She scowled into the cold blacknesses about her.

“Manning,” she said, and contemplated a figure of inaggressive persistence.  “No!” Her thoughts had turned in a new direction.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, after a long interval, “if they are absurd.  They mean something.  They mean everything that women can mean—­except submission.  The vote is only the beginning, the necessary beginning.  If we do not begin—­”

She had come to a resolution.  Abruptly she got out of bed, smoothed her sheet and straightened her pillow and lay down, and fell almost instantly asleep.

Part 2

The next morning was as dark and foggy as if it was mid-November instead of early March.  Ann Veronica woke rather later than usual, and lay awake for some minutes before she remembered a certain resolution she had taken in the small hours.  Then instantly she got out of bed and proceeded to dress.

She did not start for the Imperial College.  She spent the morning up to ten in writing a series of unsuccessful letters to Ramage, which she tore up unfinished; and finally she desisted and put on her jacket and went out into the lamp-lit obscurity and slimy streets.  She turned a resolute face southward.

She followed Oxford Street into Holborn, and then she inquired for Chancery Lane.  There she sought and at last found 107A, one of those heterogeneous piles of offices which occupy the eastern side of the lane.  She studied the painted names of firms and persons and enterprises on the wall, and discovered that the Women’s Bond of Freedom occupied several contiguous suites on the first floor.  She went up-stairs and hesitated between four doors with ground-glass panes, each of which professed “The Women’s Bond of Freedom” in neat black letters.  She opened one and found herself in a large untidy room set with chairs that were a little disarranged as if by an overnight meeting.  On the walls were notice-boards bearing clusters of newspaper slips, three or four big posters of monster meetings, one of which Ann Veronica had attended with Miss Miniver, and a series of announcements in purple copying-ink, and in one corner was a pile of banners.  There was no one at all in this room, but through the half-open door of one of the small apartments that gave upon it she had a glimpse of two very young girls sitting at a littered table and writing briskly.

She walked across to this apartment and, opening the door a little wider, discovered a press section of the movement at work.

“I want to inquire,” said Ann Veronica.

“Next door,” said a spectacled young person of seventeen or eighteen, with an impatient indication of the direction.

In the adjacent apartment Ann Veronica found a middle-aged woman with a tired face under the tired hat she wore, sitting at a desk opening letters while a dusky, untidy girl of eight-or nine-and-twenty hammered industriously at a typewriter.  The tired woman looked up in inquiring silence at Ann Veronica’s diffident entry.