Is it women like me who could do
something and don't?"]

"It is all of us." My fingers smoothed the beautiful brown hair.
"Every woman of to-day who thinks there's a halo on her head ought to
take it off and look at it. She wouldn't see much. We like halos. We
imagine we deserve them. And we like the pretty speeches which have
spoiled us. What we need is plain truth, Kitty. We need to see
without confusion. Sometimes I wonder if we are not the colossal
failure of life--we women who have hardly begun to use the power God
put in our hands when He made us the mothers of sons and daughters--"

"But we've only been educated such a little while--most of us aren't
educated yet. I'm not." Her arms on my knees, Kitty looked up in my
face, in hers the dawning light of vision long delayed. "Men haven't
wanted us to think. They want to think for us."

"But ours is the first chance at starting men to thinking right.
Through babyhood and boyhood they are ours. If all women could
understand--"

"All women haven't got anything to understand with even if they wanted
to understand. Some who have sense don't want responsibility." Kitty
bit her lip. "I haven't wanted it. It's so much easier not--not to
have it. And now--now you've put it on me."

"When women know, they will not shirk. So many of us are children yet.
We've got to grow up." Stooping, I kissed her. "In Scarborough Square
I've learned to see it's a pretty wasteful world I've lived in. And
life is short, Kitty. There's not a moment of it to be wasted."

CHAPTER XVIII

Mrs. Mundy cannot find Etta Blake. She went this morning to the
house just opposite the box-factory, but no one is living there. A
"For Rent" sign is on it. After trying, without success, to find
from the families who live in the neighborhood where the people who
once occupied the house have gone, she went to the agent, but from
him also she could learn nothing.

"They were named Banch. A man and his wife and three children lived
in the house, but where they've moved nobody could tell me, or give
me a thing to go on. They went away between sun-up and sun-down and
no one knows where." Mrs. Mundy, who had come to my sitting-room to
make report, before taking off her coat and hat, sat down in a chair
near the desk at which I had been writing, and smoothed the fingers
of her gloves with careful precision. She was disappointed and
distressed that she had so little to tell m