Now Eve Carfax was on the edge of militancy, and it was a debatable point with her whether she should begin her campaign that day. Necessity advised something of the kind, seeing that her purse was empty. Yet she could not quite convince a sensitive and individualistic pride that the breaking of a shop window or a scuffle with the police would be an adequate and suitable protest. She walked about for an hour in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square, trying to escape from a treacherous self-consciousness that refused to suffer the adventure to be treated as an impersonal affair. The few people whom she passed stared rather hard, and so persistently, that she stopped to examine herself in a shop window. A dark green blind and the plate glass made an admirable mirror. It showed her her hair straggling most disgracefully, and the feminine part of her was shocked. Her appearance mattered. She did not realise the significance of the little thrill of shame that had flashed through her when she had looked at herself in the shop window; and even when she made her way to St. James’s Park and found an empty seat she deceived herself into believing that she had come there to think things out, and not to tidy her hair, with the help of the little mirror and the comb she carried in her vanity bag. Moreover she felt that she had been chilled on that Embankment seat, and a cold in the head is not heroic. She had her protest to make. The whole day loomed over her, big with possibilities. It made her feel very small and lonely, and cold and insecure. Hazily, and with a vague audacity that had now deserted her, she had assured herself that she would strike her blow when the hour came; but now that she was face to face with the necessity she found that she was afraid. Even her scorn of her own fear could not whip her into action. Her more sensitive and spiritual self shrank from the crude publicity of the ordeal. If she did the thing she had contemplated doing, she knew that she would be hustled and roughly handled. She saw herself with torn clothes and tumbled hair. The police would rescue and arrest her. She would be charged, convicted, and sent to prison.