There was the Reverend Dr. Amelia Jones, blond, adipose, and close to the four-score mark. She stepped high in the Equal Franchise ranks. Nobody had ever had the temerity to answer her back. There was Miss Sadie Dingleheimer, fifty, emaciated, anemic, and gauntly glittering with thick-lensed eye-glasses. She was the President of the National Prophylactic Club, whatever that may be. There was Miss Margaret McFadden, a Titian, profusely toothed, muscular, and President of the Hair Dressers' Union of the United States. There was Mrs. Gladys Doolittle Batt, a grass one--Batt being represented as a vanishing point--President of the National Eugenic and Purity League; tall, gnarled, sinuously powerful, and prone to emotional attacks. The attacks were directed toward others. These, then, composed the heavy artillery. The artillery of the light brigade consisted only of a single piece. Her name was Angelica White, a delegate from the Trained Nurses' Association of America. The nurses had been too busy with their business to attend such picnics, so one had been selected by lot to represent the busy Association on this expedition. Angelica White was a tall, fair, yellow-haired girl of twenty-two or three, with violet-blue eyes and red lips, and a way of smiling a little when spoken to--but let that pass. I mean only to be scientifically minute. A passion for fact has ever obsessed me. I have little literary ability and less desire to sully my pen with that degraded form of letters known as fiction. Once in my life my mania for accuracy involved me lyrically. It was a short poem, but an earnest one: Truth is mighty and must prevail, Otherwise it were inadvisable to tell the tale. I bestowed it upon the New York _Evening Post_, but declined remuneration. My message belonged to the world. I don't mean the newspaper. Her eyes, then, were tinted with that indefinable and agreeable nuance which modifies blue to a lilac or violet hue. Watching her askance, I was deeply sorry that my cooking seemed to pain her. "Guide!" said Mrs. Doolittle Batt, in that remarkable, booming voice of hers. "Ma'am!" said Kitten Brown and I with spontaneous alacrity, leaping from the ground as though shot at. "This cooking," she said, with an ominous stare at us, "is atrocious. Don't you know how to cook?" I said with a smiling attempt at ease: "There are various ways of cooking food for the several species of mammalia which an all-wise Providence--" "Do you think you're cooking for wild-cats?" she demanded. Our smiles faded. "It's my opinion that you're incompetent," remarked the Reverend Dr. Jones, slapping at midges with a hand that might have rocked all the cradles of the nation, but had not rocked any. "We're not getting our money's worth," said Miss Dingleheimer, "even if the Government does pay your salaries." I looked appealingly from one stony face to another. In Miss McFadden's eye there was the somber glint of battle. She said: