Then Madge Wilson herself came into the dressing-room. "Hullo, duck," she said, surprised by Jenny's apparent reentry into society. "Are you speaking to me, Madge Wilson? Because I don't want to talk to you. A nice friend. Hark at your fine friends, girls. They're the rotters that take you off behind your back." "Whatever's the matter?" Madge asked. "Yes, you don't know, do you? But I wouldn't be a sneak like you! I'd say out what I thought and not care for anyone. I wasn't getting a jolly fine time for nothing? And what about you, Mrs. Straightcut? But that's the way. Girls you think are your friends, girls _you_ take out and give a good time, they're the first to turn round on you. I wonder you haven't all gone hoarse with the way you've talked me to pieces these last weeks. I can hear you mumbling and whispering in corners. 'Have you heard about Jenny Pearl? Isn't it shocking? Oh, I do think it's a dreadful thing. What a terrible girl.' God, and look at _you_. Married women! Yes, and what have you married? Why, there isn't a girl in this dressing-room whose husband can afford to keep her. Husbands! Why, they're no better than--" "She's been going out with Lilli Vergoe," interrupted Elsie sneeringly. "Jenny Pearl's turned into a suffragette." "What of it? You and your six pairs of gloves that your Willie bought you. Well, if he did, _which_ I don't think, he must have broke open the till to do it." Madge Wilson's disloyalty effected for Jenny what nothing else had done. It made the blood course fast, the heart beat: it kindled her eyes again. That night in bed, she thought of falseness and treachery and cried herself to sleep. Chapter XXVI: _In Scyros_ The outburst against feminine treachery had an effect upon Jenny's state of mind beyond the mere evoking of tears. These were followed by a general agitation of her point of view necessitating an outlet for her revived susceptibleness to emotion. A less sincere heart would have been caught on the rebound; but she and men were still mutually unattractive. The consequence of this renewed activity of spirit, in the aspect of its immediate cause, was paradoxical enough; for when Jenny thought she would try the pretensions of suffragism, no clear process of reasoning helped her to such a resolve, no formulated hostility to man. Whatever logic existed in the decision was fortuitous; nor did she at all perceive any absence of logic in throwing in her lot with treacherous woman.