tterites get there all right,
confound them. They're the progressives of the world. They--they have
their reward.'

(It's a queer thing how Jews can't help quoting the New Testament--even
Jews without religion.)

'We seem to have decided,' Katherine said, 'that Jane is a Potterite.'

'Morally she is. Not intellectually. You can be a Potterite in many ways.
Jane accepts the second-rate, though she recognises it as such.... The
plain fact is,' I was in a fit of savage truth-speaking, 'that Jane is
second-rate.'

'Well ...'

The gesture of Katherine's square shoulders may have meant several
things--'Aren't we all?' or 'Surely that's very obvious,' or 'I can't be
bothered to consider Jane any more,' or merely 'After all, we've just
dined there.'

Anyhow, Katherine got off the bus at this point.

I was left repeating to myself, as if it had been a new discovery, which
it wasn't, 'Jane is second-rate....'

CHAPTER III

SEEING JANE

1

Jane was taking the chair at a meeting of a section of the Society for
Equal Citizenship. The speakers were all girls under thirty who wanted
votes. They spoke rather well. They weren't old enough to have become
sentimental, and they were mostly past the conventional cliches of the
earlier twenties. In extreme youth one has to be second-hand; one doesn't
know enough, one hasn't lived or learnt enough, to be first-hand; and one
lacks self-confidence. But by five or six-and-twenty one should have left
that behind. One should know what one thinks and what one means, and be
able to state it in clear terms. That is what these girls--mostly
University girls--did.

Jane left the chair and spoke too.

I hadn't known Jane spoke so well. She has a clever, coherent way of
making her points, and is concise in reply if questioned, quick at
repartee if heckled.

Lady Pinkerton was sitting in the row in front of Juke and me. Mother and
daughter. It was very queer to me. That wordy, willowy fool, and the
sturdy, hard-headed girl in the chair, with her crisp, gripping mind. Yet
there was something.... They both loved success. Perhaps that was it. The
vulgarian touch. I felt it the more clearly in them because of Juke at
my side. And yet Jukie too ... Only he would always be awake to it--on
his guard, not capitulating.

2

Jane came round with me after the meeting to the _Fact_ office, to go
through some stuff she was writing for us about the meeting. She had to
come then, though