She heard them recover their voices directly she had moved away. “Bet you she’s been up to something. ’Eard of any fires down your way, Jack?” “No. Think she’s one of them dirty militant sneaks?” “I wouldn’t mind bettin’ you that’s what she is. Dirty, low-down game they’re playing. I’ve a good mind to follow her up, and tip a copper the wink.” But the speaker remained to talk and to drink another cup of mahogany-coloured tea. “That’s just it. These suffragette women ain’t got no notion of sport. Suppose they belong to the sort as scratches and throws lamps.” The coffee-stall keeper interjected a question. “What about the chaps who burnt ricks and haystacks before the Reform Bill, and the chaps who smashed machines when they first put ’em into factories?” “Well, they burnt and broke, but they did it like men.” “Women ain’t in the same situation.” “Ain’t they? They can make ’emselves ’eard. Do yer think my ol’ woman goes about the ’ouse like a bleatin’ lamb? Garn, these militants are made all wrong inside. Fine sort of cause you’ve got when yer go sneakin’ about at three in the mornin’, settin’ empty ’ouses alight. That’s ’eroic, ain’t it?” These men had set Eve down as a militant, and they had come precious near the truth. She was on the edge of militancy, impelled towards strenuous rebellion by an exasperated sense of the injustice meted out to women, and by brooding upon the things she herself had experienced. It was a generous impulse in the main, mingling some bitterness with much enthusiasm, and moving with such impetuosity that it smothered any sound thinking. For the moment she was abnormal. She had half starved herself, and during weeks of loneliness she had encouraged herself to quarrel with society. She did not see the pathetic absurdity of all this spiritual kicking and screaming, being more than inclined to regard it as splendid protest than as an outburst of hysteria, a fit of tantrums more suited to an ill-balanced and uneducated servant girl. A shrill voice carries. The frenzied few have delayed so often the very reforms that they have advocated. And there is a sort of hysterical enthusiasm that tricks the younger and more generous spirits, and acting like crude alcoholic drink, stirs up a so-called religious revival or some such orgy of purblind egoism as this phenomenon of militancy. The emotions make the brain drunk, and the power of sound reasoning is lost. The fools, the fanatics, the self-advertisers, the notoriety hunters, and the genuine idealists get huddled into one exclamatory, pitiable mob. And it is one of the tragic facts of life that the soul of a mob is the soul of its lowest and basest members. All the finer, subtler sensitive restraints are lost. A man of mind may find himself shouting demagogic cries next to some half drunken coal-heaver.