Marian Dempsey was dressed in a neatly tailored slate-grey suit and a discreet little hat that was conservative and formal and entirely appropriate to a Women’s Suffrage League meeting—which, perhaps, suggested she dressed otherwise at other times, which she did not. Miss Dempsey rarely looked her best in formal evening dress, or at her ease. The triviality and frivolousness of dinner conversations strained her innate earnestness and the extent of this only became evident when one witnessed her in the daytime at a meeting or a rally or organising and cajoling her brother, a task of which she never tired and at which she excelled. That she would have made the better parliamentarian than he had been observed many times and was perfectly true. It did, however, on occasion, make her a little dull. Eleanor had dressed in a suit too, but hers was lavender and her hat had a fascinating little gauze veil that she wore pulled down over her face.

Together they moved into a large room and looked about for a seat and Eleanor felt a sudden heaviness descend on her. Fury had carried her this far, but faced with yet another cheerless municipal hall, another platform of speakers, another hard-backed uncomfortable chair, her spirits waned. Must democracy be always so dreary?

And must it, always, be held in such wretched places? Darlington was a place of poorly built workers’ dwellings, factories and workshops piled one on top of another with little thought for fresh air or sunlight. As their cab had swung into Darlington Road it had hit something which the driver said was a woman lying in the road, though he thought her already deceased on account of her not objecting when he ran over her. A crowd had quickly gathered and Eleanor and Miss Dempsey had abandoned the cab and gone the rest of the way on foot.

‘I am attending the Women’s Federal League tomorrow afternoon,’ said Eleanor, arranging herself in a chair and looking around to see who else was here. There was no one—or no one whom she recognised. This was a relief. ‘They have only recently formed and it is to be their first official meeting,’ she went on, though at this moment the thought of it—of further democracy—appalled her. That meeting, at least, was to be held in the more salubrious surroundings of the Sydney Town Hall, and this appeased her. ‘Lady Harris, the mayoress, is president and Mrs Reid and Mrs Barton shall be there.’