“What meeting, Hen?”

“I see I did well to call,” came over the wire, on the wings of the Cooney laugh.  “The Saturday meeting at the Woman’s Club, cousin, that I engaged you for the other day.  I’ve just heard that V.V.’s going to speak, too, which made me want you specially.  Don’t say no.”

“Of course not.  I want to go, very much.”

The two girls lingered a moment to chat.  Henrietta appeared characteristically cheerful, though reporting half the family sick, and Cousin Martha Heth quite low in mind with her flatfoot.  And Cally’s manner to her poor relation was quite friendly to-night, without any special effort.  Her summer-time suspicion that Hen was actually trying to “cheer her up” had by now become a certainty (Hen did not know about Hugo, of course); and which of her own girlhood intimates had done as much?  Further, the words of comfort that the hard-worked stenographer had said to her, the day she got home from Europe, had recently been endorsed, as it were, in a most distinguished quarter.  A strange thought this, that there was a point of similarity between Hen Cooney and Mrs. Berkeley Page....

But when Cally left the telephone she was not thinking of these things at all.  She was thinking that to-morrow she would both hear and see Dr. Vivian, her father’s enemy, the hard religious fellow who could so easily forget the troubles of others.  Her duty on the occasion seemed to become quite clear to her.  She must speak to him, try to induce him to give up his newspaper articles, or at least to leave her father’s name out of them.

The day of lovers’ reunion was somewhat blurred by ending with thoughts such as these.  Hugo, as Carlisle had said, could not pop back after months, and repossess her mind and heart at a bound.  He did it pretty successfully during the evening, while she entertained Robert Tellford and James Bogue, 2d, who cordially hated each other, in the drawing-room.  But before she fell asleep that night, Cally’s thoughts had turned more than once to, V. Vivian, of the old hotel which was now a Settlement.  Why had he asked her to go to the Works some day, and why had he done it with that strange look?

     XXVI

Concerning Women who won’t remember their Place, and a Speech to Two Hundred of them, by Mr. V.V., no less; also revealing why Hen Cooney never found V.V. in the Crowd around the Platform.

It was an interesting time to be alive, as Hen Cooney remarked again next day.  Absorbing matters were afoot in the old town, provided that you had an eye in your head to see them.  One thing led to another with startling rapidity.  Only the other day, it seemed, some one had risen and flung against the ideals of generations the discordant cry of Votes for Women.  Rebukes for the unseemliness were copious and stern enough.  Many spoke acidly of the lengths to which childless females would go for lack of occupation.  Droll fellows of a pretty wit giggled and asked who