“Do you think we ought to go to London?” Audrey demanded bluntly.

“Well,” Miss Ingate answered, with impartial irony on her long upper lip.  “I don’t know.  Of course I played the organ all the way down Regent Street.  I feel very strongly about votes for women, and once when I was helping in the night and day vigil at the House of Commons and some Ministers came out smoking their cigahs and asked us how we liked it, I was vehy, vehy angry.  However, the next morning I had a cigarette myself and felt better.  But I’m not a professional reformer, like a lot of them are at Kingsway.  It isn’t my meat and drink.  And I don’t think it matters much whether we get the vote next year or in ten years.  I’m Winifred Ingate before I’m anything else.  And so long as I’m pretty comfortable no one’s going to make me believe that the world’s coming to an end.  I know one thing—­if we did get the vote it would take me all my time to keep most of the women I know from, voting for something silly.”

“Winnie,” said Audrey.  “You’re very sensible sometimes.”

“I’m always very sensible,” Winnie retorted, “until I get nervous.  Then I’m apt to skid.”

Without more words they transformed the studio, by a few magical strokes, from a drawing-room into a bedroom.  Audrey, the last to retire, extinguished the lamp, and tripped to her bed behind her screen.  Only a few slight movements disturbed the silence.

“Winnie,” said Audrey suddenly.  “I do believe you’re one of those awful people who compromise.  You’re always right in the middle of the raft.”

But Miss Ingate, being fast asleep, offered no answer.

CHAPTER XV

THE RIGHT BANK

The next day, after a studio lunch which contained too much starch and was deficient in nitrogen, Miss Ingate, putting on her hat and jacket, said with a caustic gesture: 

“Well, I must be off to my life class.  And much good may it do me!”

The astonishing creature had apparently begun existence again, and begun it on the plane of art, but this did not prevent the observer within her from taking the same attitude towards her second career as she had taken towards her first.  Nothing seemed more meet for Miss Ingate’s ironic contemplation than the daily struggle for style and beauty in the academies of the Quarter.

Audrey made no reply.  The morning had been unusually silent, giving considerable scope for Miss Ingate’s faculty for leaving well alone.

“I suppose you aren’t coming out?” added Miss Ingate.

“No.  I went out a bit this morning.  You know I have my French lesson in twenty minutes.”

“Of course.”

Miss Ingate seized her apparatus and departed.  The instant she was alone Audrey began in haste to change into all her best clothes, which were black, and which the Quarter seldom saw.  Fashionably arrayed, she sat down and wrote a note to Madame Schmitt, her French instructress, to say that she had been suddenly called away on urgent business, and asking her nevertheless to count the time as a lesson given.  This done, she put her credit notes and her cheque-book into her handbag, and, leaving the note with the concierge’s wife, who bristled with interesting suspicions, she vanished into Paris.