He seemed not to know quite how to frame his protest.

'She can carry _you_ along at least!' he grumbled. 'You forget everybody else!'

Vida smiled. It was so plain whom he meant by 'everybody.' Lord Borrodaile gave a faint laugh. He probably knew that would 'bring her round.' It did. It brought her quick eyes to his face; it brought low words.

'_Please!_ Don't let her see you--laughing, I mean.'

'You can explain to her afterwards that it was you I was laughing at.'

As that failed of specific effect, 'You really are a little ridiculous,'

he said again, with the edge in his voice, 'hanging on the lips of that Backfisch as if she were Demosthenes.'

'We don't think she's a Demosthenes. We know she is something much more significant--for _us_.'

'What?'

'She's Ernestine Blunt.'

Clean out of patience, he turned his back.

'Am I alone?' she whispered over his shoulder, as if in apology. 'Look at all the other women. Some of them are very intelligent. Our interest in our fellow-woman seems queer and unnatural to you because you don't realize Mrs. Brown has always been interested in Mrs. Jones.'

'Oh, has she?'

'Yes. She hasn't said much to Mr. Brown about it,' Vida admitted, smiling, because a man's interest in woman is so limited.'

Borrodaile laughed. 'I didn't know that was his failing!'

'I mean his interest is of one sort. It's confined to the woman he finds interesting in _that_ way at _that_ minute. Other women bore him. But other women have always been mightily interesting to us! Now, sh! let's listen.'

'I can understand those callow youths,' unwarily he persisted; 'she's pink and pert and all the rest, but _you_----'

'Oh, will you _never_ understand? Don't you know women are more civilized than men?'

'Woman! she'll be the last animal domesticated.' It seemed as if he preferred to have her angry rather than oblivious of him.

But not for nothing did she belong to a world which dares to say whatever it wants to say.

'We are civilized enough, at all events'--there was an ominous sparkle in her eye--'to listen to men speakers clever or dull--we listen quietly enough. But men!--a person must be of your own s.e.x for you to be able to regard him without distraction. If the woman is beautiful enough, you are intoxicated. If she's plain enough, you are impatient. All you see in any woman is her s.e.x. You can't _listen_.'

'Whew!' remarked Borrodaile.

'But _I_ must listen--I haven't got over being ashamed to find how much this girl can teach me.'

'I'm sorry for you that any of Miss Scammell's interesting speech was lost,' the chairman was saying. 'She was telling you just the kind of thing that you men ought to know, the kind of thing you get little chance of knowing about from men. Yet those wretched girls who die young of lead-poisoning, or live long enough to bring sickly babies into the world, those poor working women look to you working men for help. Are they wrong to look to you, or are they right? You working men represent the majority of the electorate. _You_ can change things if you will. If you don't, don't think the woman will suffer alone. We shall all suffer together. More and more the masters are saying, "We'll get rid of these men--they're too many for us with their unions and their political pull.

We'll get women. We'll get them for two-thirds of what we pay the men.

Good business!" say the masters. But it's bad business----'

'For all but the masters,' muttered the tramp.

'Bad for the masters, too,' said the girl, 'only they can't see it, or else they don't care what sort of world they leave to their children. If you men weren't so blind, you'd see the women will be in politics what they are in the home--your best friends.'

'Haw! haw! Listen at 'er!'

'_With_ the women you would be strong. Without them you are--what you are!'

The ringing contempt in her tone was more than one gentleman could put up with.

'How do you think the world got on before you came to show it _how_?'

'It got on very badly. Not only in England--all over the world men have insisted on governing alone. What's the result? Misery and degradation to the ma.s.ses, and to the few--the rich and high-placed--for them corruption and decline.'

'That's it, always 'ammering away at the men--pore devils!'

'Some people are so foolish as to think we are working against the men.'

'So you are!'

'It's just what the old-school politicians would like you to think. But it's nonsense. n.o.body knows better than we that the best interests of men and women are identical--they _can't be separated_. It's trying to separate them that's made the whole trouble.'

'Oh, you know it all!'

'Well, you see'--she put on her most friendly and reasonable air--'men have never been obliged to study women's point of view. But we've been obliged to study the men's point of view. It's natural we should understand you a great deal better than you understand us. And though you sometimes disappoint us, we don't lose hope of you.'

'Thanks awfully.'

'We think that if we can only make you understand the meaning of this agitation, then you'll help us to get what we want. We believe the day will come when the old ideal of men standing by the women--when that ideal will be realized. For don't believe it ever _has_ been realized.

It never has! Now our last speaker for to-day will say a few words to you. Mrs. Thomas.'

'Haven't you had about enough?' said Borrodaile, impatiently.

'Don't wait for me,' was all her answer.

'Shall you stay, then, till the bitter end?'

'It will only be a few moments now. I may as well see it out.'

He glanced at his watch, detached it, and held it across the back of the seat.

She nodded, and repeated, 'Don't wait.'

His answer to that was to turn not only a bored but a slightly injured face towards the woman who had, not without difficulty, balanced her rotund form on the bench at the far end. She might have been the comfortable wife of a rural grocer. She spoke the good English you may not infrequently hear among that cla.s.s, but it became clear, as she went on, that she was a person of a wider cultivation.

'You'd better go. She'll be stodgy and dull.' Vida spoke with a real sympathy for her friend's sufferings. 'Oh, portentous dull.'

'And no waist!' sighed Borrodaile, but he sank back in his corner.

Presently his wandering eye discovered something in his companion's aspect that told him subtly she was not listening to the mauve matron.

Neither were some of the others. A number had moved away, and the little lane their going left was not yet closed, for the whole general attention was obviously slackened. This woman wasn't interesting enough even to boo at. The people who didn't go home began to talk to one another. But in Vida's face--what had brought to it that still intensity? Borrodaile moved so that he could follow the fixed look. One of the infrequently pa.s.sing hansoms had stopped. Was she looking at that? Two laughing people leaning out, straining to catch what the mauve orator was saying. Suddenly Borrodaile pulled his slack figure together.