After that, it was easy to laugh and go ahead in a world that could always be counted upon to feed the most unsatisfied sense of humour. Otherwise, for the first half-hour or so, I doubt if we should have felt acutely conscious of anything but the traffic. Glorious as it may seem to the imaginative to suffer for a cause, one finds it difficult, when carrying sandwich-boards in its service, to detach from this distant and problematic reward the more immediate prospect of being run down from behind by a skidding motor-omnibus. In time, no doubt, it would be possible to acquire the easy swagger of the real sandwich man, though the real sandwich man would under no circumstances be submitted, as we were, to a definite onslaught from every impudent tradesman's boy who whizzed past us on a tricycle. As it was, no one could have said that our pace bore the slightest resemblance to the leisurely saunter of the professional patroller of the gutter. In spite of conscientious efforts on our part to maintain the regulation distance from one another, none of us could resist the impulse to catch up the next woman in front; and as our leader, the tall woman in purple, desired nothing more than to cover the prescribed route and return to the shelter of home as quickly as possible, only he who ran could have read the announcement printed on our boards, as we raced breathlessly along the edge of the pavement. At the same time, we found, nobody had the slightest difficulty in reading the identity of those who carried the boards. "Suffer-a-gettes! Look at 'em!" roared an omnibus driver. "Well, why not?" responded a gallant cabman from the shelter we were approaching. "Why shouldn't Mrs. Pank'urst 'ave a vote, same as you an' me? Ain't she got as much sense in her 'ead as what _I_ 'ave?" He modulated his belligerent shout to a dulcet undertone as we came alongside. "The whole of the four-wheel trade is with you, ladies," he told us confidentially. A block in the traffic caused us all to close up for a moment, and we compared notes hurriedly. "Not so bad as we expected, is it?" said our literary comrade, who was one of those to overhear the friendly remark made by the representative of the four-wheel trade. The girl in green reserved her opinion. "It makes one feel desperately sorry for the poor men who have to do this sort of thing, not for a cause, but for a living," she said feelingly.