Mukden. Harsh things she was saying--harsh things about the decent
Scotch folks who were shocked by the arrest of Suffragettes in London
for brawling, harsh suggestions that they would be better employed being
shocked at the number of women who were arrested in Edinburgh for
solicitation.

He chuckled to think that the Presbyterian woman had found out the
Presbyterian man, for he did not believe, from his knowledge of the
world, that any man was ever really as respectable as the Presbyterian
man pretended to be. The woman who sat beside her, who was evidently the
celebrated Mrs. Ormiston, was also a personage. She had not the same
stamp of personal worth, but she had the indefinable historic quality.
For no reason to be formulated by the mind, her face might become a flag
to many thousands, a thing to die for, and, like a flag, she would be at
their death a mere martial mark of the occasion, with no meaning of
pity.

The third woman he detested. Presumably she was at this meeting because
she was a loyal Suffragist and wanted to bring an end to the subjection
of woman, yet all the time that the other woman was speaking her
beautiful body practised fluid poses as if she were trying to draw the
audience's attention to herself and give them facile romantic dreams in
which the traditional relations of the sexes were rejoiced in rather
than disturbed. And she wore a preposterous dress. There were two ways
that women could dress. If they had work to do they could dress curtly
and sensibly like men and let their looks stand or fall on their
intrinsic merits; or if they were among the women who are kept to
fortify the will to live in men who are spent or exasperated by conflict
with the world, the wives and daughters and courtesans of the rich, then
they should wear soft lustrous dresses that were good to look at and