Joan expressed her thanks.  She would like to have had more talk with the stern old lady, but was prevented by the entrance of two new comers.  The first was Miss Lavery, a handsome, loud-toned young woman.  She ran a nursing paper, but her chief interest was in the woman’s suffrage question, just then coming rapidly to the front.  She had heard Joan speak at Cambridge and was eager to secure her adherence, being wishful to surround herself with a group of young and good-looking women who should take the movement out of the hands of the “frumps,” as she termed them.  Her doubt was whether Joan would prove sufficiently tractable.  She intended to offer her remunerative work upon the Nursing News without saying anything about the real motive behind, trusting to gratitude to make her task the easier.

The second was a clumsy-looking, overdressed woman whom Miss Lavery introduced as “Mrs. Phillips, a very dear friend of mine, who is going to be helpful to us all,” adding in a hurried aside to Madge, “I simply had to bring her.  Will explain to you another time.”  An apology certainly seemed to be needed.  The woman was absurdly out of her place.  She stood there panting and slightly perspiring.  She was short and fat, with dyed hair.  As a girl she had possibly been pretty in a dimpled, giggling sort of way.  Joan judged her, in spite of her complexion, to be about forty.

Joan wondered if she could be the wife of the Member of Parliament who occupied the rooms below her in Cowley Street.  His name, so the landlady had told her, was Phillips.  She put the suggestion in a whisper to Flossie.

“Quite likely,” thought Flossie; “just the type that sort of man does marry.  A barmaid, I expect.”

Others continued to arrive until altogether there must have been about a dozen women present.  One of them turned out to be an old schoolfellow of Joan’s and two had been with her at Girton.  Madge had selected those who she knew would be sympathetic, and all promised help:  those who could not give it direct undertaking to provide introductions and recommendations, though some of them were frankly doubtful of journalism affording Joan anything more than the means—­not always, too honest—­of earning a living.

“I started out to preach the gospel:  all that sort of thing,” drawled a Miss Simmonds from beneath a hat that, if she had paid for it, would have cost her five guineas.  “Now my chief purpose in life is to tickle silly women into spending twice as much upon their clothes as their husbands can afford, bamboozling them into buying any old thing that our Advertising Manager instructs me to boom.”

“They talk about the editor’s opinions,” struck in a fiery little woman who was busy flinging crumbs out of the window to a crowd of noisy sparrows.  “It’s the Advertiser edits half the papers.  Write anything that three of them object to, and your proprietor tells you to change your convictions or go.  Most of us change.”  She jerked down the window with a slam.