"I never realized before what it meant to be a belted knight, but I do now," remarked our literary member, trying in vain to free her hands from their cardboard bonds in order to straighten a crooked hat. "If anything or anybody were to unhorse us and make us bite the dust--isn't that what belted knights were always doing to one another in the Middle Ages?--we should have to lie on our backs, as they did, till some one came and picked us up." "I feel like a pantomime super, myself," observed somebody else, twirling round in order to get a full-length back view of herself in the glass. "I shall never get accustomed to the make-up," she added ruefully, as she once more swept the greater part of our stock of pamphlets from the counter to the floor, and had to stand helpless and repentant while the shop secretary picked them up, not for the first time in the course of these trial manoeuvres. "If you don't start soon, there will be nothing saleable left in the place," said the shop secretary pointedly. "Well, what are you waiting for?" demanded the girl in green, trying to infuse a little real impatience into her tone. "Courage," confessed the woman in purple, gloomily. "Oh, nonsense!" said our literary member, without, however, moving any nearer to the door. "Think of George Herbert: God gave thy soul brave wings; put not those feathers Into a bed to sleep out all ill weathers." We all tried to think of George Herbert, but without marked success. "I can't think of anything but the ill weather waiting for us outside and all the people I know in Kensington," said the tall woman, voicing bluntly and concisely what the rest of us were feeling. "Do you think the people we know would ever recognize us in these things?" asked some one in a moment of real inspiration; and under the influence of this new and cheering suggestion we formed up hastily in single file and really made a start. The secretary of another local branch, who had dropped in to seek recruits for a similar poster parade in her district, observed significantly as we filed past her that it was most important to be as well dressed as possible in her neighbourhood. Neither this, nor the first comment that reached our ears as we plunged into the street, added particularly to our good opinion of ourselves. "Well, I must say you ladies don't think of appearances, that you don't!" was the comment of the street. At a less sensitive moment we might have derived comfort from the tone of admiration in which this was uttered. As it was, an outrageous remark that followed did far more to raise our drooping spirits. This one was made by a girl, wearing a flaming hat and blouse that not one of us would have had the courage to put on before going for a walk, even if supported by so magnificent a youth as the one on whose arm she leaned as she criticized. "Brazen, ain't they?" she said.