cs were discussed in
turn, and the office was littered with newspaper cuttings branded with
the blue, if ambiguous, marks of her displeasure. She confessed herself
at fault in her estimate of human nature.

"The simple elementary acts of justice," she said, waving her hand
towards the window, and indicating the foot-passengers and omnibuses
then passing down the far side of Russell Square, "are as far beyond
them as they ever were. We can only look upon ourselves, Mary, as
pioneers in a wilderness. We can only go on patiently putting the truth
before them. It isn't THEM," she continued, taking heart from her sight
of the traffic, "it's their leaders. It's those gentlemen sitting in
Parliament and drawing four hundred a year of the people's money. If we
had to put our case to the people, we should soon have justice done to
us. I have always believed in the people, and I do so still. But--" She
shook her head and implied that she would give them one more chance,
and if they didn't take advantage of that she couldn't answer for the
consequences.

Mr. Clacton's attitude was more philosophical and better supported by
statistics. He came into the room after Mrs. Seal's outburst and pointed
out, with historical illustrations, that such reverses had happened in
every political campaign of any importance. If anything, his spirits
were improved by the disaster. The enemy, he said, had taken the
offensive; and it was now up to the Society to outwit the enemy. He gave
Mary to understand that he had taken the measure of their cunning, and
had already bent his mind to the task which, so far as she could make
out, depended solely upon him. It depended, so she came to think,
when invited into his room for a private conference, upon a systematic
revision of the card-index, upon the issue of certain new lemon-colored
leaflets, in which the facts were marshaled once more in a very striking
way, and upon a large scale map of England dotted with little pins
tufted with differently colored plumes of hair according to their
geographical position. Each district, under the new system, had its
flag, its bottle of ink, its sheaf of documents tabulated and filed
for reference in a drawer, so that by looking under M or S, as the
case might be, you had all the facts with respect to the Suffrage
organizations of that county at your fingers' ends. This would require a
great deal of work, of course.

"We must try to consider ourselves rather in the