And now it's you young women--we look to you--the future looks
to you. Ah, my dear, if I'd a thousand lives, I'd give them all to our
cause. The cause of women, d'you say? I say the cause of humanity. And
there are some"--she glanced fiercely at the window--"who don't see it!
There are some who are satisfied to go on, year after year, refusing to
admit the truth. And we who have the vision--the kettle boiling over?
No, no, let me see to it--we who know the truth," she continued,
gesticulating with the kettle and the teapot. Owing to these
encumbrances, perhaps, she lost the thread of her discourse, and
concluded, rather wistfully, "It's all so SIMPLE." She referred to
a matter that was a perpetual source of bewilderment to her--the
extraordinary incapacity of the human race, in a world where the good
is so unmistakably divided from the bad, of distinguishing one from the
other, and embodying what ought to be done in a few large, simple Acts
of Parliament, which would, in a very short time, completely change the
lot of humanity.

"One would have thought," she said, "that men of University training,
like Mr. Asquith--one would have thought that an appeal to reason would
not be unheard by them. But reason," she reflected, "what is reason
without Reality?"

Doing homage to the phrase, she repeated it once more, and caught the
ear of Mr. Clacton, as he issued from his room; and he repeated it a
third time, giving it, as he was in the habit of doing with Mrs. Seal's
phrases, a dryly humorous intonation. He was well pleased with the
world, however, and he remarked, in a flattering manner, that he would
like to see that phrase in large letters at the head of a leaflet.

"But, Mrs. Seal, we have to aim at a judicious combination of the two,"
he added in his magisterial way to check the unbalanced enthusiasm of
the women. "Reality has to be voiced by reason before it can make
itself felt. The weak point of all these movements, Miss Datchet," he
continued, taking his place at the table and turning to Mary as usual
when about to deliver his more profound cogitations, "is that they
are not based upon sufficiently intellectual grounds. A mistake, in
my opinion. The British public likes a pellet of reason in its jam
of eloquence--a pill of reason in its pudding of sentiment," he said,
sharpening the phrase to a satisfactory degree of literary precision.

His eyes rested, with something of the vanity of an author, upon the
yellow