and the reeking throng.

When, contrary to the old-established custom of the demagogue, the
little politician in homespun had confided to the men in front of him
what he thought of them, he told them that the Woman's Movement which
they held themselves so clever for ridiculing, was in much the same
position to-day as the Extension of Suffrage for men was in '67. Had it
not been for demonstrations (beside which the action that had lodged the
women in gaol was innocent child's play), neither he, the speaker, nor
any of the men in front of him would have the right to vote to-day.

'You ridicule and denounce these women for trying peacefully--yes, I say
_peacefully_--to get their rights as citizens. Do you know what our
fathers did to get ours? They broke down Hyde Park railings, they burnt
the Bristol Municipal Buildings, they led riots, and they shed blood.
These women have hurt nobody.'

'What about the policeman?'

He went on steadily, comparing the moderation of the women with the
red-hot violence of their Chartist forbears--till one half-drunken
listener, having lost the thread, hiccuped out--

'Can't do nothin'--them women. Even after we've showed 'em _'ow_!'

'Has he got his history right?' Vida asked through her smiling at the
last sally. 'Not that it applies, of course,' she was in haste to add.

'Oh, what does it matter?' Her sister waved it aside. 'An unscrupulous
politician hasn't come here to bother about little things like facts.'

'I don't think I altogether agree with you _there_. That man may be a
fanatic, but he's honest, I should say. Those Scotch peasants, you
know----'

'Oh, because he's rude, and talks with a burr, you think he's a sort of
political Thomas Carlyle?'

Though Vida smiled at the charge, something in her alert air as she
followed the brief recapitulation of the Chartist story showed how an
appeal to justice, or even to pity, may fail, where the rousing of some
dim sense of historical significance (which is more than two-thirds
fear), may arrest and even stir to unsuspected deeps. The grave
Scotsman's striking that chord even in a mind as innocent as Vida's, of
accurate or ordered knowledge of the past, even here the chord could
vibrate to a strange new sense of possible significance in this scene
'----after all.' It would be queer, it would be horrible, it was
fortunately incredible, but what if, 'after all,' she were ignorantly
assisting at a scene that was to play its part