There would have to be more colleges for women--Newnham and Girton could not turn out nearly enough--there would have to be a great many Newnhams. Some girls, no doubt, sat down at once and began to prepare a sermon, and others took down Blackstone and began seriously to study law. Lucy went back to her room alone. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, though she 'kept' next door, wouldn't take the slightest notice of her. She had lighted her lamp, and was just thinking what she would give for a cup of tea, when someone knocked at her door. It wasn't a girl with a cup of tea, as she hoped it might be--the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with all her fine airs, generally brought her in a cup of tea before she went to bed, and sometimes she condescended to sit down for five minutes and discuss the burning questions of the day. It was not the Chancellor of the Exchequer--it was a far greater person--it was the Leader of the House. 'Well?' she said, when she came in and had shut the door after her--'well?' She had come in so suddenly, and Lucy's mind was so full of the motion of the evening--this Parliamentary business was quite a new thing to her, and she had taken it _au serieux_--that she could not collect herself sufficiently to think what Pamela meant. Her mind was so full of the lady curates and the female barristers that she looked up at the Leader of the House in bewilderment. 'Well,' said Pamela impatiently, 'how is he? I saw by your face at Hall that he was not dead. Is he going to get well?' Then Lucy remembered all about it. 'Oh dear!' she said, 'how could I have forgotten! Yes, he is going to get well, I think. He will owe his life if he does to Eric. Oh, Eric has been lovely!' 'Eric has done no more than anyone else would have done,' Pamela said coldly; 'no more than a woman would have done if a woman had been in his place.' 'I don't think a woman _could_ have done what Eric has done,' Lucy said. She was thinking of those stitches he had put in, and how he had struggled with the poor fellow all night, and how he had been watching and praying beside him for two whole nights and days. Nurse Brannan would have done as much as most women, but she would not have done all this. 'Oh, you don't know what women can do!' Pamela said, with a little curl of her lip. Her lips were so thin and so hard--such crisp lips that they couldn't help curling. 'You are only a fresher; when you have been here three years you will have found out what a woman can do. He would never have cut his throat if a woman had been near him.' 'No,' said Lucy eagerly, 'I am sure he wouldn't--not if a woman he loved had been near. Oh dear! you should have seen the wistfulness in his poor eyes when I put the wet bandage on his head! It was enough to melt one's heart. Eric says he will be sure to do it again--at least, that we must never leave off praying for him. I am sure that there is only one thing that can save him from doing it again.'