Volunteer work is of course not always to be depended upon. It is eccentric and follows its own laws. There would be periods when Headquarters would be flooded with help. There came intervals when it was almost empty. Sara Grogan, herself a devoted adherent, tells how in this case, she used to go out on the streets and ask strangers to help. Volunteer workers—if they were housekeepers or the mothers of families—learned, on their busy days, to give F Street a wide berth. As they had no time to give and as it was impossible to say no to Alice Paul, the streets about Headquarters were as closed to them as the streets of his creditors to Dick Swiveller. It was perhaps this experience which taught Alice Paul what later became one of her chief assets—her power to put to use every bit of human material that came her way; which developed in her that charitable willingness, when this human material failed in one direction, to try it in another; and another; and another. Rarely did she reject any offer of help, no matter how untrained or seemingly untrainable it was. I asked Mabel Vernon how she got so much work—and such splendid work of all kinds—out of amateurs. She answered, “She believed we could do it and so she made us believe it.” In those days, Alice Paul herself was like one driven by a fury of speed. She was a human dynamo. She made everybody else work as hard as possible, but she drove—although she did drive—nobody so hard as herself. Winifred Mallon said, “I worked with Alice Paul for three months before I saw her with her hat off. I was perfectly astonished, I remember, at that mass of hair. I had never suspected its existence.” For a long time, Alice Paul deliberately lived in a cold room, so that she could not be tempted to sit up late to read. It was more than a year before she visited the book-shop opened by a friend because, she said, “I should be tempted to buy so many books there.” Anne Martin says that she believes Alice Paul made a vow not to think or to read anything that was not connected with Suffrage until the Amendment was passed. There was certainly no evidence of her reading anything else. They make the humorous observation at Headquarters now that the instant the Amendment had passed both Houses, Alice Paul began to permit herself the luxury of one mental relaxation—the reading of detective stories. But in those early days she worked all the time and she worked at everything. Somebody said to Lucy Burns, “She asks nothing of us that she doesn’t do herself,” and Lucy Burns answered dryly, “Yes, she’s annoyingly versatile.”