'How you men stand up for one another! You know perfectly well you can't endure him.' Mrs. Heriot jerked her head away and faced the group round the tea-table. 'What is she saying? That she's been to a Suffrage meeting in Hyde Park!' 'How could she! Nothing would induce me to go and listen to such people!' said Miss Dunbarton. Her eyes, as well as Mrs. Heriot's, were riveted on the tall figure, tea-cup in hand, moving away from the table now to make room for some new arrivals, and drawing after her a portion of the company, including Lady Whyteleafe and Richard Farnborough, who one after another had come in a few moments before. It was to the young man that Greatorex was saying, with a twinkle, 'I am sure Mr. Farnborough agrees with me.' Slightly self-conscious, he replied, 'About Miss Levering being too--a----' 'For that sort of thing altogether "too."' 'How do you know?' said the lady herself, with a teasing smile. Greatorex started out of the chair in which he had just deposited himself at her side. 'God bless my soul!' he said. 'She's only saying that to get a rise out of you.' Farnborough seemed unable to bear the momentary shadow obscuring the lady's brightness. 'Ah, yes'--Greatorex leaned back again--'your frocks aren't serious enough.' 'Haven't I been telling you it's an exploded notion that the Suffrage people are all dowdy and dull?' 'Pooh!' said Mr. Greatorex. 'You talk about some of them being pretty,' Farnborough said. '_I_ didn't see a good-looking one among 'em.' 'Ah, you men are so unsophisticated; you missed the fine feathers.' 'Plenty o' feathers on the one I heard.' 'Yes, but not _fine_ feathers. A man judges of the general effect. We can, at a pinch, see past unbecoming clothes, can't we, Lady Whyteleafe? We see what women could make of themselves if they took the trouble.' 'All the same,' said the lady appealed to, 'it's odd they don't see how much better policy it would be if they _did_ take a little trouble about their looks. Now, if we got our maids to do those women's hair for them--if we lent them our French hats--ah, _then_'--Lady Whyteleafe nodded till the pear-shaped pearls in her ears swung out like milk-white bells ringing an alarum--'they'd convert you creatures fast enough then.' 'Perhaps "convert" is hardly the word,' said Vida, with ironic mouth. As though on an impulse, she bent forward to say, with her lips near Lady Whyteleafe's pearl drop: 'What if it's the aim of the movement to get away from the need of just these little dodges?' 'Dodges?' But without the exclamation, Miss Levering must have seen that she had been speaking in an unknown tongue. A world where beauty exists for beauty's sake--which is love's sake--and not for tricking money or power out of men, even the possibility of such a world is beyond the imagining of many. Something was said about a deputation of women who had waited on Mr. Greatorex. 'Hm, yes, yes.' He fiddled with his watch chain.