At the end of ten minutes I had learnt every detail of her private and special society for protecting pampered pets against those who pampered them--this, by the way, was not what she called it--and of the dear little children who paid their pennies weekly, and of the Christmas card to advertise the cause, that she had designed herself. The Christmas card was extricated from the ermine muff, with no inconsiderable ingenuity, for the toy dog, making a wild dash for liberty, very nearly emerged with it; and my criticism was condescendingly invited. It is not easy to give an intelligent opinion on a drawing of a cat, a dog, a donkey, a parrot, a tadpole, a pony, a pigeon, and a newt; and I found I had said quite the wrong thing when I murmured that it was very pretty. Prettiness, I was told sternly, was not its object. I looked again, and was fortunately inspired to detect that she had not included a rabbit. She thought she might squeeze in the rabbit between the Newfoundland dog and the newt; and after that I forced my own goods upon her in a determined manner until she went. It is sometimes helpful to remind yourself, if you are the crank who stands at a street corner selling papers for a cause, that cranks are the salt of the earth. But, as Henry Harland once wrote in a frivolous moment--"_Il faut souffrir pour être sel._" VIII Patrolling the Gutter "I suppose we had better start," faltered the tall woman in purple. "I can't think of a reasonable excuse for delaying any longer," sighed the girl in green. "Come along!" said a third, making a great show of the courage she did not feel. Nobody came along. Under some pretext or another we still lingered, though there were ten of us and the space in our Suffragette shop was uncomfortably limited. Most people, the even tenor of whose lives had not been ruffled by the call of a great cause, might have thought the day an unpropitious one to choose for patrolling the gutter, even for the sake of advertising a meeting of rebel women in the Albert Hall. A strong south-west wind, a real London drizzle overhead and thick mud underfoot, could hardly be held to offer striking attractions to a band of naturally timorous ladies, girt about with sandwich-boards, preparing to issue forth in procession into the conventional streets of Kensington. If we had been less timorous we should probably have postponed the expedition; but the last fear that rebel women ever learn to overcome is the fear of being thought afraid, so this was an alternative that did not suggest itself to anybody.