The Edge of Dreams by Rhys Bowen

again, can you? It’s been hard going home at night to that narrow, dingy apartment and wishing you were there to hold in my arms.”
    “You’ll be able to hold me in your arms tomorrow night,” I said. “But carefully. I’m fragile. I might break.”
    He laughed. “I tell you what, I’m devilishly hungry, Molly. Do you think there’s a chance your friends would invite me to dinner tonight?”
    “They would, but you wouldn’t want to come,” I said. “They’ve a whole band of women coming for a meeting.”
    “Oh, God. No thanks. Well, it better be the pie shop again.” He got up, squeezing my hand before he let it go. “Until tomorrow then. I’m meeting Mother at the station, if my work allows me to escape for that long. If not, she’ll have to take a cab. You’ll make her welcome, won’t you?”
    “Of course,” I said. “What time is she expected?”
    “Not until about four thirty.”
    “I’ll be in the drawing room and keep an eye out for her.”
    “Splendid. Well, good-bye then, my darling.”
    “Good-bye.” I blew him a kiss.
    As soon as I heard his footsteps going down the stairs, I felt bad that I had turned him away the one time he had wanted to have dinner with us. But truly I was doing him a kindness. Women suffragists would not have helped his appetite!
    *   *   *
    I sat in the kitchen while Sid and Gus made sandwiches and pitchers of lemonade.
    “One has to be careful about offering wine,” Sid said. “Sometimes these women are also ardent followers of the temperance movement.”
    “It’s a warm evening,” Gus said, as she wrapped a stack of dainty sandwiches in a damp serviette. “We were thinking it might be more pleasant to sit in the conservatory, rather than the more formal atmosphere of the drawing room.”
    “Good idea.” I nodded agreement.
    “And since we won’t have time for a proper meal, Sid has made a cold soup,” Gus went on. “And there is salad left from luncheon. Help yourself whenever you feel like it, Molly.”
    I took some cold cucumber soup, fed Liam, and by the time I had put him to bed I heard a knock at the front door, followed by women’s voices in animated conversation. The first of the ladies had arrived. I spruced myself up and came downstairs to find four women seated in the wicker chairs in the conservatory. Two of them were earnest young women I had met before on a similar occasion. The other two were older women and unfamiliar to me. They both looked like solid and affluent matrons, and it was quite a surprise to find them at such a subversive meeting. While we were exchanging pleasantries, more women kept arriving, until there were ten of us.
    “That’s all, I think,” Sid said, looking around with satisfaction. “A good number at such short notice, don’t you think?”
    “It’s hard for so many of the sisters to get away,” one of the older women said. She had an air of authority to her, as if she had once been a schoolmistress, and I thought that I wouldn’t like to cross her. “If they are married, their evenings are devoted to serving dinner to their husbands and putting the children to bed. You might have better luck if you schedule the next meeting for the morning or afternoon. No husband objects to his wife attending a coffee morning with friends, but they are highly suspicious of a woman who wants to go out at night alone.”
    “I suppose you’re right,” Sid said, “but I was thinking of our young unmarried women who work during the day. At least five of us are gainfully employed.”
    “Really?” the older woman asked. “As what?”
    “I work in a bank,” one of them said.
    “And I in a flower shop.”
    “I’m a teacher,” the little redhead I had met before added.
    “And I am a typewriter for a firm of lawyers.”
    “Mercy me,” the older woman said. “I had heard that those typewriting machines were simply too strenuous for young women to handle.”
    The girl laughed. “That falsehood was spread