“How I’d like you to know her!” she exclaimed.

She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry.  Her eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion.  “Lillah runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,” she continued.  “She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it’s now the biggest of its kind in England.  You can’t think what those women are like—­and their homes.  But she goes among them at all hours of the day and night.  I’ve often been with her. . . .  That’s what’s the matter with us. . . .  We don’t do things.  What do you do?” she demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile.  Rachel had scarcely listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and unhappy.  She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her work in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love affairs.

“I play,” she said with an affection of stolid composure.

“That’s about it!” Evelyn laughed.  “We none of us do anything but play.  And that’s why women like Lillah Harrison, who’s worth twenty of you and me, have to work themselves to the bone.  But I’m tired of playing,” she went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her arms above her head.  Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.

“I’m going to do something.  I’ve got a splendid idea.  Look here, you must join.  I’m sure you’ve got any amount of stuff in you, though you look—­well, as if you’d lived all your life in a garden.”  She sat up, and began to explain with animation.  “I belong to a club in London.  It meets every Saturday, so it’s called the Saturday Club.  We’re supposed to talk about art, but I’m sick of talking about art—­what’s the good of it?  With all kinds of real things going on round one?  It isn’t as if they’d got anything to say about art, either.  So what I’m going to tell ’em is that we’ve talked enough about art, and we’d better talk about life for a change.  Questions that really matter to people’s lives, the White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on.  And when we’ve made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it. . . .  I’m certain that if people like ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop to—­prostitution”—­she lowered her voice at the ugly word—­“in six months.  My idea is that men and women ought to join in these matters.  We ought to go into Piccadilly and stop one of these poor wretches and say:  ’Now, look here, I’m no better than you are, and I don’t pretend to be any better, but you’re doing what you know to be beastly, and I won’t have you doing beastly things, because we’re all the same under our skins, and if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me.’  That’s what Mr. Bax was saying this morning, and it’s true, though you clever people—­you’re clever too, aren’t you?—­don’t believe it.”