“Mercy, Ellen, you’re late!  I was getting feared!” cried her mother, who had gone to the kitchen to boil up the cocoa when she heard the key in the lock.  She liked that sound.  Ellen thought herself a wonderful new sort of woman who was going to be just like a man; she would have been surprised if she had known how many of her stern-browed ambitions, how much of her virile swagger of life, were not the invention of her own soul, but had been suggested to her by an old woman who liked to pretend her daughter was a son.

“We had a great press of business and I had to stay,” said Ellen with masculine nonchalance.  “A most interesting client came in....”

CHAPTER II

I

Every Saturday afternoon Ellen sold Votes for Women in Princes Street, and the next day found her as usual with a purple, white and green poster hung from her waist and a bundle of papers tucked under her arm.  This street-selling had always been a martyrdom to her proud spirit, for it was one of the least of her demands upon the universe that she should be well thought of eternally and by everyone; but she had hitherto been sustained by the reflection that while there were women in jail, as there were always in those days, it ill became her to mind because Lady Cumnock (and everyone knew what she was, for all that she opened so many bazaars) laughed down her long nose as she went by.  But now Ellen had lost all her moral stiffening, and as that had always been her specialty she was distressed by the lack; she felt like a dress-shirt that a careless washerwoman had forgotten to starch.  The giggling of the passers-by and the manifest unpopularity of her opinions pricked her to tears, and she mournfully perceived that she had ceased to be a poet.  For that the day was given over to a high melancholy of grey clouds, which did not let the least stain of weak autumn sunlight discolour the black majesty of the Castle Rock, and that a bold wind played with the dull clothes of the Edinburgh folk and swelled them out into fantastic shapes like cloaks carried by grandees, were as nothing to her because the hurricane tore the short ends of her hair from under her hat and made them straggle on her forehead.  “I doubt if I’ll be able to appreciate Keats if this goes on,” she meditated gloomily.  And the people that went by, instead of being as usual mere provocation for her silent laughter, had to-day somehow got power over her and tormented her by making her suspect the worthlessness of her errand.  It seemed the height of folly to work for the race if the race was like this:  men who, if they had dignity, looked cold and inaccessible to fine disastrous causes; men who were without dignity and base as monkeys; mountainous old men who looked bland because the crevices of their expressions had been filled up with fat, but who showed in the glares they gave her and her papers an immense