who had risen to open the meeting was a jolly woman like a cook, with short grey curly hair; and her red face was like the Scotch face—­the face that he had looked on many a time in all parts of the world and had always been glad to see, since where it was there was sense and courage.  She was the image of old Captain Guthrie of the Gondomar, and Dr. Macalister at the Port Said hospital, and that medical missionary who had come home on the Celebes on sick leave from Mukden.  Harsh things she was saying—­harsh things about the decent Scotch folks who were shocked by the arrest of Suffragettes in London for brawling, harsh suggestions that they would be better employed being shocked at the number of women who were arrested in Edinburgh for solicitation.

He chuckled to think that the Presbyterian woman had found out the Presbyterian man, for he did not believe, from his knowledge of the world, that any man was ever really as respectable as the Presbyterian man pretended to be.  The woman who sat beside her, who was evidently the celebrated Mrs. Ormiston, was also a personage.  She had not the same stamp of personal worth, but she had the indefinable historic quality.  For no reason to be formulated by the mind, her face might become a flag to many thousands, a thing to die for, and, like a flag, she would be at their death a mere martial mark of the occasion, with no meaning of pity.

The third woman he detested.  Presumably she was at this meeting because she was a loyal Suffragist and wanted to bring an end to the subjection of woman, yet all the time that the other woman was speaking her beautiful body practised fluid poses as if she were trying to draw the audience’s attention to herself and give them facile romantic dreams in which the traditional relations of the sexes were rejoiced in rather than disturbed.  And she wore a preposterous dress.  There were two ways that women could dress.  If they had work to do they could dress curtly and sensibly like men and let their looks stand or fall on their intrinsic merits; or if they were among the women who are kept to fortify the will to live in men who are spent or exasperated by conflict with the world, the wives and daughters and courtesans of the rich, then they should wear soft lustrous dresses that were good to look at and touch and as carefully beautiful as pictures.  But this blue thing was neither sturdy covering nor the brilliant fantasy it meant to be.  It had the spurious glitter of an imitation jewel.  He knew he felt this irritation about her partly because there was something base in him, half innate and half the abrasion his present circumstances had rubbed on his soul, which was willing to go on this stupid sexual journey suggested by such vain, passive women, and the saner part of him was vexed at this compliance; he thought he had a real case against her.  She was one of those beautiful women who are not only conscious of their beauty but have accepted it as their vocation.  She was ensphered from the world of creative effort in the establishment of her own perfection.  She was an end in herself as no human, save some old saint who has made a garden of his soul, had any right to be.