virginal unsophistication piling one indictment after another upon the British Empire. He re minded her of the speakers at the Nationalist Convention at Bloemfontein. Translating in her own mind his most telling phrases into Afrikaans, she felt that at last she had found her spiritual home in London. She joined the Independent Labour Party, and later on placed her car and her services in the evening at the disposal of its London speakers.
Then began a period of superb adventure. Throughout the rest of the winter she spent bright orderly days at the secretarial college, where she worked with punctual neatness and efficiency; but her days were threaded together by nights of daring splendour. Backwards and forwards through the lighted streets of London Eleanor drove, conveying chair men to conferences, lecturers to week-end schools, and hum bler speakers to little meetings at Croydon and Ilford. She learned the elements of English politics through heated dis cussions in small schoolrooms and Labour clubs. She learned the geography of the Home Counties by poring over maps in the light of an electric torch, and she saw the landscape of England as a flurry of moving darkness, through which she rode behind the silver spear of light thrown by her lamps on the sleek ribbons of asphalt or the winding caprice of coun try lanes. She drove in a cool fury of concentration, tilting at the huge December darkness with her spear of light, and as she drove she felt that she was indeed tilting against slums and poverty and economic oppression and the hidden menace of vested interests. She surrendered herself to the strong sweeping urgency of speed and propaganda. Though temperamentally cool-headed and suspicious of enthusiasm, she found that the physical excitement of driving an uncer tain engine down strange roads in darkness, and the mental excitement of political indictment of half-realized evils, re laxed the painful tension of her nerves. She was so tired when she went to bed that she no longer lay tormenting herself about her father's death, but fell into the dreamless sleep of exhausted youth.
In this new life, Eleanor's first visit to Caroline lost its dream-like fantasy. Caroline soon appeared no stranger an enthusiast than the many other Eleanor encountered. Caroline starved, prayed, toiled and exalted over the Christian Cinema Company with a faith no more foolish than that of Rita Hardcastle, who hunted a crock of gold at the Rain bow's End of family allowances, of Ben Sanders, who cheer fully courted imprisonment while demonstrating on behalf of the Class War Prisoners' Aid Association, or of Brenda Clay who shuddered at Marble Arch on frosty evenings, preaching passionately the gospel of Total Abstinence from Alcoholic Liquors.
London hummed with the activities of Propaganda and Reform. Wherever Eleanor turned she found societies for the ultimate perfection of Society. She was invited to Youth Rallies for Peace, Feminist Teas, and protest meetings about China. She was asked to address envelopes, buy calendars, act as steward at meetings, sell papers at the street corner, and drive enthusiasts from one revival to another. And whatever society she encountered, she found always that it was short of money, living on the margin of subsistence, bluffing with magnificent effrontery about the size of its membership, the influence of its resolutions, and the condi tion of its bank balance. The relationship between cause and effect was more remote than her scientific education had led her to believe. Institutions which she had thought con crete and stable enough, such as newspapers, political con ferences, and business companies, rested upon a large mea sure of unsubstantial fantasy. 'Far be it from me to judge Reality,' thought Eleanor, 'when the world is so very much more odd than I had thought it, and when, according to Professor Ipswain's lectures on the Operation of Credit, the most powerful source of wealth and the dominating eco
Then began a period of superb adventure. Throughout the rest of the winter she spent bright orderly days at the secretarial college, where she worked with punctual neatness and efficiency; but her days were threaded together by nights of daring splendour. Backwards and forwards through the lighted streets of London Eleanor drove, conveying chair men to conferences, lecturers to week-end schools, and hum bler speakers to little meetings at Croydon and Ilford. She learned the elements of English politics through heated dis cussions in small schoolrooms and Labour clubs. She learned the geography of the Home Counties by poring over maps in the light of an electric torch, and she saw the landscape of England as a flurry of moving darkness, through which she rode behind the silver spear of light thrown by her lamps on the sleek ribbons of asphalt or the winding caprice of coun try lanes. She drove in a cool fury of concentration, tilting at the huge December darkness with her spear of light, and as she drove she felt that she was indeed tilting against slums and poverty and economic oppression and the hidden menace of vested interests. She surrendered herself to the strong sweeping urgency of speed and propaganda. Though temperamentally cool-headed and suspicious of enthusiasm, she found that the physical excitement of driving an uncer tain engine down strange roads in darkness, and the mental excitement of political indictment of half-realized evils, re laxed the painful tension of her nerves. She was so tired when she went to bed that she no longer lay tormenting herself about her father's death, but fell into the dreamless sleep of exhausted youth.
In this new life, Eleanor's first visit to Caroline lost its dream-like fantasy. Caroline soon appeared no stranger an enthusiast than the many other Eleanor encountered. Caroline starved, prayed, toiled and exalted over the Christian Cinema Company with a faith no more foolish than that of Rita Hardcastle, who hunted a crock of gold at the Rain bow's End of family allowances, of Ben Sanders, who cheer fully courted imprisonment while demonstrating on behalf of the Class War Prisoners' Aid Association, or of Brenda Clay who shuddered at Marble Arch on frosty evenings, preaching passionately the gospel of Total Abstinence from Alcoholic Liquors.
London hummed with the activities of Propaganda and Reform. Wherever Eleanor turned she found societies for the ultimate perfection of Society. She was invited to Youth Rallies for Peace, Feminist Teas, and protest meetings about China. She was asked to address envelopes, buy calendars, act as steward at meetings, sell papers at the street corner, and drive enthusiasts from one revival to another. And whatever society she encountered, she found always that it was short of money, living on the margin of subsistence, bluffing with magnificent effrontery about the size of its membership, the influence of its resolutions, and the condi tion of its bank balance. The relationship between cause and effect was more remote than her scientific education had led her to believe. Institutions which she had thought con crete and stable enough, such as newspapers, political con ferences, and business companies, rested upon a large mea sure of unsubstantial fantasy. 'Far be it from me to judge Reality,' thought Eleanor, 'when the world is so very much more odd than I had thought it, and when, according to Professor Ipswain's lectures on the Operation of Credit, the most powerful source of wealth and the dominating eco
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