they saw how human she was, they forgot her hard efficiency and her
sociological angers, and liked her. Gilbert urged her to tell them tales
of the C.O.S. and the Care Committee, and rejoiced loudly when she
described how she had discomfited a large, granitic woman ... the
Mayor's wife ... who had committed a flagrant breach of the law in her
anxiety to penalise some unfortunate children whose father was an
agitator. "If I were poor," Rachel said, "I'd hit a C.O.S. person on
sight! I'd hit it simply because it was a C.O.S. person! That would be
evidence against it!" She enjoyed calling a C.O.S. person, "it," and
Henry felt that perhaps some of the difficulty with the Mayor's wife was
due to the pleasure that Rachel took in rubbing her up the wrong way. He
suggested that tactful treatment....

"You can't be tactful with that kind of person," she asserted instantly.
"You can only be angry. You see, they love to badger poor people. It's
sheer delight to them to ask impertinent questions. There's a big streak
of Torquemada in them. They'd have been Inquisitors if they'd been born
in Spain when there were Inquisitors!" She paused for a second or two,
and then went on rapidly. "I never thought of that before. Why, of
course, that's what they are. They've been reincarnated ... you know,
transmigration of souls ... and that fat woman, Mrs. Smeale...." Mrs.
Smeale was the Mayor's wife ... "was an Inquisitor before she was ...
was dug up again. I can see her beastly big face in a cowl, and hot
pincers in her hands, plucking poor Protestants' flesh off their bones
... and she's doing that now, using all the rotten rules and regulations
as hot pincers to pluck the spirit out of the poor! Of course, she does
it all for the best! So did the Inquisitors! She doesn't want to
undermine the moral character of the poor, and they didn't want to let
the poor heretic imperil his soul.... I'd like to inquisit her!..."

"There isn't a word 'inquisit,' Rachel!" said Roger.

"Well, there ought to be," she answered.

Henry pictured her, in her committee room, surrounded by hard women,
opposing herself to them, fighting for people who were not of her class
against people who were, and it seemed to him that Rachel was very
valiant, even if she were tactless, much more valiant than he could be.
Rachel belonged to the fearless, ungracious, blunt people who are not to
be deterred from their purpose by ostracism or abuse, and Henry realised
that su