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thought she could hear the sound of a piano.
    She thought, this is a four-storey building, but there are no other names on the door, no other bells to ring. What does one doctor do with four floors?
    She heard a car drawing up behind her and turned to see a black taxicab. She walked slowly away along the pavement and then stopped as though she were about to cross the road. The taxi drew up outside number 40 and a man got out. A well-dressed man with smart grey suit, top hat and a loud, cheerful voice. He paid the driver and then turned to hand out a young woman. As she stepped out he said something to her and she laughed.
    There was something about the laugh that grated horribly on Sarah. It was high, falsetto, slightly tipsy. As though the girl was slightly drunk and determined to seem more so, to get the maximum amusement out of the man's joke and at the same time to seem silly, flighty, without a thought in her head but what he put there. As she came out of the cab she staggered and leant against him. He put his arm round her and led her up the steps.
    The man did not need to ring the bell at Dr Armstrong's consulting rooms. The girl, tipsy as she was, produced a key.
    When they had gone it began to get dark. Sarah crossed the road and looked back at the house. The curtains were drawn now but there were gas lights in every room except those on the ground floor. Although from this distance she could hear no sound, not even the piano, in the gathering dusk the house had an indefinable air of gaiety.
    Sarah waited half an hour until the lamplighter came along the street with his long pole. By that time several men had passed, coming home to their respectable family houses and flats, and two had looked at her hesitantly, as though tempted to say something, before moving on. One other man, a distinguished man in top hat and grey overcoat, had rung the doorbell of number 40 and been let in, but Jonathan had not come out.
    Sarah walked home, feeling lonelier and angrier and more humiliated than she had ever felt since her father died . . .
    She lay on her back on the hard wooden bed and stared up at the ceiling, where a glimmer of light from the street outside made shadows flicker in the gloom. The prostitutes and the drunk in the cells down the corridor were quiet now, and the shouts and laughter in the street outside were few and far between. Her body ached with the cold and she felt alone in all the world.
    It's true then, she thought, the whole rotten system that men have set up oppresses women and destroys love. We have to get the vote, because that's the only way we shall ever change these horrors. Though just now she couldn't quite see how.
    I slashed the picture, anyway, she told herself bleakly. That may do something for the movement but it won't help me. Because the woman in the picture wasn't just a whore as I said she was — she was me, myself, the woman Jonathan thought he had married. The woman I once thought I was. If I had stayed like that he would never have betrayed me.
    She had not slept with Jonathan for over a year. It had been her own decision, part of her reaction to the trauma of her miscarriages, to her own political development. A grown man ought to be able to cope with that. If men behave like beasts they don't deserve our love.
    The words rang hollow, even to herself. All that sleepless night she tried to warm herself with hatred of him but the flame refused to burn.
    If he went to a whore she had only herself to blame . . .

4
    T HE COURTROOM was crowded, but there were no women there at all. Sarah came into the dock up the stairs which led directly from the police cells, and she could hear the murmur of voices as she climbed the steps. The murmur changed to an indrawn hush, and then there she was. One moment in the cold, echoing, whitewashed underworld of the cells, the next in a warm, oak-panelled magistrates' court, warmed by the breath and bodies of fifty or sixty men crammed together around her