supported by statistics. He came into the room after Mrs. Seal’s outburst and pointed out, with historical illustrations, that such reverses had happened in every political campaign of any importance. If anything, his spirits were improved by the disaster. The enemy, he said, had taken the offensive; and it was now up to the Society to outwit the enemy. He gave Mary to understand that he had taken the measure of their cunning, and had already bent his mind to the task which, so far as she could make out, depended solely upon him. It depended, so she came to think, when invited into his room for a private conference, upon a systematic revision of the card-index, upon the issue of certain new lemon-coloured leaflets, in which the facts were marshalled once more in a very striking way, and upon a large scale map of England dotted with little pins tufted with differently coloured plumes of hair according to their geographical position. Each district, under the new system, had its flag, its bottle of ink, its sheaf of documents tabulated and filed for reference in a drawer, so that by looking under M or S, as the case might be, you had all the facts with respect to the Suffrage organizations of that county at your fingers’ ends. This would require a great deal of work, of course.
“We must try to consider ourselves rather in the light of a telephone exchange—for the exchange of ideas, Miss Datchet,” he said; and taking pleasure in his image, he continued it. “We should consider ourselves the centre of an enormous system of wires, connecting us up with every district of the country. We must have our fingers upon the pulse of the community; we want to know what people all over England are thinking; we want to put them in the way of thinking rightly.” The system, of course, was only roughly sketched so far—jotted down, in fact, during the Christmas holidays.
“When you ought to have been taking a rest,
