CHAPTER XIV
DAPHNE AT VIOLETTE
1
Daphne Sandomir was in the train between Cambridge and King's Cross. She was always very busy in trains, as, indeed, everywhere else. On this journey she was correcting the proofs of the chapter (Chapter IV., Education of the Children) which she was contributing to a volume by seven authors, shortly to appear, to be entitled alliteratively Is Permanent Peace Possible? and to come to the conclusion that it was.
Daphne Sandomir's interest in many things had always been so keen that before the war you could not have picked out one as absorbing her more than a score of others. She had been used to write pamphlets and address meetings on most of them: eurhythmics, for instance, and eugenics, and the economic and constitutional position of women, and sweated industries, and baby crèches, and suggestion healing, and health food, and clean milk, and twenty other of the causes good people have at heart.
Then had come the war, an immense and horribly surprising shock, to which her healthy and vigorous mind, not shattered like some, had reacted in new forms of energy.
There were in England no ladies more active through that desperate time than Daphne Sandomir and her sister Eleanor Orme; but their activities were for the most part different. Mrs. Orme was secretary of a Red Cross hospital, superintended canteens, patrolled camps, relieved and entertained Belgians and dealt them out clothes, was the soul of Women's Work Committees, made body-belts, respirators and sand-bags, locked up her cellar, bought war loan, and wrote sensible letters to the Times, which usually got printed.
Mrs. Sandomir also relieved Belgians, got up Repatriation and Reconstruction societies for them, spoke at meetings of the Union of Democratic Control (to which society, as has been before mentioned, she did not belong) and of other societies to which she did belong, held study circles of working people to educate them in the principles making for permanent peace, went with a motor ambulance to pick up wounded in France, tried, but failed, like so many others, to attend the Women's International Congress at the Hague, travelled round the world examining its disposition towards peace, helped to form the S.P.P.P. (Society for Promoting Permanent Peace), wrote sensible letters to the Times, which sometimes got printed and sometimes not, articles in various periodicals, pamphlets on peace, education and such things, and chapters in joint books.
She had just returned now from her journey round the world, where she had been interviewing a surprising number of the members of the governments of the belligerent and neutral countries and making a study of such of the habits and points of view of their subjects as could be readily investigated by visitors. Immediately, she came from Cambridge, where her home was, and where she had been starting a local branch of the S.P.P.P., and addressing a meeting of the Heretics Society on the Attitude of Neutral Governments towards Mediation without Armistice.