something about her, too, which he could not identify, which made him
feel the sharp yet almost anguished delight that is caused by the
spectacle of a sunset or a foam-patterned breaking wave, or any other
beauty that is intense but on the point of dissolution.

The defile of some women on to the platform and a clamour of clapping
reminded him that he had better be getting to his seat, and he found
that the steward to whom he had given his ticket, a sallow young woman
with projecting teeth, was holding it close to her eyes with one hand
and using the other to fumble in a leather bag for some glasses which
manifestly were not there. He felt sorry for her because she was not
beautiful like Ellen Melville. Did she grieve at it, he wondered; or had
she, like most plain women, some scrap of comeliness, slender ankles or
small hands, which she pathetically invested with a magic quality and
believed to be more subtly and authentically beautiful than the specious
pictorial quality of other women? In any case she must often have been
stung by the exasperation of those at whom she gawked. He took the
ticket back from her and told her the number of his seat. It was far
forward, and as he sat down and looked up at the platform he saw how
vulgarly mistaken he had been in thinking--as just for the moment that
the sallow woman with the teeth had stooped and fumbled beside him he
certainly had thought--that the Suffrage movement was a fusion of the
discontents of the unfit. These people on the platform were real women.
The speaker who had risen to open the meeting was a jolly woman like a
cook, with short grey curly hair; and her red face was like the Scotch
face--the face that he had looked on many a time in all parts of the
world and had always been glad to see, since where it was there was
sense and courage. She was the image of old Captain Guthrie of the
_Gondomar_, and Dr. Macalister at the Port Said hospital, and that
medical missionary who had come home on the Celebes on sick leave from