"It was idiotic of me," confessed Penelope; "she said something unfair about 'those dreadful women,' so I had to say I was one of them; and after that I had to go on, naturally. But if I haven't converted mother in the drawing-room, I seem to have succeeded incidentally in converting cook in the kitchen. It's a pity there were not a few more Antis concealed about the house while I was at the ear-trumpet, isn't it?" "Listen!" I interrupted. Sarah was clearing away tea, and through the open drawing-room door came scraps of conversation. "It is only right to study both sides of a question, Sarah." "Yes'm." "Florence Nightingale, the noblest Englishwoman who ever lived--I hope you open the window and not the door, when you wish to air your bedroom, Sarah?--Florence Nightingale was misrepresented just in the same way." "Yes'm." "I think I shall stop your monthly magazine and order a suffrage periodical for the kitchen instead." "Yes'm. We have two of Miss Penelope's already. Thank you, ma'am." Penelope and I fled downstairs to escape detection. "She was converted all the time; I told you she would be," I remarked on the doorstep. "Now for the immortal grudge!" sighed Penelope. VI At a Street Corner "People of London!" faltered the lady who had just stepped upon the sugar-box at the edge of the pavement. The people of London, who happened just then to be a very little girl carrying a very large baby, stared in some astonishment. Another lady, who had been distributing handbills farther along the street, came back and prompted the speaker encouragingly. "Go on; that's splendid!" she said with friendly warmth. The woman on the sugar-box, who had never stood on a sugar-box before, smiled wanly. "Why do they never have earthquakes except in countries where people don't want them?" she sighed. Her friend being engaged at the moment in pressing a handbill upon the little girl, who obligingly gripped the baby with one hand and her chin in order to take it, there came no response to the appeal of the orator in the gutter; and she pulled herself together and made a fresh start. "People of London!" she repeated amiably. "We have come here to tell you about 'Votes for----'" "Why, it's these 'ere Suffra_gites_!" suddenly yelled the people of London, shifting the baby on to the other arm; and the debutante on the sugar-box broke down and laughed deprecatingly. "I really must wait for some more people," she protested. "You needn't," said her more experienced companion. "They always come along fast enough as soon as they see some one like you standing on a sugar-box." "That doesn't surprise me," remarked the inexperienced one, thinking regretfully of a happy past in which the chief aim of a well-ordered life had been to avoid doing anything that would attract attention.