They parted at the corner of Gray's Inn Road. Alix saw him swallowed up
in black fog, called by his bell, going to his church to fight war by
the means he had at his command.
She got into her bus and went towards Violette, where no one fought
anything at all, but where supper waited, and Mrs. Frampton was anxious
lest she should have got lost in the fog.
PART III
DAPHNE
CHAPTER XIV
DAPHNE AT VIOLETTE
1
Daphne Sandomir was in the train between Cambridge and King's Cross. She
was always very busy in trains, as, indeed, everywhere else. On this
journey she was correcting the proofs of the chapter (Chapter IV.,
Education of the Children) which she was contributing to a volume by
seven authors, shortly to appear, to be entitled alliteratively _Is
Permanent Peace Possible_? and to come to the conclusion that it was.
Daphne Sandomir's interest in many things had always been so keen that
before the war you could not have picked out one as absorbing her more
than a score of others. She had been used to write pamphlets and address
meetings on most of them: eurhythmics, for instance, and eugenics, and
the economic and constitutional position of women, and sweated
industries, and baby crèches, and suggestion healing, and health food,
and clean milk, and twenty other of the causes good people have at
heart.
Then had come the war, an immense and horribly surprising shock, to
which her healthy and vigorous mind, not shattered like some, had
reacted in new forms of energy.
There were in England no ladies more active through that desperate time
than Daphne Sandomir and her sister Eleanor Orme; but their activities
were for the most part different. Mrs. Orme was secretary of a Red Cross
hospital, superintended canteens, patrolled camps, relieved and
entertained Belgians and dealt them out clothes, was the soul of Women's
Work Committees, made body-belts, respirators and sand-bags, locked up
her cellar, bought war loan, and wrote sensible letters to the _Times_,
which usually got printed.
Mrs. Sandomir also relieved Belgians, got up Repatriation and
Reconstruction societies for them, spoke at meetings of the Union of
Democratic Control (to which society, as has been before mentioned, she
did not belong) and of other societies to which she did belong, held
study circles of working people to educate them in the principles making
for permanent peace, went with a motor ambulance to pick up wounded in
France, tried, but failed, like so many others, to attend the Women's
International Congress at the Hague, travelled round the world examining
its disposition towards peace, helped to form the S.P.P.P. (Society for
Promoting Permanent Peace), wrote sensible letters to the _Times_, which
sometimes got printed and sometimes not, articles in various
periodicals, pamphlets on peace, education and such things, and chapters
in joint books.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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