One of Mary's first after dinner friendships was made at the hotel with a certain Mrs. Elliott, who turned out to be the President of the local Suffrage Club. Scenting a new recruit, this lady early engaged the Byrds in conversation and, finding Mary a believer, at once enveloped her in the camaraderie which has been this cause's gift to women all the world over. They exchanged calls, and soon became firm friends. Mrs. Elliot was an attractive woman in middle life, of slim, graceful figure and vivacious manner. She had one son out in the world, and one in college, and lived in a charming house just off the Avenue, with an adored but generally invisible husband, who was engaged in business downtown. As a girl Constance Elliot had been on the stage, and had played smaller Shakespearean parts in the old Daly Company, but, bowing to the code of her generation, had abandoned her profession at marriage. Now, in middle life, too old to take up her calling again with any hope of success, yet with her mental activity unimpaired, she found in the Suffrage movement her one serious vocation. “I am nearly fifty, Mrs. Byrd,” she said to Mary, “and have twenty good years before me. I like my friends, and am interested in philanthropy, but I am not a Jack-of-all-trades by temperament. I need work--a real job such as I had when the boys were little, or when I was a girl. We are all working hard enough to win the vote, but what we shall fill the hole in our time with when we have it, I don't know. It will be easy for the younger ones--but I suppose women like myself will simply have to pay the price of having been born of our generation. Some will find solace as grandmothers--I hope I shall. But my elder son, who married a pretty society girl, is childless, and my younger such a light-hearted young rascal that I doubt if he marries for years to come.” Mary was much interested in this problem, which seemed more salient here than in her own class in England, in which social life was a vocation for both sexes. At Mrs. Elliot's house she met many of the neighborhood's more conventional women, and began to have a great liking for these gently bred but broad-minded and democratic Americans. She also met a mixed collection of artists, actresses, writers, reformers and followers of various “isms”; for as president of a suffrage club it was Mrs. Elliot's policy to make her drawing rooms a center for the whole neighborhood. She was a charming hostess, combining discrimination with breadth of view; her Fridays were rallying days for the followers of many more cults than she would ever embrace, but for none toward which she could not feel tolerance.