desperate bitterness of battered women showing in
their eyes; north-country factory 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 mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or cease. I
found that continual siege of the legislature extraordinarily
impressive--infinitely more impressive than the feeble-forcible
"ragging" of the more militant section. I thought of the appeal that
must be going through the country, summoning the women from countless
scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to Westminster.

I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt 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, averted minds, "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 essentials the habitual daily
life is all against a profounder treatment of political issues. The
politician, almost as absurdly as the philosopher, tends constantly, in
spite of magnificent preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself
out of the reality he has so stupendously summoned--he bolts back to
littleness. The world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but
without, he adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning
cup of tea....

The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one. It
reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it. And at
any particular time only a small minority have a