Penelope stood at one of the windows of the flat in Edenhall Mansions,
and looked down at the busy thoroughfare below. Hither and thither men
and women hurried about their business; there seemed few indeed nowadays
of the leisured loiterers through life. A tube strike had only recently
been brought to a conclusion, and Londoners of all classes were
endeavouring to make good the time lost during those days of enforced
stagnation. Unfortunately, time that is lost can never be recovered.
Even Eternity itself can't give us back the hours which have been flung
away.

Rather bitterly Penelope reflected that, in spite of all our vaunted
civilisation and education, men still resorted, as did their ancestors of
old, to brute force in order to obtain their wishes. For, after all, a
strike, however much you may gloss over the fact, is neither more nor
less than a modern substitute for the old-time revolt of men armed with
pikes and staves. That is to say, in either instance you insist on what
you want by a process of making other people thoroughly uncomfortable
till you get your way--unless they happen to be stronger than you! And
incidentally a good many innocent folk who have nothing to do with the
matter get badly hurt in the fray.

All the miseries which inevitably beset the steadfast worker when a
strike occurs had fallen to Penelope's lot. She had scrambled hopelessly
for a seat on a motor-'bus, or, driven by extremity into a fit of wild
extravagance, had vainly hailed a taxi. Sometimes she had been compelled
to tramp the whole way home, through drenching rain, from some house at
which she had been giving a lesson, in each case enduring the very kind
of physical stress which plays such havoc with a singer's only
capital--her voice. She wondered if the strikers ever realised the extra