It was a fine afternoon towards the end of July, so the tea-room was empty. Jenny looked cautiously at all the pictures but none of them conjured up the past. There was a large photograph of the beautiful sad head of Jeanne d'Arc, but Jenny did not bother to read that it came originally from the church of St. Maurice in Orleans. There was a number of somewhat dreary engravings of famous pioneers of feminism like Mary Wolstonecraft, whose faces, she thought, would look better turned round to the wall. Below these hung several statistical maps showing the density of population in various London slums, with black splodges for criminal districts. Most of the furniture was of green fumed oak fretted with hearts, and the crockery that lived dustily on a shelf following the line of the frieze came from Hanley disguised in Flemish or Breton patterns, whose studied irregularity of design and roughness of workmanship was symbolic of much. In order, apparently, to accentuate the flimsiness of the green fumed oak, there were several mid-Victorian settees that, having faded in back rooms of Wimpole Street and Portman Square, were now exposed round the sides of their new abode in a succession of hillocks. On the wall by the door hung a framed tariff, on which poached eggs in every permutation of number and combination of additional delicacies figured most prominently. Here and there on tables not occupied with green teacups were scattered pamphlets, journals, and the literary propaganda of the feminine movement. The general atmosphere of the room was permeated by an odor of damp toast and the stale fumes of asthma cigarettes. "What an unnatural smell," murmured Jenny. "It's those asthma cigarettes," Lilli explained. "One of the members has got it very bad." Jenny was glad to escape very soon after tea, and told her friend a second visit to Mecklenburg Square was not to be done. "I used to think they was nice houses when I passed by the other side in that green 'bus going to Covent Garden, but I think they're _very_ stuffy, and what wall-paper! More like blotting-paper." However, one Saturday evening in August, as Jenny was leaving the theater, Lilli begged her to come and hear Miss Ragstead speak on the general aims of the movement, with particular attention to a proposed demonstration on the occasion of the re-opening of Parliament. "When's the old crow going to speak?" Jenny inquired. "To-morrow evening." "On a Sunday?" "Yes." So, because there was nothing else to do and because nowadays Sunday was a long grim moping, a procession of pretty hours irrevocable, Jenny promised to accompany her friend.