She was very lucky; one always is when one doesn’t deserve to be so. She might have found a room with a brown wet ceiling curtseying floorward under the stress of many rains. She might have found a room peopled by a smell incredible, with rags stuffed into panes that had been broken by a merciful accident. She might have found walls discoloured by dark patches that looked like old blood. All these things are apt to decorate Woman’s Sphere in the Brown Borough. But the suffragette had, by mistake, knocked on the door of the most respectable house in the most respectable street in the district. She found a clean, though dark room, with a window blinking against the sun at a back yard filled with snowdrops. The wall-paper talked in a loud voice of tulips: wine-coloured tulips trampled on each other and wrestled for supremacy over every inch of it. The tablecloth and carpet were the colour of terra-cotta, and firmly disagreed with every word the wall-paper said. Two horse-hair chairs, in sullen brown, looked moodily at each other across the table. The suffragette never asked more than that her body might live in a clean place. She kept her mind detachable from colour schemes. After all, what is my body for but to enclose me? “I’ll have the room,” said the suffragette, as if it had been a cake of soap. It was like a dream to the landlady, a dream she had never been sufficiently feverish to indulge in. “You’ll have it?” she gasped. “Yes. Why not? What’s the rent, by the way?” The landlady, by means of a rapid mental process of multiplication, rose manfully to the occasion. “All right, fifteen shillings,” said the suffragette. “I’ll come in to-morrow.” She went to see the priest’s sister, but to her mild annoyance found the priest instead. “My sister suggested that you should visit the Wigskys,” said the priest, who never bore malice, as far as one could see. He never allowed you for a moment to forget that he was a Christian. “Mrs. Wigsky’s latest baby hasn’t been christened. Also I think the eldest girl must be getting into bad ways; she has left the excellent place I found for her.” “And must I persuade the baby to be christened?” “Not the child itself. You had better do your best to persuade the mother.” “But supposing she refuses on principle?” The priest fixed her with his piercing eye. “There can be no principle contrary to the Right,” he said. “The opposite to Right is Wrong.” “How simple!” said the suffragette. “But won’t Hell be terribly overcrowded?” The priest sighed, and certainly with reason. But he remembered that he was very broad-minded, and that he had often said that everybody had a right to their own opinion. He remembered that the soft answer that turneth away the fatuity of women had found a place even in the New Testament. “No one would be more loth than I ...” he said, “to classify as condemned all whose views do not coincide with the dictates of the Church. Let us rather call them mistaken.”