows of the shrubbery. Her companion, Kitty Foster, a rather pretty girl with flaming red hair, the daughter of a substantial farmer on the further side of the village, chattered unceasingly, especially about the window-breaking raid in which she had been concerned, the figure she had cut at the police court, the things she had said to the magistrate, and the annoyance she had felt when her father paid her fine.
"They led me a life when they got me home. And mother's been so ill since, I had to promise I'd stay quiet till Christmas anyway. But then I'm off! It's fine to feel you're doing something real—something hot and strong—so that people can't help taking notice of you. That's what I say to father, when he shouts at me—'we're not going to ask you now any more—we've asked long enough—we're going to make you do what we want.'"
And the girl threw back her head excitedly. Marion vaguely assented, and the talk beside her rambled on, now violent, now egotistical, till they reached the Maumsey door.