Her pale blue eyes shone in their wrinkled sockets. Delia remembered a recent visit to Miss Toogood's tiny parlour behind the front room where she saw her few customers and tried them on. She recollected the books which the back parlour contained. Miss Toogood's father had been a bookseller--evidently a reading bookseller--in Winchester, and in the deformed and twisted form of his daughter some of his soul, his affections and interests, survived. "Yes, but what are you going to give us to _do_, Miss Blanchflower?" said Kitty Foster, impatiently--"I don't care what I do! And the more it makes the men mad, the better!" She drew herself up affectedly. She was a strapping girl, with a huge vanity and a parrot's brain. A year before this date a "disappointment" had greatly embittered her, and the processions and the crowded London meetings, and the window-breaking riots into which she had been led while staying with a friend, had been the solace and relief of a personal rancour and misery she might else have found intolerable. "_I_ can't do anything--not anything public"--said Miss Jackson, with emphasis--"or I should lose my post. Oh the slavery it is! and the pittance they pay us--compared to the men. Every man in the Boys' school get L120 and over--and we're thought lucky to get L80. And I'll be bound we work more hours in the week than they do. It's _hard_!" "That'll soon be mended," said Miss Toogood hopefully. "Look at Norway! As soon as the women got the vote, why the women's salaries in public offices were put up at once." The strong, honest face of the teacher refused to smile. "Well it isn't always so, Miss Toogood. I know they say that in New Zealand and Colorado--where we've got the vote--salaries aren't equal by any manner of means." The dressmaker's withered cheek flushed red. "'_They_ say'"--she repeated scornfully. "That's one of the Anti dodges--just picking out the things that suit 'em, and forgetting all the rest. Don't you look at the depressing things--I never do! Look at what helps us! There's a lot o' things said--and there's a lot of things ain't true--You've got to pick and choose--you can't take 'em as they come. No one can." Miss Jackson looked puzzled and unconvinced; but could think of no reply. The two persons in the distance appeared in the archway between the drawing-rooms, Gertrude Marvell leading. Everyone looked towards her; everybody listened for what she would say. She took Delia's chair, Delia instinctively yielding it, and then--her dark eyes measuring and probing them all while she talked, she gave the little group its orders. Kitty Foster was to be one of the band of girl-sellers of the _Tocsin_, in Latchford, the day of the meeting. The town was to be sown with it from end to end, and just before the meeting, groups of sellers, in the "Daughters'" black and orange, were to appear in every corner of the square where the open-air meeting was to be held.