"I think I heard you say you'd never been to a meeting before, didn't I?" said her neighbour pleasantly. "Neither have I, and I wouldn't be wasting my time here to-night if it wasn't to please my husband. He likes to see women take an interest in politics; it was him that got our member a hundred and twenty-eight canvassers, last election. Oh, he thinks a lot of women, does my husband; says he hasn't any objection to their having a vote, either, only they ought to be ashamed of themselves for going on so about it. I don't hold with votes myself. It's only men that's got all that idle time on their hands, and if they're respectable married men, there's nothing else to occupy them but politics. But for a woman it's work, work, work, from her wedding-day till her funeral, and how can she find time for such nonsense? 'You've got to be made to think, Martha,' he says to me, coming here to-night. Think? If a woman stops to think, she don't stop with her husband, chances are. Of course, he don't believe me when I say that. He's too sure of me, that's where it is." "That is always where it is," said the woman in black, quietly. Her neighbour took out some knitting. "They laugh at me for bringing my knitting everywhere," she said. "I can't listen if I sit idle. Not that I want to listen," she concluded, as she settled down comfortably to the counting of stitches. The organ boomed out a jerky tune with elephantine lightness, and the audience vented its impatience in a lusty rendering of some song about England and liberty. The music was uninspiring, the words were clap-trap, and seemed to convey the singular idea that freedom had been invented and patented within recent years by a particular political party; but the indifferent expression of the woman in black changed and softened as the chorus rose and fell, and a tall man with a lean, humorous face, who stood looking at her, gave her a smile of understanding as the echoing sounds died away. He too was wearing a steward's button, she noticed. "There's a sort of barbaric splendour about that, isn't there?" he remarked. She felt none of the irritation that had been roused by the conversational advances of the other steward. It was a relief, indeed, to talk about something ordinary with a man who, she felt instinctively, knew how to give even ordinary things their true values. "It's the whole effect," she answered impulsively. "The cathedral outside, and this thirteenth-century interior, and then--this!" She looked round the magnificent old County Hall, and along the densely packed rows of restless modern men and women, and then back again, half whimsically, at the man who had spoken to her. "It is like reaching back to shake hands with the Middle Ages," she said. "To fight with the Middle Ages," he amended, and they both laughed. "You will find," he added, narrowing his eyes a little to look at her, "that the Middle Ages generally win, when we hold political meetings here in the provinces."