By this time she would be back from her work.
To see Ralph appear unexpectedly in her room threw Mary for a second off her balance.

She had been cleaning knives in her little scullery, and when she had let him in she went back again, and turned on the cold-water tap to its fullest volume, and then turned it off again.
"Now," she thought to herself, as she screwed it tight, "I'm not going to let these silly ideas come into my head....

Don't you think Mr.
Asquith deserves to be hanged ?" she called back into the sitting-room, and when she joined him, drying her hands, she began to tell him about the latest evasion on the part of the Government with respect to the Women's Suffrage Bill.

Ralph did not want to talk about politics, but he could not help respecting Mary for taking such an interest in public questions.

He looked at her as she leant forward, poking the fire, and expressing herself very clearly in phrases which bore distantly the taint of the platform, and he thought, "How absurd Mary would think me if she knew that I almost made up my mind to walk all the way to Chelsea in order to look at Katharine's windows.