The Women’s Franchise Union was now in the full whirl of its revolution.  Under the inspiring leadership of the Blathwaites it ran riot up and down the country.  It smashed windows; it hurled stone ginger-beer bottles into the motor cars of Cabinet Ministers; it poured treacle into pillar-boxes; it invaded the House of Commons by the water-way, in barges, from which women, armed with megaphones, demanded the vote from infamous legislators drinking tea on the Terrace; it went up in balloons and showered down propaganda on the City; now and then, just to show what violence it could accomplish if it liked, it burned down a house or two in a pure and consecrated ecstasy of Feminism.  It was bringing to perfection its last great tactical manoeuvre, the massed raid followed by the hunger-strike in prison.  And it was considering seriously the very painful but possible necessity of interfering with British sport—­say the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord’s—­in some drastic and terrifying way that would bring the men of England to their senses.

And Dorothea’s soul had swung away from the sweep of the whirlwind.  It would never suck her in.  She worked now in the office of the Social Reform Union, and wrote reconstructive articles for The New Commonwealth on Economics and the Marriage Laws.

Frances was not afraid for her daughter.  She knew that the revolution was all in Dorothea’s brain.

When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he was being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art.  And since Frances confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis Desmond she judged it to be terrible.  She understood from Michael that it was the Vortex, the only one that really mattered, and the only one that would ever do anything.

And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence Stephen.

Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for Michael, she did not realize that they depended much more on Michael himself than on him.  Stephen had said that if Michael was good enough he meant to help him.  If his poems amounted to anything he would publish them in his Review.  If any book of Michael’s poems amounted to anything he would give a whole article to that book in his Review.  If Michael’s prose should ever amount to anything he would give him regular work on the Review.

In nineteen-thirteen Michael Harrison was the most promising of the revolutionary young men who surrounded Lawrence Stephen, and his poems were beginning to appear, one after another, in the Green Review.  He had brought out a volume of his experiments in the spring of that year; they were better than those that Reveillaud had approved of two years ago; and Lawrence Stephen had praised them in the Green Review.

Lawrence Stephen was the only editor “out of Ireland,” as he said, who would have had the courage either to publish them or to praise them.