As Audrey sat down again, the illustrious Rosamund took a chair near her, and it could not be doubted that the woman had the mien and the carriage of a leader.

“You are very rich, are you not?” asked Rosamund, in a tone at once deferential and intimate, and she smiled very attractively in the gloom.  Impossible not to reckon with that smile, as startling as it was seductive!

Evidently Nick had been communicative.

“I suppose I am,” murmured Audrey, like a child, and feeling like a child.  Yet at the same time she was asking herself with fierce curiosity:  “What has Madame Piriac got to do with this woman?”

“I hear you have eight or ten thousand a year and can do what you like with it.  And you cannot be more than twenty-three....  What a responsibility it must be for you!  You are a friend of Miss Ingate’s and therefore on our side.  Indeed, if a woman such as you were not on our side, I wonder whom we could count on.  Miss Ingate is, of course, a subscriber to the Union—­”

“Only a very little one,” cried Miss Ingate.

Audrey had never felt so abashed since an ex-parlourmaid at Flank Hall, who had left everything to join the Salvation Army, had asked her once in the streets of Colchester whether she had found salvation.  She knew that she, if any one, ought to subscribe to the Suffragette Union, and to subscribe largely.  For she was a convinced suffragette by faith, because Miss Ingate was a convinced suffragette.  If Miss Ingate had been a Mormon, Audrey also would have been a Mormon.  And, although she hated to subscribe, she knew also that if Rosamund demanded from her any subscription, however large—­even a thousand pounds—­she would not know how to refuse.  She felt before Rosamund as hundreds of women, and not a few men, had felt.

“I may be leaving for Germany to-morrow,” Rosamund proceeded.  “I may not see you again—­at any rate for many weeks.  May I write to London that you mean to support us?”

Audrey was giving herself up for lost, and not without reason.  She foreshadowed a future of steely self-sacrifice, propaganda, hammers, riots, and prison; with no self-indulgence in it, no fine clothes, no art, and no young men save earnest young men.  She saw herself in the iron clutch of her own conscience and sense of duty.  And she was frightened.  But at that moment Nick rushed into the room, and the spell was broken.  Nick considered that she had the right to monopolise Rosamund, and she monopolised her.

Miss Ingate prudently gathered Audrey to her side, and was off with her.  Nick ran to kiss them, and told them that Tommy was waiting for them in the other studio.  They groped downstairs, guided by a wisp of light from Tommy’s studio.

“Why didn’t you come up?” asked Miss Ingate of Tommy in Tommy’s antechamber.  “Have you and she quarrelled?”

“Oh no!” said Tommy.  “But I’m afraid of her.  She’d grab me if she had the least chance, and I don’t want to be grabbed.”