man.

"Not again," said Jenny to herself, "not ever again will I be such a
silly, soppy idiot."

In the distance she could still hear the shouting of the riot; but as
she drew nearer to Charing Cross railway station, the noise of trains
took its place.

Chapter XXVII: _Quartette_

Suffragism viewed in retrospect was shoddy embroidery for the _vie
interieure_ of Jenny. There was no physical exhilaration for her in
wrestling with policemen, and the intellectual excitement of controversy
would never be likely to appeal to a mind naturally unfitted for
argument. There was, too, about her view of the whole business something
of Myrrhine's contempt. She may have been in an abnormal condition of
acute hostility to the opposite sex; but as soon as she found herself in
a society whose antipathy towards men seemed to be founded on inability
to attract the hated male, all her common sense cried out against
committing herself to such a devil-driven attitude. She felt that
something must be wrong with so obviously an ineffective aggregation of
Plain Janes. She was not concerned with that unprovided-for surplus of
feminine population. She had no acquaintance with that asceticism
produced by devotion to the intellect. She perceived, though not
consciously, the inherent weakness of the whole movement in its failure
to supply an emotional substitute for more elemental passions.

Jenny was shrewd enough to understand that leaders like Miss Bailey and
Miss Ragstead were logically justified in demanding a vote. She could
understand that they would be able to use it to some purpose; but at the
same time she realized that to the majority of women a vote would be
merely an encumbrance. Jenny also saw through the folly of agitation
that must depend for success on equality of physique, and half divined
that the prime cause of such extravagance lay in the needs of feminine
self-expression. Nuns are wedded to Christ; suffragists, with the
notable exceptions of those capable of sustaining an intellectual
predominance, must remain spiritual old maids. As Jenny asked, "What do
they all want?" Very soon the inhabitants of Mecklenburg Square became
as unreal as unicorns, and the whole episode acquired the reputation of
an interlude of unaccountable madness from the memory of which the
figure of Miss Ragstead stood out cool and tranquil and profoundly sane.
Jenny would in a way have been glad to meet her again; but she was too
shy to sugg