By and by he ventured to scan the group.
Carson Haggerty, the American poet, was there. But the center
of them all was Olympia Johns herself--spinster, thirty-four, as
small and active and excitedly energetic as an ant trying to get
around a match. She had much of the ant's brownness and
slimness, too. Her pale hair was always falling from under her
fillet of worn black velvet (with the dingy under side of the
velvet showing curled up at the edges). A lock would tangle in
front of her eyes, and she would impatiently shove it back with
a jab of her thin rough hands, never stopping in her machine-gun
volley of words.
"Yes, yes, yes, yes," she would pour out. "Don't you _see?_
We must do something. I tell you the conditions are intolerable,
simply intolerable. We must _do_ something."
The conditions were, it seemed, intolerable in the several
branches of education of female infants, water rates in
Bloomsbury, the cutlery industry, and ballad-singing.
And mostly she was right. Only her rightness was so demanding,
so restless, that it left Mr.
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