arm upon the sill. She noticed now young she was and full of the promise of womanhood. The sight made her so uneasy that she fidgeted the cups upon their saucers.
“Yes—enough work to last a lifetime,” said Mary, as if concluding some passage of thought.
Mrs. Seal brightened at once. She lamented her lack of scientific training, and her deficiency in the processes of logic, but she set her mind to work at once to make the prospects of the cause appear as alluring and important as she could. She delivered herself of an harangue in which she asked a great many rhetorical questions and answered them with a little bang of one fist upon another.
“To last a lifetime? My dear child, it will last all our lifetimes. As one falls another steps into the breach. My father, in his generation, a pioneer—I, coming after him, do my little best. What, alas! can one do more? And now it’s you young women—we look to you—the future looks to you. Ah, my dear, if I’d a thousand lives, I’d give them all to our cause. The cause of women, d’you say? I say the cause of humanity. And there are some”—she glanced fiercely at the window—“who don’t see it! There are some who are satisfied to go on, year after year, refusing to admit the truth. And we who have the vision—the kettle boiling over? No, no, let me see to it—we who know the truth,” she continued, gesticulating with the kettle and the teapot. Owing to these encumbrances, perhaps, she lost the thread of her discourse, and concluded, rather wistfully, “It’s all so simple.” She referred to a matter that was a perpetual source of bewilderment to her—the extraordinary incapacity of the human race, in a world where the good is so unmistakably divided from the bad, of distinguishing one from the other, and embodying what ought to be done in a few large, simple Acts of Parliament, which would, in a very short time, completely change the lot of humanity.
