* * * * *
"Now that we've got women like you with us—it can't be long—it can't be long!" repeated Miss Toogood, clasping her hands, as she looked first at Delia, and then at the distant figure of Miss Marvell, who in the further drawing-room, and through an archway, could be seen talking with Marion Andrews.
Delia's brows puckered.
"I'm afraid it will be long," she said, with a kind of weary passion. "The forces against us are so strong. But we must just go on—and on—straight ahead."
She sat erect on her chair, very straight and slim, in her black dress, her hands, with their long fingers, tightly pressed together on her knee. Miss Toogood thought she had never seen anyone so handsome, or so—so splendid! All that was romantic in the little dressmaker's soul rose to appreciate Delia Blanchflower. So young and so self-sacrificing—and looking like a picture of Saint Cecilia that hung in Miss Toogood's back room! The Movement was indeed wonderful! How it broke down class barriers, and knit all women together! As her eyes fell on the picture of Lady Blanchflower, in a high cap and mittens, over the mantelpiece, Miss Toogood felt a sense of personal triumph over the barbarous and ignorant past.
"What I mind most is the apathy of people—the people down here. It's really terrible!" said the science mistress, in her melancholy voice. "Sometimes I hardly know how to bear it. One thinks of all that's going on in London—and in the big towns up north—and here—it's like a vault. Everyone's really against us. Why the poor people—the labourers' wives—they're the worst of any!"
"Oh no!—we're getting on—we're getting on!" said Miss Toogood, hastily. "You're too despondent, Miss Jackson, if you'll excuse me—you are indeed. Now I'm never downhearted, or if I am, I say to myself—'It's all right somewhere!—somewhere that you can't see.' And I think of a poem my father was fond of—'If hopes are dupes, fears may be liars—And somewhere in yon smoke concealed—Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers—And but for you possess the field!' That's by a man called Arthur Clough—Miss Blanchflower—and it's a grand poem!"
Her pale blue eyes shone in their wrinkled sockets. Delia remembered a recent visit to Miss Toogood's tiny parlour behind the front room where she saw her few customers and tried them on. She recollected the books which the back parlour contained. Miss Toogood's father had been a bookseller—evidently a reading bookseller—in Winchester, and in the deformed and twisted form of his daughter some of his soul, his affections and interests, survived.
"Yes, but what are you going to give us to do, Miss Blanchflower?" said Kitty Foster, impatiently—"I don't care what I do! And the more it makes the men mad, the better!"
She drew herself up affectedly. She was a strapping girl, with a huge vanity and a parrot's brain. A year before this date a "disappointment" had greatly embittered her, and the processions and the crowded London meetings, and the window-breaking riots into which she had been led while staying with a friend, had been the solace and relief of a personal rancour and misery she might else have found intolerable.