And Grannie, immutable in her aged wisdom and malevolence, pushed out her lower lip at them.

“If you three would leave off that folly and sit down and knit, you might be some use,” said Grannie.  “Kitchener says that if every woman in England knitted from morning till night he wouldn’t have enough socks for his Army.”

Grannie knitted from morning till night.  She knitted conspicuously, as a protest against bandage practice; giving to her soft and gentle action an air of energy inimical to her three unmarried daughters.  And not even Louie had the heart to tell her that all her knitting had to be unravelled overnight, to save the wool.

“A set of silly women, getting in Kitchener’s way, and wasting khaki!”

Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal affair, as if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other women were interfering with them.

Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all the men.  The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and her followers received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain from violence during the period of the War.  And instantly, in the first week of war, the Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies (already organized and disciplined by seven years’ methodical resistance) presented their late enemy, the Government, with an instrument of national service made to its hand and none the worse because originally devised for its torture and embarassment.

The little vortex of the Woman’s Movement was swept without a sound into the immense vortex of the War.  The women rose up all over England and went into uniform.

And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches and puttees of the Women’s Service Corps.  She had joined a motor-ambulance as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that Anthony had given to it.  Dorothea really had a chance of being sent to Belgium before the end of the month.  Meanwhile she convoyed Belgian refugees from Cannon Street Station.

She saw nothing before her as yet.  Her mind was like Cannon Street Station—­a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the horror and misery of Belgium poured and was congested.

Cannon Street Station.  Presently it was as if she were spending all of her life that counted there; as if for years she had been familiar with the scene.

Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the blurred transparency of the roof.  Iron rails running under the long roof, that was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end.  By day a greyish light, filtered through smoke and grit and steam.  Lamps, opaque white globes, hanging in the thick air like dead moons.  By night a bluish light, and large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again to a ghastly, ruinous life.

The iron breasts of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing under the immense fanlight of the open arch.  Long trains of carriages packed tight with packages, with, enormous bundles; human heads appearing, here and there, above the swollen curves of the bundles; human bodies emerging in the struggle to bring forth the bundles through the narrow doors.