that thrushes ring upon the evening air; and since they were
produced suddenly with no hint of premeditation, the feeblest listener
was at some time inevitably waylaid.

It was not astonishing Jenny should find herself caught in the melodious
twilight of the oration, should find that the craning audience was less
important than the speaker. She came to believe that Mona Lisa's smile
was kindlier. She began to take in some of the rhetoric of the
peroration:

"I wish I could persuade you that, if our cause is a worthy cause, it
must exist and endure through the sanity of its adherents. It must never
depend upon the trivial eccentricities of a few. I want to see the
average woman fired with zeal to make the best of herself. I do not want
us to be contemptuously put aside as exceptions. Nor am I anxious to
recruit our strength from the discontented, the disappointed and the
disillusioned. Let us do away with the reproach that we voice a
minority's opinion. Let us preserve the grace and magic of womanhood, so
that with the spiritual power of virginity, the physical grandeur of
motherhood, in a devoted phalanx huge as the army of Darius, we may
achieve our purpose."

Here the speaker paused and, as if afraid she might be deemed to offer
counsels of pusillanimity, broke forth more passionately:

"But because I wish to see our ambition succeed through the aggregate of
dignified opinion, I do not want to discredit or seek to dishearten the
advance-guard. Let us who represent the van of an army so mighty as to
be mute and inexpressive, let us, not thinking ourselves martyrs nor
displaying like Amazons our severed breasts, let us resolve to endure
ignominy and contempt, slander, disgrace and imprisonment. Some day men
will speak well of us; some day the shrieking sisterhood will be
forgotten, and those leaders of women whom to-day we alone venerate,
will be venerated by all. Pay no heed to that subtle propaganda of
passivity. Reject the lily-white counsels of moderation. Remember that
without visible audible agitation this phlegmatic people cannot be
roused. Therefore I call on you who murmur your agreement to join the
great march on Westminster. I implore you to be brave, to despise
calumny, to be careless of abuse and, because you believe you are in the
right, to alarm once more this blind and stolid mass of public opinion
with the contingency of your ultimate triumph."

The speaker sat down, lost in the haze which shrouds