Now she spoke in a voice that had a little of the Ashendyne golden drawl. "I have been--in the last eight years--oh, all over! Europe, yes; but more especially, it seems to me, looking back, the Orient. Egypt, all North Africa, Turkey and Persia, Japan and India. Yes, and Europe, too; Greece and Italy and Spain, the mid-Continent and the North. Around the world--a little of Spanish America, a little of the Islands. Sometimes long in one place, sometimes only a few days.... Everywhere it was always the same.... The Social Organism with a shrivelled side." The writer of plays was in a mood to take issue with his every deepest conviction; also to say banal things. "But aren't American women the freest in the world?" Hagar Ashendyne did not answer. She sat in a deep armchair, her elbow upon the arm, her chin in her hand, her eyes dreaming upon the fire.... But Christopher entered the lists. "'Freest'--'freest'! Yes, perhaps they are. The Italian woman is freer than the Oriental woman, and the German woman is freer than the Italian, and the English woman is freer than the German, and the American is freer than the English! But what have they to do with 'freer' and 'freest'? It is a question of being free!" "Free politically?" "Free in all human ways, politically being one. I do not see how a man can endure to say to a woman, 'You are less free than I am, but be satisfied! you are so much freer than that wretch over there!'" Hagar rose. Her eyes chanced to meet those of the man who had talked physics and mysticism. "We shan't," she said, "get into the Fourth Dimension while we have a shrivelled side. We can't limp into that, you know." She crossed the room and stood before a portrait hung above a sofa. "Roger Michael, come tell me about this Quaker lady!" She left before ten, pleading an early rising for work that must be done. And Molly and Christopher would come to see her? She might be a month in London. Christopher and the Fabian saw her into her cab, and she gave each her hand and was driven away. "That," said the Fabian, as they turned back to the house, "is a woman one could die for." It was a long way to the hotel where the Ashendynes were staying. A mild, dark, blurred night; street lights, houses with lights and darkened houses, forms on the pavement that moved briskly, forms that idled, forms that went with stealthiness; passing vehicles, the horses' hoofs, the roll of the wheels, the onward, unfolding ribbon of the night. The air came in at the lowered window, soft and cool, with a hint now of rain. Hagar was dreaming of Gilead Balm. Up over the threshold had peered a childhood evening, and she and Thomasine and Maggie and Corker and Mary Magazine played ring-around-a-rosy, over the dewy grass until the pink in the west was ashes of roses and the fireflies were out. CHAPTER XXII HAGAR IN LONDON