“I do not expect she does play the piano,” said the priest lamely.
“You do play, don’t you? You have such pretty hands.”
After that, of course, the suffragette felt as though she could have played Strauss to please her. As a matter of fact she had little real articulate gift for music, but she never forgot a tune she had heard, and found no difficulty in rendering the songs that always sang in her head, outwardly instead of inwardly.
The priest’s sister was not musical. Nor was she critical. She considered that the Brown Borough had in this newcomer found something it had lacked. The suffragette, who possessed certain secret springs of conceit, was to some extent of the same opinion. And by the end of the evening the majority of the girls shared this view.
“Do you know a Mrs. Smith?” asked the suffragette, as she said good-bye.
“I know perhaps five hundred Mrs. Smiths,” said the priest’s sister.
“She wears a plush coat, and a baby, and a little girl of hers died in October.”
“About two hundred and fifty out of the five hundred wear plush coats, and babies, and little girls that die.”
“I wonder what surnames are for,” said the suffragette pettishly, “since they have ceased to distinguish one person from another?”
“If you come to me to-morrow,” said the priest’s sister, “I will give you the names of various women who want visiting. If your Mrs. Smith needs you, you will soon find her, if you live in the Brown Borough.”