motive of self-torture and sat quite close by, jerking her pale face
about in the shadow of a wide, expensive hat (it was always women like
that, Ellen acidly remarked, who could afford good clothes) as she was
seized by convulsions of contempt for the speaker and the audience.
Ellen knew her very well, for every Saturday morning she used to stride
up in an emerald green sports skirt, holding out a penny in a hand that
shook with rage, and saying something indistinct about women biting
policemen. On these occasions Ellen was physically afraid, for she could
not overcome a fancy that the anklebones which projected in
geological-looking knobs on each side of Miss Coates's large flat
brogues were a natural offensive weapon like the spurs of a cock; and
she was afraid also in her soul. Miss Coates was plainly, from her
yellow but animated pallor, from her habit of wearing her blouse open at
the neck to show a triangle of chest over which the horizontal bones
lay like the bars of a gridiron, a mature specimen of a type that Ellen
had met in her school-days. There had been several girls at John
Thompson's, usually bleached and ill-favoured victims of anæmia or
spinal curvature, who had seemed to be compelled by something within
themselves to spend their whole energies in trying, by extravagances of
hair-ribbon and sidecombs and patent leather belts, the collection of
actresses' postcards, and the completest abstention from study, to
assert the femininity which their ill-health had obscured. Their efforts
were never rewarded by the companionship of any but the most shambling
kind of man or boy; but they proceeded through life with a greater
earnestness than other children of their age, intent on the business of
establishing their sex. Miss Coates was plainly the adult of the type,
who had found in Anti-Suffragism, that extreme gesture of political
abasement before the male, a new way of calling attention to what
otherwise only the person who was naturally noticing about clothes would
detect. It was a fact of immense and dangerous significance that the