“Leave it to me, my dear,” said he. “I will answer Corinna.” * * * * * In the tiny town of Wendlebury, in the noisy bosom of her family, Corinna was eating her heart out. During the latter days of June she had returned to the fold, an impecunious failure. As a matter of theory she had upheld the principles of woman suffrage. As a matter of practice, in the effort to obtain it, she loathed it with bitter hatred. She lacked the inspiration of its overwhelming importance in sublunary affairs. She was willing enough to do ordinary work in its interests, at a living wage, even to the odious extent of wearing an anæmic tricolor and selling newspapers in the streets. But when her duties involved incendiarism, imprisonment and hunger, striking, Corinna revolted. She had neither the conviction nor the courage. Miss Banditch reviled her for a recreant, a snake in the grass and a spineless doll and left the flat, forswearing her acquaintance for ever. Headquarters signified disapproval of her pusillanimity. Driven to desperation she signified her disapproval of Headquarters in unmeasured terms. The end came and prospective starvation drove her home to Wendlebury. When the war broke out, in common with the rest of the young maidenhood of the town, she yearned to do something to help the British Empire. Her sister Clara, to satisfy this laudable craving, promptly married a subaltern, and, when he was ordered to the front, went to live with his people. The next youngest sister, Evelyn, anxious for Red Cross work, found herself subsidised by an aunt notoriously inimical to Corinna. Corinna therefore had to throw in her lot with Margaret and Winnie, chits of fifteen and thirteen—the intervening boys having flown from the nest. What was a penniless and, in practical matters, a feckless young woman to do? She knitted socks and mufflers and went round the town collecting money for Belgian refugees. So did a score of tabbies, objects of Corinna’s scornful raillery who district-visited the poor to exasperation. She demanded work more glorious, more heroic; but lack of funds tied her to detested knitting-needles. As the Vicar’s daughter she was compelled to go to church and listen to her father’s sermons on the war; compared with which infliction, she tartly informed her mother, forcible feeding was a gay amusement.