that she regarded as a tract until she
saw "Votes for Women" at the top. That turned her mind to the more
generalized aspects of her perplexities again. She had never been so
disposed to agree that the position of women in the modern world is
intolerable.

Capes joined the students at tea, and displayed himself in an impish
mood that sometimes possessed him. He did not notice that Ann Veronica
was preoccupied and heavy-eyed. Miss Klegg raised the question of
women's suffrage, and he set himself to provoke a duel between her and
Miss Garvice. The youth with the hair brushed back and the spectacled
Scotchman joined in the fray for and against the women's vote.

Ever and again Capes appealed to Ann Veronica. He liked to draw her in,
and she did her best to talk. But she did not talk readily, and in
order to say something she plunged a little, and felt she plunged.
Capes scored back with an uncompromising vigor that was his way of
complimenting her intelligence. But this afternoon it discovered an
unusual vein of irritability in her. He had been reading Belfort Bax,
and declared himself a convert. He contrasted the lot of women in
general with the lot of men, presented men as patient, self-immolating
martyrs, and women as the pampered favorites of Nature. A vein of
conviction mingled with his burlesque.

For a time he and Miss Klegg contradicted one another.

The question ceased to be a tea-table talk, and became suddenly
tragically real for Ann Veronica. There he sat, cheerfully friendly
in his sex's freedom--the man she loved, the one man she cared
should unlock the way to the wide world for her imprisoned feminine
possibilities, and he seemed regardless that she stifled under his eyes;
he made a jest of all this passionate insurgence of the souls of women
against the fate of their conditions.

Miss Garvice repeated again, and almost in the same words she used at
every discussion, her contribution to the great question.

She thought that women were not made for the struggle and turmoil of
life--their place was the little world, the home; that their power lay
not in votes but in influence over men and in making the minds of their
children fine and splendid.

"Women should understand men's affairs, perhaps," said Miss Garvice,
"but to mingle in them is just to sacrifice that power of influencing
they can exercise now."

"There IS something sound in that position," said Capes, intervening as
if to defend Miss Garvi