“We want just such people as you,” she repeated, and began in panting rhetorical sentences to urge the militant cause. For her it was manifestly a struggle against “the Men.” Miss Alimony had no doubts of her sex. It had nothing to learn, nothing to be forgiven, it was compact of obscured and persecuted marvels, it needed only revelation. “They know Nothing,” she said of the antagonist males, bringing deep notes out of the melodious caverns of her voice; “they know _Nothing_ of the Deeper Secrets of Woman’s Nature.” Her discourse of a general feminine insurrection fell in very closely with the spirit of Lady Harman’s private revolt. “We want the Vote,” said Agatha, “and we want the Vote because the Vote means Autonomy. And then——” She paused voluminously. She had already used that word “Autonomy” at the lunch table and it came to her hearer to supply a long-felt want. Now she poured meanings into it, and Lady Harman with each addition realized more clearly that it was still a roomy sack for more. “A woman should be absolute mistress of herself,” said Miss Alimony, “absolute mistress of her person. She should be free to develop——” Germinating phrases these were in Lady Harman’s ear. She wanted to know about the Suffrage movement from someone less generously impatient than Georgina, for Georgina always lost her temper about it and to put it fairly _ranted_, this at any rate was serene and confident, and she asked tentative ill-formed questions and felt her way among Miss Alimony’s profundities. She had her doubts, her instinctive doubts about this campaign of violence, she doubted its wisdom, she doubted its rightness, and she perceived, but she found it difficult to express her perception, that Miss Alimony wasn’t so much answering her objections as trying to swamp her with exalted emotion. And if there was any flaw whatever in her attention to Miss Alimony’s stirring talk, it was because she was keeping a little look-out in the tail of her eye for the reappearance of the men, and more particularly for the reappearance of Mr. Brumley with whom she had a peculiar feeling of uncompleted relations. And at last the men came and she caught his glance and saw that her feeling was reciprocated. She was presently torn from Agatha, who gasped with pain at the parting and pursued her with a sedulous gaze as a doctor might watch an injected patient, she parted with Lady Beach-Mandarin with a vast splash of enthusiasm and mutual invitations, and Lady Viping came and pressed her to come to dinner and rapped her elbow with her lorgnette to emphasize her invitation. And Lady Harman after a still moment for reflection athwart which the word Autonomy flickered, accepted this invitation also. §3