as also a personage. She had not the same
stamp of personal worth, but she had the indefinable historic quality.
For no reason to be formulated by the mind, her face might become a flag
to many thousands, a thing to die for, and, like a flag, she would be at
their death a mere martial mark of the occasion, with no meaning of
pity.

The third woman he detested. Presumably she was at this meeting because
she was a loyal Suffragist and wanted to bring an end to the subjection
of woman, yet all the time that the other woman was speaking her
beautiful body practised fluid poses as if she were trying to draw the
audience's attention to herself and give them facile romantic dreams in
which the traditional relations of the sexes were rejoiced in rather
than disturbed. And she wore a preposterous dress. There were two ways
that women could dress. If they had work to do they could dress curtly
and sensibly like men and let their looks stand or fall on their
intrinsic merits; or if they were among the women who are kept to
fortify the will to live in men who are spent or exasperated by conflict
with the world, the wives and daughters and courtesans of the rich, then
they should wear soft lustrous dresses that were good to look at and
touch and as carefully beautiful as pictures. But this blue thing was
neither sturdy covering nor the brilliant fantasy it meant to be. It had
the spurious glitter of an imitation jewel. He knew he felt this
irritation about her partly because there was something base in him,
half innate and half the abrasion his present circumstances had rubbed
on his soul, which was willing to go on this stupid sexual journey
suggested by such vain, passive women, and the saner part of him was
vexed at this compliance; he thought he had a real case against her. She
was one of those beautiful women who are not only conscious of their
beauty but have accepted it as their vocation. She was ensphered from
the world of creative effort in the establishment of her own perfection.
She was an end in herself as no human, save some old saint who has made
a garden of his soul, had any right to be.

That little girl Ellen Melville was lovelier stuff because she was at
grips with the world. This woman had magnificent smooth wolds of
shoulders and a large blonde dignity; but life was striking sparks of
the flint of Ellen's being. There came before him the picture of her as
she had been that day in Princes Street, with the hairs s