girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women; trim,comfortable mothers of

families; valiant-eyed girl graduates and undergraduates; lank,

hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's imagination; one very

dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall, grave and steadfast,

with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of those women looked

defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of

adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never

ceased. I had a mortalfear that somehow the supply might halt or

cease. I found thatcontinual siege of the legislature

extraordinarily impressive-infinitely more impressive than the

feeble-forcible "ragging" of the more militant section. Ithought

of the appeal that must be going through the country, summoning the

women from countless scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to

Westminster.

Iremember too the petty little difficulty Ifelt whether I should

ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past

with averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards

the end the House evoked an etiquette of salutation.

4

There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat

the whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue,

irrelevant to all other broad developments of social and political

life. We struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it

thrust out before us. "Your schemes, for all their bigness," it

insisted to our reluctant, avertedminds, "still don't go down to

the essential things…"

We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient

children will starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That

conservatism which works in every class to preserve in its

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