ons, as they could in their own little narrow
spheres at home. A child who first goes to school is awfully new at it.
He sulks, cries, wants his own way; he hasn't learned how to work with
others. Neither have women yet, but suffrage will help us toward it."

"I had no idea you were such a little enthusiast. Come, don't you want
to have tea with me and my friend Mrs. Scot-Williams? I'm to meet her
at the Carl. She enjoys a girl with ideas."

"In this?" I indicated my suit. We were drawing up to the lighted
restaurant, where costly lace veiled from the street candle-lighted
tables.

"In that?" Mrs. Sewall looked at me and smiled. "Talk as you have to me,
my dear, and she will not see what your soul goes clothed in."

My enemy--Mrs. Sewall! My almost friend now! She could sting, but she
could make honey too. Bittersweet. I went with her to drink some tea.

That was the beginning of our intimate relations. Mrs. Sewall invited me
the very next day to lunch with her in the formal dining-room, with the
Sewall portraits hanging all around. We talked more suffrage. It seemed
to amuse her. She was not particularly interested in the woman's
movement. It simply served as an excuse.

One stormy evening not long after the luncheon invitation Mrs. Sewall
invited me to stay all night. She was to be alone and had no engagement.
She asked me frequently after that. We slipped into relations almost
affectionate. I discovered that Mrs. Sewall enjoyed my reading aloud to
her. I found out one day, when her maid, who was an hourly irritation to
her, was especially slow about arranging her veil, that my fingers
pleased and satisfied. Often, annoyed beyond control, she would exclaim,
"Come, come, Marie, how clumsy you are! All thumbs! Miss Vars, do you
mind? Would you be so kind?" Often I found myself buttoning gloves,
untangling knots in platinum chains, and fastening hooks.

As late fall wore into early winter, frequently I presided at the
tea-table in Mrs. Sewall's library--the inner holy of holies, upstairs
over the drawing-room. "Perkins is so slow" (Perkins was the butler)
"and his shoes squeak today. Would you mind, Miss Vars? You're so swift
and quiet with cups."

Once she said, in explanation of her friendliness: "I've never had
anything but a machine for a private secretary before. Miss Armstrong
was hardly a companionable person. No sense of humor. But an excellent
machine. Oh, yes--excellent. Better at figures than you, my d