“Spark”—­she’s a conflagration by this new plan of Jane’s, but I’m glad he didn’t know about it then.  He may have to suffer from it yet.  It is best for him to be as happy as he can as long as he can.

“Evelina, dear,” said Jane, as she and Mary Elizabeth Conners and I sat in the suite of apartments in which our proud Alma Mater had lodged us old grads, returned for our second degrees, “your success has been remarkable, and I am not surprised at all that that positively creative thesis of yours on the Twentieth Century Garden, to which I listened to-night, procured you an honorable mention in your class at the Beaux Arts.  The French are a nation that quickly recognizes genius.  I am very happy to-night.  All your honors and achievements make me only the more certain that I have chosen the right person for the glorious mission I am about to offer you.”

“Oh, no, Jane!” I exclaimed, from a sort of instinct for trouble to come.  I know that devoted, twenty-second century look in Jane’s intense, near-sighted eyes, and I always fend from it.  She is a very dear person, and I respectfully adore her.  Indeed, I sometimes think she is the real spine in my back that was left out of me, and of its own strength got developed into another and a finer woman.  She became captain of my Freshman soul, at the same time she captured the captaincy of the boat crew, on which I pulled stroke, and I’m still hitting the water when she gives the word, though it now looks as if we are both adrift on the high and uncharted seas—­or sitting on the lid of a tinder-box, juggling lighted torches.

“You see, dear,” she went on to say slowly, drawing Mary Elizabeth into the spell-bound circle of our intensity, as we three sat together with our newly-engraved sheepskins on our knees, “for these two years while you have been growing and developing along all your natural lines in a country which was not your own, in a little pool I should call it, out of even sight and sound of the current of events, we have been here in your own land engaged in the great work of the organization and reorganization which is molding the destinies of the women of our times, and those that come after us.  That is what I want to talk to you about, and devoutly have I been praying that your heart will be receptive to the call that has claimed the life of Mary Elizabeth and me.  There is a particular work, for which you are fitted as no other woman I have ever known is fitted, and I want to lay the case plainly before you to-night.  Will you give me a hearing?”

And the hearing I gave that beloved and devout woman was the reveille that awakened me to this—­this whirlwind that seems to be both inside me and outside me, and everywhere else in the whole world.

It’s not woman’s suffrage; it has gone way down past the road from votes for women.  I wish I could have stopped in that political field of endeavor before Jane got to me.  She might have left me there doing little things like making speeches before the United States Senate and running for Governor of Tennessee, after I had, single-handed, remade the archaic constitution of that proud and bat-blind old State of my birth; but such ease was not for me.