“I would rather die than appear in a blouse and skirt in the stalls of a theatre.”
“We can go to the pit or upper circle,” said Martin, who had never sat in the stalls in his life.
But she declined. The prodigal in the pit was too ludicrous. No. She was conscientious. She had adopted martyrdom as a profession; she was paid for being a martyr; and to martyrdom, so long as it didn’t include voluntary starvation, she would stick until she could find a pleasanter and more lucrative means of livelihood.
“It’s all very well for you to talk like that,” said Martin in his sober way, “but how can you call yourself conscientious when you take these people’s money without believing in their cause?”
“Who told you I didn’t believe in it?” she cried. “Do you know what it means to be an utterly useless woman? I do. I’m one. It is to prevent replicas of myself in the next generation that I get up at a public meeting and bleat out ‘Votes for Women,’ and get ignominiously chucked. Can’t you see?”
“No,” said Martin. “Your attitude is too Laodicean.”
“What?” snapped Corinna.
“It’s somewhere in the Bible. The Laodiceans were people who blew both hot and cold.”
“My father found scriptural terms for me much more picturesque than that,” said Corinna, with a laugh.
A door opened and the frozen, blue-nosed head of Miss Banditch appeared.