“Oh, I might,” Kate insisted.  “If I had babies of my own, I’d like them to be hard, brown little savages—­the sort you could put on donkey-back or camel-back and take anywhere.”

Mrs. Hays shook her head at the idea of camels.  It hardly sounded Christian, and certainly it in no way met her notion of the need of infants.

“Mrs. Browning writes about taking her baby to a mountain-top not far from the stars,” Kate went on.  “They rode donkey-back, I believe.  Personally, however, I should prefer the camel.  For one thing, you could get more babies on his back.”

Mrs. Hays threw a glance at her mistress as if to say:  “Is it proper for a young woman to talk like this?”

The young woman in question said many things which, according to the always discreet and sensible Mrs. Hays, were hardly to be commended.

There was, for example, the evening she had stood in the westward end of the veranda and called:—­

“Archangels!  Come quick and see them!”

The summons was so stirring that they all ran,—­even Honora, who was just beginning to move about the house,—­but Wander reached Kate’s side first.

“She’s right, Honora,” he announced.  “It is archangels—­a whole party of them.  Come, see!”

But it had been nothing save a sunset rather brighter than usual, with wing-like radiations.

“Pshaw!” said Mrs. Hays confidentially to the cook.

“Shouldn’t you think they’d burn up with all that flaming crimson on them?” Kate cried.  “And, oh, their golden hair!  Or does that belong to the Damosel?  Probably she is leaning over the bar of heaven at this minute.”

In Mrs. Hays’s estimation, the one good thing about all such talk was that Mrs. Fulham seemed to like it.  Sometimes she smiled; and she hung upon the arm of her friend and looked at her as if wondering how one could be so young and strong and gay.  Mr. Wander, too, seemed never tired of listening; and the way that letters trailed after this young woman showed her that a number—­quite an astonishingly large number—­of persons were pleased to whet their ideas on her.  Clarinda Hays decided that she would like to try it herself; so one morning when she sat on the veranda watching the slumbers of the little girls in their hammocks, and Miss Barrington sat near at hand fashioning a blouse for Honora’s journey, she ventured:—­

“You’re a suffragette, ain’t you, Miss?”

“Why, yes,” admitted Kate.  “I suppose I am.  I believe in suffrage for women, at any rate.”

“Well, what do you make of all them carryings-on over there in England, ma’am?  You don’t approve of acid-throwing and window-breaking and cutting men’s faces with knives, do you?” She looked at Kate with an almost poignant anxiety, her face twitching a little with her excitement.  “A decent woman couldn’t put her stamp on that kind o’ thing.”