ion did not wink over
her shoulder at Lilli.

"Thank you. Here's the badge. It's copied from an old Athenian medal.
This is Pallas Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom."

"She isn't much to look at, is she?" commented Jenny.

"My dear child, that's the owl."

Jenny turned the medal over and contemplated the armed head. Then she
put it carefully away in her purse, wondering if the badge would bring
her luck.

"Now, I shall let Lilli show you round the club rooms, for I'm very busy
this afternoon," said Miss Bailey in gentle dismissal.

The two girls left the study and set out to explore the rest of the
house. Over the mantlepiece of the principal room Jenny saw Mona Lisa
and drew back so quickly that she trod on Lilli's foot.

"I'm not going in there," she said.

"Why not? It's a nice room."

"I'm not going in. I don't want to," she repeated, without any
explanation of her whim.

"All right. Let's go downstairs. We can have tea."

It was a fine afternoon towards the end of July, so the tea-room was
empty. Jenny looked cautiously at all the pictures but none of them
conjured up the past. There was a large photograph of the beautiful sad
head of Jeanne d'Arc, but Jenny did not bother to read that it came
originally from the church of St. Maurice in Orleans. There was a number
of somewhat dreary engravings of famous pioneers of feminism like Mary
Wolstonecraft, whose faces, she thought, would look better turned round
to the wall. Below these hung several statistical maps showing the
density of population in various London slums, with black splodges for
criminal districts. Most of the furniture was of green fumed oak fretted
with hearts, and the crockery that lived dustily on a shelf following
the line of the frieze came from Hanley disguised in Flemish or Breton
patterns, whose studied irregularity of design and roughness of
workmanship was symbolic of much. In order, apparently, to accentuate
the flimsiness of the green fumed oak, there were several mid-Victorian
settees that, having faded in back rooms of Wimpole Street and Portman
Square, were now exposed round the sides of their new abode in a
succession of hillocks. On the wall by the door hung a framed tariff, on
which poached eggs in every permutation of number and combination of
additional delicacies figured most prominently. Here and there on tables
not occupied with green teacups were scattered pamphlets, journals, and
the literary propaganda of the feminin