the whirlwind, to wheel round and round outside it, and
swerve away before the thing got her.

For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex, as her brother Michael
had been afraid of the little vortex of school. She was afraid of the
herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices
skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and
the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge
of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the
collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many
as one. She would not be carried away by it; she would keep the
clearness and hardness of her soul. It was her soul they wanted, these
women of the Union, the Blathwaites and the Palmerston-Swetes, and
Rosalind, and the Blackadder girl and the Gilchrist woman; they ran out
after her like a hungry pack yelping for her soul; and she was not going
to throw it to them. She would fight for freedom, but not in their way
and not at their bidding.

She was her brother Michael, refusing to go to the party; refusing to
run with the school herd, holding out for his private soul against other
people who kept him from remembering. Only Michael did not hold out. He
ran away. She would stay, on the edge of the vortex, fascinated by its
danger, and resisting.

But as she looked at them, at Rosalind with her open mouth, at the
Blackadder girl who was scowling horribly, and at Valentina Gilchrist,
sceptical and quizzical, she laughed. The three had been trying to rush
her, and because they couldn't rush her they were questioning her
honour. She had asked them plainly for a plain meaning, and their idea
of apt repartee was to pretend to question her honour.

Perhaps they really did question it. She didn't care. She loathed their
excited, silly, hurrying suspicion; but she didn't care. It was she who
had drawn them and led them on to this display of incomparable idiocy.
Like her brother Nicholas she found that adversity was extremely funny;
and she laughed.

She was no longer Michael, she was Nicky, not caring, delighting in her
power to fool them.

"You think," she said, "I'd no business to find out?"

"Your knowledge would certainly have been mysterious," said the
Secretary; "unless at least two confidences had been betrayed. Supposing
there had been any secret policy."

"Well, you see, I don't know it; and I didn't invent it; and I didn't
find it