She looked across the hall at him.  Their eyes met.

III

There had mounted in him, as he rode through the damp night on his motor-cycle, such an inexplicable and intense exhilaration, that this ugly hall which was at the end of his journey, with its stone corridors in which a stream of people wearing mackintoshes and carrying umbrellas made sad, noises with their feet, seemed an anti-climax.  It was absurd; that he should feel like that, for he had known quite well why he was coming into Edinburgh and what a Suffrage meeting would be like.  But he was angry and discontented, and impatient that no deflecting adventure had crossed his path, until he arrived at the door which led to the half-crown seats and saw across the hall that girl called Ellen Melville.  The coarse light deadened the brilliance of her hair, so that it might have been but a brightly coloured tam-o’-shanter she was wearing; and now that that obvious beauty was not there to hypnotise the eye the subtler beauty of her face and body got its chance.  “I had remembered her all wrong,” he said to himself.  “I was thinking of her as a little girl, but she’s a beautiful and dignified woman.”  And yet her profile, which showed against the dark pillar at which she stood, was very round and young and surprised, and altogether much more infantile than the proud full face which she turned on the world.  There was something about her, too, which he could not identify, which made him feel the sharp yet almost anguished delight that is caused by the spectacle of a sunset or a foam-patterned breaking wave, or any other beauty that is intense but on the point of dissolution.

The defile of some women on to the platform and a clamour of clapping reminded him that he had better be getting to his seat, and he found that the steward to whom he had given his ticket, a sallow young woman with projecting teeth, was holding it close to her eyes with one hand and using the other to fumble in a leather bag for some glasses which manifestly were not there.  He felt sorry for her because she was not beautiful like Ellen Melville.  Did she grieve at it, he wondered; or had she, like most plain women, some scrap of comeliness, slender ankles or small hands, which she pathetically invested with a magic quality and believed to be more subtly and authentically beautiful than the specious pictorial quality of other women?  In any case she must often have been stung by the exasperation of those at whom she gawked.  He took the ticket back from her and told her the number of his seat.  It was far forward, and as he sat down and looked up at the platform he saw how vulgarly mistaken he had been in thinking—­as just for the moment that the sallow woman with the teeth had stooped and fumbled beside him he certainly had thought—­that the Suffrage movement was a fusion of the discontents of the unfit.  These people on the platform were real women.  The speaker