The Vortex fascinated Dorothy even while she resisted it.  She liked the feeling of her own power to resist, to keep her head, to beat up against the rush of the whirlwind, to wheel round and round outside it, and swerve away before the thing got her.

For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex, as her brother Michael had been afraid of the little vortex of school.  She was afraid of the herded women.  She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and the platform slang.  She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many as one.  She would not be carried away by it; she would keep the clearness and hardness of her soul.  It was her soul they wanted, these women of the Union, the Blathwaites and the Palmerston-Swetes, and Rosalind, and the Blackadder girl and the Gilchrist woman; they ran out after her like a hungry pack yelping for her soul; and she was not going to throw it to them.  She would fight for freedom, but not in their way and not at their bidding.

She was her brother Michael, refusing to go to the party; refusing to run with the school herd, holding out for his private soul against other people who kept him from remembering.  Only Michael did not hold out.  He ran away.  She would stay, on the edge of the vortex, fascinated by its danger, and resisting.

But as she looked at them, at Rosalind with her open mouth, at the Blackadder girl who was scowling horribly, and at Valentina Gilchrist, sceptical and quizzical, she laughed.  The three had been trying to rush her, and because they couldn’t rush her they were questioning her honour.  She had asked them plainly for a plain meaning, and their idea of apt repartee was to pretend to question her honour.

Perhaps they really did question it.  She didn’t care.  She loathed their excited, silly, hurrying suspicion; but she didn’t care.  It was she who had drawn them and led them on to this display of incomparable idiocy.  Like her brother Nicholas she found that adversity was extremely funny; and she laughed.

She was no longer Michael, she was Nicky, not caring, delighting in her power to fool them.

“You think,” she said, “I’d no business to find out?”

“Your knowledge would certainly have been mysterious,” said the Secretary; “unless at least two confidences had been betrayed.  Supposing there had been any secret policy.”

“Well, you see, I don’t know it; and I didn’t invent it; and I didn’t find it out—­precisely.  Your secret policy is the logical conclusion of your present policy.  I deduced it; that’s all.  Anybody could have done the same.  Does that satisfy you? (They won’t love me any better for making them look fools!)”

“Thank you,” said Miss Gilchrist.  “We only wanted to be sure.”