She pictured to herself all those women and girls working over yonder, the seamstresses and milliners, the clerks, typists, shop-girls, waitresses, factory hands, _filles de joie_—what a voiceless, helpless crowd it seemed. Was the clamour for the vote a mere catch cry, one of those specious demagogic phrases that pretended to offer so much and would effect so little? Was it not the blind, passionate cry of a mass of humanity that desired utterance and yearned for self-expression? Could anything be altered, or was life just a huge, fateful phenomenon that went its inevitable way, despite all the talk and the fussy little human figures? She wondered. How were things going to be bettered? How were the sex spirit and the commercial spirit going to be chastened and subdued? * * * * * CHAPTER XXXIV EVE PURSUES EXPERIENCE During the next two weeks Eve’s moods fluctuated between compassionate altruism and bitter and half laughing scorn. Life was so tremendous, so pathetic, so strenuous, so absurd. For the time being she was a watcher of other people’s activities, and she spent much of her time tramping here, there and everywhere, interested in everything because of her new prejudices. She was glad to get out of the hotel, since it was full of a certain type of American tourists—tall, sallow women who talked in loud, harsh voices, chiefly about food and the digestion of food, where they had been, and what they had paid for things. The American man was a new type to Eve—a mongrel still in the making. The type puzzled and repelled her with its broad features, and curious brown eyes generally seen behind rimless glasses. Sometimes she sat and watched them and listened, and fancied she caught a note of hysterical egoism. Their laughter was not like an Englishman’s laughter. It burst out suddenly and rather fatuously, betraying, despite all the jaw setting and grim hunching of shoulders, a lack of the deeper restraints. They were always talking, always squaring themselves up against the rest of the world, with a neurotic self-consciousness that realised that it was still only half civilised. They suggested to Eve people who had set out to absorb culture in a single generation, and had failed most grotesquely. She kept an open mind as to the men, but she disliked the women wholeheartedly. They were studies in black and white, and crude, harsh studies, with no softness of outline.