room at the end of the drive. She climbed the stone steps quickly, remarking the queer look of her blue silk skirt and blue shoes upon the stone, dusty with the boots of the day, under the light of an occasional jet of flickering gas.
The door was opened in a second by Mary herself, whose face showed not only surprise at the sight of her visitor, but some degree of embarrassment. She greeted her cordially, and, as there was no time for explanations, Katharine walked straight into the sitting-room, and found herself in the presence of a young man who was lying back in a chair and holding a sheet of paper in his hand, at which he was looking as if he expected to go on immediately with what he was in the middle of saying to Mary Datchet. The apparition of an unknown lady in full evening dress seemed to disturb him. He took his pipe from his mouth, rose stiffly, and sat down again with a jerk.
‘Have you been dining out?’ Mary asked.
‘Are you working?’ Katharine inquired simultaneously.
The young man shook his head, as if he disowned his share in the question with some irritation.
‘Well, not exactly,’ Mary replied. ‘Mr Basnett had brought some papers to show me. We were going through them, but we’d almost done ... Tell us about your party.’
Mary had a ruffled appearance, as if she had been running her fingers through her hair in the course of her conversation; she was dressed more or less like a Russian peasant girl. She sat down again in a chair which looked as if it had been her seat for some hours; the saucer which stood upon the arm contained the ashes of many cigarettes. Mr Basnett, a very young man with a fresh complexion and a high forehead from which the hair was combed straight back, was one of that group of ‘very able young men’ suspected by Mr Clacton, justly as it turned out, of an influence upon Mary Datchet. He had come down from one of the Universities not long ago, and was now charged with the reformation of society. In connexion with the rest of the group of very able young men he had drawn up a scheme for the education of labour, for the amalgamation of the middle class and the working class, and for a joint assault of the two bodies, combined in the Society for the Education of Democracy, upon Capital.2 The scheme had already reached the stage in which it was permissible to hire an office and engage a secretary, and he had been deputed to expound the scheme to Mary, and make her an offer of the Secretaryship, to which, as a matter of principle, a small salary was attached. Since seven o’clock that evening he had been reading out loud the document in which the faith of the new reformers was expounded, but the reading was so frequently interrupted by discussion, and it was so often necessary to inform Mary ‘in strictest confidence’ of the private characters and evil designs of certain individuals and societies that they were still only half-way through the manuscript. Neither of them realized that the talk had already lasted three hours. In their absorption they had forgotten even to feed the fire, and yet both Mr Basnett in his exposition, and Mary in her interrogation, carefully preserved a kind of formality calculated to check the desire of the human mind for irrelevant discussion. Her questions frequently began, ‘Am I to understand—’ and his replies invariably represented the views of some one called ’we’.
By this time Mary was almost persuaded that she, too, was included in the ‘we’, and agreed with Mr Basnett in believing that ‘our’ views, ‘our’ society, ‘our’ policy, stood for something quite definitely segregated from the main body of society in a circle of superior illumination.
The appearance of Katharine in this atmosphere was extremely incongruous, and had the effect of making Mary remember all sorts of things that she had been glad to forget.
‘You’ve been dining out?’ she asked again, looking, with a little smile, at the blue silk and the pearl-sewn shoes.
‘No, at home. Are you starting something new?’ Katharine hazarded, rather hesitatingly, looking at the papers.
‘We are,’ Mr Basnett replied. He said no more.
‘I’m thinking of leaving our friends in Russell Square,’ Mary explained.
‘I see. And then you will do something else.’
‘Well, I’m afraid I like working,’ said Mary.
‘Afraid,’ said Mr Basnett, conveying the impression that, in his opinion, no sensible person could be afraid of liking to work.
‘Yes,’ said Katharine, as if he had stated this opinion aloud. ‘I should like to start something—something off one’s own bat—that’s what I should like.’
‘Yes, that’s the fun,’ said Mr Basnett, looking at her for the first time rather keenly, and refilling his pipe.
‘But you can’t limit work—that’s what I mean,’ said Mary. ‘I mean there are other sorts of work. No one works harder than a woman with little children.’
‘Quite so,’ said Mr Basnett. ‘It’s precisely the women with babies we want to get hold of.’ He glanced at his document, rolled it into a cylinder between his fingers, and gazed into the fire. Katharine felt that in this company anything that one said would be judged upon its merits; one had only to say what one thought, rather barely and tersely, with a curious assumption that the number of things that could properly be thought about was strictly limited. And Mr Basnett was only stiff upon the surface; there was an intelligence in his face which attracted her intelligence.
‘When will the public know?’ she asked.
‘What d’you mean—about us?’ Mr Basnett asked, with a little smile.
‘That depends upon many things,’ said Mary. The conspirators looked pleased, as if Katharine’s question, with the belief in their existence which it implied, had a warming effect upon them.
‘In starting a society such as we wish to start (we can’t say any more at present),’ Mr Basnett began, with a little jerk of his head, ‘there are two things to remember—the Press and the public. Other societies, which shall be nameless, have gone under because they’ve appealed only to cranks. If you don’t want a mutual admiration society, which dies as soon as you’ve all discovered each other’s faults, you must nobble the Press. You must appeal to the public.’
‘That’s the difficulty,’ said Mary thoughtfully.
‘That’s where she comes in,’ said Mr Basnett, jerking his head in Mary’s direction. ‘She’s the only one of us who’s a capitalist. She can make a whole-time job of it. I’m tied to an office; I can only give my spare time. Are you, by any chance, on the look-out for a job?’ he asked Katharine, with a queer mixture of distrust and deference.
