Capes joined the students at tea, and displayed himself in an impish mood that sometimes possessed him.  He did not notice that Ann Veronica was preoccupied and heavy-eyed.  Miss Klegg raised the question of women’s suffrage, and he set himself to provoke a duel between her and Miss Garvice.  The youth with the hair brushed back and the spectacled Scotchman joined in the fray for and against the women’s vote.

Ever and again Capes appealed to Ann Veronica.  He liked to draw her in, and she did her best to talk.  But she did not talk readily, and in order to say something she plunged a little, and felt she plunged.  Capes scored back with an uncompromising vigor that was his way of complimenting her intelligence.  But this afternoon it discovered an unusual vein of irritability in her.  He had been reading Belfort Bax, and declared himself a convert.  He contrasted the lot of women in general with the lot of men, presented men as patient, self-immolating martyrs, and women as the pampered favorites of Nature.  A vein of conviction mingled with his burlesque.

For a time he and Miss Klegg contradicted one another.

The question ceased to be a tea-table talk, and became suddenly tragically real for Ann Veronica.  There he sat, cheerfully friendly in his sex’s freedom—­the man she loved, the one man she cared should unlock the way to the wide world for her imprisoned feminine possibilities, and he seemed regardless that she stifled under his eyes; he made a jest of all this passionate insurgence of the souls of women against the fate of their conditions.

Miss Garvice repeated again, and almost in the same words she used at every discussion, her contribution to the great question.

She thought that women were not made for the struggle and turmoil of life—­their place was the little world, the home; that their power lay not in votes but in influence over men and in making the minds of their children fine and splendid.

“Women should understand men’s affairs, perhaps,” said Miss Garvice, “but to mingle in them is just to sacrifice that power of influencing they can exercise now.”

“There is something sound in that position,” said Capes, intervening as if to defend Miss Garvice against a possible attack from Ann Veronica.  “It may not be just and so forth, but, after all, it is how things are.  Women are not in the world in the same sense that men are—­fighting individuals in a scramble.  I don’t see how they can be.  Every home is a little recess, a niche, out of the world of business and competition, in which women and the future shelter.”

“A little pit!” said Ann Veronica; “a little prison!”

“It’s just as often a little refuge.  Anyhow, that is how things are.”

“And the man stands as the master at the mouth of the den.”

“As sentinel.  You forget all the mass of training and tradition and instinct that go to make him a tolerable master.  Nature is a mother; her sympathies have always been feminist, and she has tempered the man to the shorn woman.”