Everything in the neighbourhood under the age of twelve rushed helter-skelter to the spot. As fast as the photographer swept them to one side of the pavement, they closed up on the other; and only his experienced agility and a lightning camera enabled him to procure a picture that did not resemble an advertisement of the Children's Holiday Fund. All this was in the nature of a Roman holiday for the neighbourhood, but we, summoned to the doorstep to form part of the picture, felt it was to be counted among the lesser sacrifices that have to be made for a cause. The bystanders, of course, did not take this view of our behaviour. "Look at 'em," said one of these, just as we were miserably submitting to being grouped in self-conscious, affectionate attitudes that did not remotely convey the business-like relations of a business-like committee. "That's what they like! Votes for women, indeed!" Fixed by the glassy eye of the camera, we were unable to reply to this; so our scornful critic went away, doubtless confirmed in his belief that there is no higher reward for a rebel woman than that of standing in a thin blouse, at a street corner, to be photographed, blown about by a cutting east wind, jostled by yelling children, and exposed to the chance of recognition at any minute by some disapproving friend or relative. "Nobody will ever look upon us as real people in business, after that," sighed one of our shop assistants when we regained comparative privacy behind the counter. "Nobody," acquiesced our militant member, gloomily. "And only this morning, I was really feeling like a genuine tradesman when I took down the shutters and agreed with the man next door that trade will never improve as long as this Government is in power." "Our trade certainly won't," agreed a chorus of anti-Government agitators. The door was suddenly flung open, and a boy came in and flung a sovereign on the counter. "Could you oblige Mr. Bunting with change, please, miss?" he asked briskly. That was all. There was no condescension in his tone. There was no impudence in his manner. He did not ask if we wanted our rights now, or if we would sooner wait till we got them. He did not say he had no wish to see women sitting in _his_ Parliament. He just stood there, as shopman to shopman, waiting to effect a trade transaction that raised us, once and for all, beyond the level of amateurs. Nothing approaching a sovereign's worth of change was in the chocolate-box hopefully described by us as the till; but our militant member, now as ever, knew how to rise to a great occasion. She looked up from the column of figures she had hastily pretended to be adding up when the shop bell tinkled, seemed to take in the boy's request with difficulty, called "Forward, dear, please!" in a languid tone up the spiral staircase, then returned to the column of figures. No lady of business experience in any shop or any post office could have been more exasperatingly irrelevant.