"You can hear anything that's said to the mistress from the top of the house to the bottom--that is, if the mistress can hear it," she explained unemotionally. The controversy had reached the acute stage when I arrived in the back drawing-room, an unwilling eavesdropper. This I gathered from the significant circumstance that both speakers were talking at once. Presently there came a calm, in the course of which Penelope seemed to be getting on rather well. She was keeping her temper wonderfully, I thought, and was apparently convincing the enemy beyond the power of retort. The absence of retort became, indeed, astonishing, until it was explained by a sudden interruption from Penelope's mother, just as her daughter reached a fine pitch of persuasive eloquence. "I can't hear a word you are saying, my dear. I wish you would pick up my ear-trumpet," said Penelope's mother, breaking unconsciously into the middle of a sentence. Evidently the ear-trumpet was found and adjusted, for retorts came thick and fast as soon as Penelope began patiently to say it all over again. "What rubbish, child!" was an early interruption. "I have never done anything to hinder your development, as you call it. I drew the line at ju-jitsu, I admit, because I didn't like the appearance of the unpleasant little yellow person with the pigtail--he had no pigtail? Well, he was the style of person to whom one expects to find a pigtail attached. That is neither here nor there--" "No, mother darling, it isn't," interposed Penelope firmly; "and I never said you hindered my development. We are not Suffragettes because we have personal grievances, but because of the general attitude towards women----" "You will never persuade me, my dear, that you can cure anybody's attitude towards women by knocking off policemen's helmets----" "We don't knock off----" "I am convinced, Penelope, that I have seen a picture, in the _Daily Illustrated_, I think it was, of a woman knocking off a policeman's helmet. Her mouth was wide open, and she was doing it with an umbrella--a dreadful, ill-bred, unwomanly creature she looked! I remember it distinctly. The _Daily Illustrated_ is a most respectable paper; it would never----" "Darling, you know you have told me over and over again how all the respectable papers of the day called Florence Nightingale a dreadful, unwomanly creature for wanting to go out to the war to nurse grown-up men without a chaperon, instead of staying at home to nurse the baby she hadn't got," shouted Penelope down the ear-trumpet. "And so they did," cried her mother, as though her veracity were being called in question. "All sorts of wicked and untrue things were said about that noble woman, for whom I have the utmost veneration, because she taught me to air a room by opening the window a few minutes at the bottom instead of opening the door. Oh! it was shocking the things they said about her! But now----"