by superposition and haven't remembered
the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, 'Lay AB along DE' till all's
blue and you'll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip
can blether to his silly heart's content and he'll never prove that I'm
a bold girl. Me, Ellen Melville, who cares for nothing in the world
except the enfranchisement of women and getting on...."

She felt better. "There's nothing in life you can't get the better of by
thinking about it," she said sententiously, and fell to dabbing her eyes
with her handkerchief. She could easily pass off her tearstains as the
marks of a bad cold. "It's a dreadful thing to rejoice in another body's
affliction, but sometimes I'm glad mother's so short-sighted.

"He wanted to make me unhappy, but he did not know how," she thought,
with a sudden renewal of rage. "Now I should have minded awful if he had
noticed that slip I made about the Brazilians talking Spanish. It was a
mercy yon man Yaverland thought I was thinking of the Argentine." But
indeed the stranger would never have wanted to hurt her; she felt sure
that he was either very kind to people or very indifferent. She began to
recall him delightedly, to see him standing in the villa garden against
a hedge of scarlet flowers that marched as tall as soldiers beside a
marble wall, to see him moving, dark and always a little fierce, through
a world of beauty she was now too fatigued to imagine save as a kind of
solidification of a sunset. Dreamily she moved to the little house in
the corner....

It was her habit to let herself in with the latchkey just as if she were
the man of the house.

"Mercy, Ellen, you're late! I was getting feared!" cried her mother, who
had gone to the kitchen to boil up the cocoa when she heard the key in
the lock. She liked that sound. Ellen thought herself a wonderful new
sort of woman who was going to be just like a man; she would have been
surprised if she had known how many of her stern-browed ambitions, how
much of her virile swagger of life, were not the invention of her own
soul, but had been suggested to her by an old woman who liked to pretend
her daughter was a son.

"We had a great press of business and I had to stay," said Ellen with
masculine nonchalance. "A most interesting client came in...."

CHAPTER II

I

Every Saturday afternoon Ellen sold _Votes for Women_ in Princes Street,
and the next day found her as usual with a purple, white and green