Mrs. Payton was speechless with displeasure, but Mrs. Holmes, shivering from the chill of that word Fred had used, helped herself wildly from a dish Flora had been holding, unnoticed, at her elbow. "Ellen, I simply will not come here, if you allow that girl to speak in this way--before a servant, too!" she added, as Flora retreated to the pantry. "I merely told the truth," Fred said, with a bored look. "Well," said her grandmother, "then _I_ will tell you the truth! You are a very unpleasant girl. And I don't wonder you are not married--no man would be such a fool as to ask you! A girl who cheapens herself by locking herself up in empty flats with any young man she happens to meet, and signs indecent petitions, and rants in the public streets to a lot of strikers--why, you are not a _lady_! You are as plain as a pike-staff; and you have no manners, and no sense, and no heart--you've nothing but cleverness, which is about as attractive to a man as a hair shirt! Maria Spencer told me she expected you would be ruined; but I said I would think better of you if you were capable of being ruined, or if anybody wanted to ruin you. You are not a woman; you are a suffragist! That's why you haven't any charm; not a particle!" "Thank Heaven!" Frederica murmured. "Well, unless men have changed since my day," Mrs. Holmes said, shrilly, "a man wants charm in a woman, more than he wants brains." "It is a matter of indifference to me what men want," Fred commented. Her grandmother did not notice the interruption--"Though when _we_ were young, some of us had brains and charm, too! There! That's the truth, and how do you like it? Ellen, why do you have your napkins starched so stiffly--they won't stay on your lap a minute!" CHAPTER XI "I never noticed her looks," Howard Maitland was saying, as he and another member of the Survey Expedition lounged against the railing of their tubby little vessel and looked idly down on an oily sea. They had been talking about women--or Woman, as Frederica Payton would have expressed it; and, naturally, she herself came in for comment. "Pretty?" Thomas Leighton had asked, sleepily. It was very hot, and the flats smelt abominably; both men were muddy and dripping with perspiration. Howard meditated: "I never noticed her looks. She keeps you hustling so to know what she's talking about, that looks don't count. She says things that make you sit up--but lots of girls do that." "They do. Boring after the first shock. But they enjoy it. It draws attention to 'em. Our grandmothers used to faint all over the lot, for the same purpose." "Sometimes," Howard said, grinning, "when they get going about sex, I don't know where to look!" "Look at _them_. That's what they want. And as most of 'em don't know what they're talking about, you needn't be uncomfortable. When they orate on Man's injustice to Woman--capital M and capital W--I get a little weary." "I'm with 'em, there!" Maitland said.