Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 6.pdf/356

Rh on the other side. She noticed his walk. "Oh, don't you get up," she said. "This gentleman," she indicated my convulsive struggles to free myself, "will do that. I did not see that you were a cripple."

It may be some of my readers will recognise the lady now. It can be—for the honour of womankind—only one woman. She is an atavism, a survival of the age of violence, a Palæolithic squaw in petticoats. I do not know her name and address or I would publish it. I do not care if she kills me the next time she meets me, for the limits of endurance have been passed. If she kills me I shall die a martyr in the cause of the Queen's peace. And if it is only one woman, then it was the same, more than half intoxicated, that I saw in the Whitechapel Road cruelly illtreating a little costermonger. If it was not she it was certainly her sister, and I do not care who knows it.

What to do with her I do not know. A League, after all, seems ineffectual; she would break up any League. I have thought of giving her in charge for assault, but I shrink from the invidious publicity of that. Still, I am in grim earnest to do something. I think at times that the compulsory adoption of a narrow doorway for churches and places of public entertainment might be some protection for quiet, inoffensive people. How she would rage outside to be sure! Yet that seems a great undertaking.

But this little paper is not so much a plan of campaign as a preliminary defiance. Life is a doubtful boon while one is never safe from assault, from hitting and shoving, from poking with umbrellas, being