parrot business; every one agreed that there was always far too many
pictures in the Academy Exhibition, and the drastic weeding out of a few
hundred canvases was regarded as a positive improvement. Moreover, from
the artists' point of view it was realised that the outrage constituted a
sort of compensation for those whose works were persistently 'skied',
since out of sight meant also out of reach. Altogether it was one of the
most successful and popular exhibitions that the Academy had held for
many years. Then the fair agitators fell back on some of their earlier
methods; they wrote sweetly argumentative plays to prove that they ought
to have the vote, they smashed windows to show that they must have the
vote, and they kicked Cabinet Ministers to demonstrate that they'd better
have the vote, and still the coldly reasoned or unreasoned reply was that
they'd better not. Their plight might have been summed up in a
perversion of Gilbert's lines--

"Twenty voteless millions we,
Voteless all against our will,
Twenty years hence we shall be
Twenty voteless millions still."

And of course the great idea for their master-stroke of strategy came
from a masculine source. Lena Dubarri, who was the captain-general of
their thinking department, met Waldo Orpington in the Mall one afternoon,
just at a time when the fortunes of the Cause were at their lowest ebb.
Waldo Orpington is a frivolous little fool who chirrups at drawing-room
concerts and can recognise bits from different composers without
referring to the programme, but all the same he occasionally has ideas.
He didn't care a twopenny fiddlestring about the Cause, but he rather
enjoyed the idea of having his finger in the political pie. Also it is
possible, though I should think highly improbable, that he admired Lena