“Yes,” said Ann Veronica, trying to think where they were, trying to get things plain again that had seemed plain enough in the quiet of the night.

“Nothing was ever done,” Miss Brett asserted, “without a certain element of Faith.  After we have got the Vote and are recognized as citizens, then we can come to all these other things.”

Even in the glamour of Miss Brett’s assurance it seemed to Ann Veronica that this was, after all, no more than the gospel of Miss Miniver with a new set of resonances.  And like that gospel it meant something, something different from its phrases, something elusive, and yet something that in spite of the superficial incoherence of its phrasing, was largely essentially true.  There was something holding women down, holding women back, and if it wasn’t exactly man-made law, man-made law was an aspect of it.  There was something indeed holding the whole species back from the imaginable largeness of life....

“The Vote is the symbol of everything,” said Miss Brett.

She made an abrupt personal appeal.

“Oh! please don’t lose yourself in a wilderness of secondary considerations,” she said.  “Don’t ask me to tell you all that women can do, all that women can be.  There is a new life, different from the old life of dependence, possible.  If only we are not divided.  If only we work together.  This is the one movement that brings women of different classes together for a common purpose.  If you could see how it gives them souls, women who have taken things for granted, who have given themselves up altogether to pettiness and vanity....”

“Give me something to do,” said Ann Veronica, interrupting her persuasions at last.  “It has been very kind of you to see me, but I don’t want to sit and talk and use your time any longer.  I want to do something.  I want to hammer myself against all this that pens women in.  I feel that I shall stifle unless I can do something—­and do something soon.”

Part 4

It was not Ann Veronica’s fault that the night’s work should have taken upon itself the forms of wild burlesque.  She was in deadly earnest in everything she did.  It seemed to her the last desperate attack upon the universe that would not let her live as she desired to live, that penned her in and controlled her and directed her and disapproved of her, the same invincible wrappering, the same leaden tyranny of a universe that she had vowed to overcome after that memorable conflict with her father at Morningside Park.

She was listed for the raid—­she was informed it was to be a raid upon the House of Commons, though no particulars were given her—­and told to go alone to 14, Dexter Street, Westminster, and not to ask any policeman to direct her. 14, Dexter Street, Westminster, she found was not a house but a yard in an obscure street, with big gates and the name of Podgers & Carlo, Carriers and Furniture Removers,