joyed myself. The
razzle-dazzle of London doesn't appeal to a man much, when he's been on
the bend in sea-ports. Humph!

"And Miss Flagg took my manuscript and went crazy about it. She said she
sat up all night to read it. Knowing what I do of women now, I think she
was a liar. Besides, anyone could read it in two or three hours. The
point is she told the publisher that lie, and he believed it. Her
enthusiasm was contagious. He said it was fine, and gave me ten pounds
for it. Miss Flagg said it was a generous offer and raked off a
sovereign for her commission. I often wonder how authors bear up under
such generosity. But of course I know nothing about the business side of
it. Only for a short time did I get bitten about the idea of being an
author. I found I had nothing to say. Miss Flagg told me she knew a man
who 'did fiction' at the rate of twenty thousand words a week. She might
have lied, but then, how do I know? Anyway, I saw it wasn't in my
line--'fiction.'

"You see, when I went to their flat and met their literary friends and
heard them talking about their work, I felt out of it. I was an alien in
their world. I had no interest in the details of book-writing. I'd just
put down what happened to come into my mind. I wondered what they wrote
about. Love I suppose. I'd sit and look about me and try to imagine what
those people would have thought of the old _Corydon's_ engine-room.
Humph! Do _you_ know what those thin, half-fed men and women thought the
most important thing in the world? Not husbands and wives and children,
not war, nor even courage; not books nor pictures; nothing of this. No;
they were wearing their souls out clamouring for a _Vote_!"

We sat very still. You could have heard a pin drop.

"There was Gladys. She was only nineteen, and ought to have been helping
her mother at home; but no, she was emancipated, as she called it. Her
experience with my brother taught her that the _Vote_ was necessary.
Miss Flagg told me that unless women got the Vote England would drop
behind. They all said that. To me it was amazing. It showed me how far
I'd travelled away from the old ideas. It angered me to see women acting
like that, spoiling themselves, making themselves ridiculous and ugly,
all for that!

"I'd been home a couple of months, not more, when I began to get
restless. My mother asked me why I didn't get a job on shore. But I
couldn't see myself going to Victoria Street every day, clean collar and