ruary activity at headquarters, a
pleasant, though not palatial suite of offices in Victoria Street,
Westminster, was in full swing.

The first number of the _Bridge_ was to make its appearance at Easter;
and Owen was meditating one morning over the possible inclusion of a
little set of verses which had reached him from a hitherto-unknown
contributor, when Barry appeared in the doorway leading to his inner
sanctum with a worried look in his frank blue eyes.

"Hallo, Barry, anything wrong?" Owen put down the paper he held and
looked at his young colleague with a smile.

"Well, it's no end of a bore!" Barry frowned distastefully. "That stupid
Jenkins woman has gone and landed herself in Holloway!"

"Holloway?" Owen repeated the word in surprise.

"Yes. I knew she was a Militant Suffragette, but I thought she would
have more sense than to go mixing herself up in brawls with the police!"

"And she hasn't?"

"No. On Saturday afternoon"--this was Monday--"she went and marched in a
procession of women out to smash windows or something of the sort, got
into a row and kicked a bobby in the ribs. The end was she got locked up
that night."

"Where is she now?"

"Brought up before the magistrate this morning and sentenced to fourteen
days without an option for violence," said Barry laconically. "I've just
had a note from her mother, who's nearly distracted, begging me to keep
her place open for her, but I don't see how we can do that."

"Certainly not," said Owen decidedly. "I'll have no militant women on my
staff, and the sooner they understand that the better. She wasn't any
great treasure, either. She was too fond of revising the stuff she had
to type; and her ideas and mine clashed considerably when it came to
punctuation."

"I suppose I must advertise for someone to take her place, then," said
Barry, with a sigh.

"Yes. Get a younger girl this time, if you can. Miss Jenkins had reached
the certain--or uncertain--age when women take to militant suffragism.
She didn't like being corrected when she made mistakes, and used to
argue with me till you'd have thought it was she who ran the office, and
not I."

"All right. I'll do my best."

"Not too young, though," said Owen, half-maliciously, "or she'll be
thinking about her best boy all day instead of working. Of course that's
a bit better than militancy, less upsetting; but women are so
incomprehensible when they're in what they are pleased to call love that
it's