twilight."

Part 9

She was sitting brooding over her fire about ten o'clock that night when
a sealed and registered envelope was brought up to her.

She opened it and drew out a letter, and folded within it were the notes
she had sent off to Ramage that day. The letter began:

"MY DEAREST GIRL,--I cannot let you do this foolish thing--"

She crumpled notes and letter together in her hand, and then with a
passionate gesture flung them into the fire. Instantly she seized the
poker and made a desperate effort to get them out again. But she was
only able to save a corner of the letter. The twenty pounds burned with
avidity.

She remained for some seconds crouching at the fender, poker in hand.

"By Jove!" she said, standing up at last, "that about finishes it, Ann
Veronica!"

CHAPTER THE TENTH

THE SUFFRAGETTES

Part 1

"There is only one way out of all this," said Ann Veronica, sitting up
in her little bed in the darkness and biting at her nails.

"I thought I was just up against Morningside Park and father, but it's
the whole order of things--the whole blessed order of things...."

She shivered. She frowned and gripped her hands about her knees very
tightly. Her mind developed into savage wrath at the present conditions
of a woman's life.

"I suppose all life is an affair of chances. But a woman's life is all
chance. It's artificially chance. Find your man, that's the rule. All
the rest is humbug and delicacy. He's the handle of life for you. He
will let you live if it pleases him....

"Can't it be altered?

"I suppose an actress is free?..."

She tried to think of some altered state of affairs in which these
monstrous limitations would be alleviated, in which women would stand on
their own feet in equal citizenship with men. For a time she brooded on
the ideals and suggestions of the Socialists, on the vague intimations
of an Endowment of Motherhood, of a complete relaxation of that intense
individual dependence for women which is woven into the existing social
order. At the back of her mind there seemed always one irrelevant
qualifying spectator whose presence she sought to disregard. She would
not look at him, would not think of him; when her mind wavered, then
she muttered to herself in the darkness so as to keep hold of her
generalizations.

"It is true. It is no good waiving the thing; it is true. Unless women
are never to be free, never to be even respected, there must