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at the world from behind the barricade of spectacles bolstered her self-confidence.
    "Distinguished colleagues, guests, sisters. And brothers," she added, nodding toward her friend, Theodore--Teddy-- Cavendish, who smiled and saluted her from the back of the crowd.
    Looking out onto the green, she took note of the running noses and cold-pinched faces and decided on the spot to cut her speech by half. The bullhorn proved to be more encumbrance than boon. Halfway through, she handed it to Harriet and made do with her own raised voice.
    Afterward, she spent a good quarter of an hour shaking hands with women who came up to meet her, society ladies and tradesmen's wives, women of independent means and women who hadn't a penny apart from what their husbands gave them in allowance. Women who had never known a day of toil in the whole of their lives and others who had known little but. By the end of it, her fingers felt so numb she could barely feel the eager hands pumping hers and she was keenly aware that her nose had begun to run. Without thinking, she reached into her coat pocket for her handkerchief, but the rumpled linen square she retrieved wasn't hers. Seeing the "H.S." embroidered on an upper corner, she stuffed it back into her pocket unused, a flush working its way across her wind-chapped face.
    Her vice president, Lydia Witherspoon, was the first to greet her when she stepped down. "Well done as always, Callie. But are you quite sure you're well? You look a bit feverish."
    "Do I? It must be the effects of the wind, not to mention the coffee Harriet has plied me with for fear I'd fall asleep mid-sentence." Eager to change the subject, she turned to her secretary, already busy gathering up their things. As soon as Lydia had moved on, she leaned in to Harriet and confided, "I'm afraid I may have no voice left for tomorrow night."
    Harriet paused from her packing. Looking up, she grinned broadly. "I hope you find it because we're expecting two hundred or more."
    Two hundred or more.
Callie suppressed a sigh. Now that her address was concluded, she felt a profound weariness tugging at her, an exhaustion that went beyond mere physical fatigue. How lovely it would be to go home and curl up beneath the covers with a cup of tea and a book, perhaps one of those sweetly foolish penny dreadfuls she hadn't picked up since her schoolgirl years, when she'd still believed in fictions like
True Love
and
Happily Ever After.
But these days leisure was beyond her reach, a self-indulgence for which she simply hadn't the time. She had any number of tasks to attend to before she could seek out her bed, and neither novel reading nor daydreaming about handsome young photographers could be counted among them.
    Yet when Harriet groaned and announced, "Oh no, here he comes," Callie's heart leapt into her throat. Hadrian St. Claire, he'd come back! She turned about eagerly. But instead of the handsome photographer, it was Teddy walking briskly toward them, his bottle green coat and plaid trousers making him easy to track in the twilight.
    Swallowing her disappointment, Callie fixed on a smile. "Teddy, I spotted you earlier. How good of you to come."
    "I wouldn't have missed it for the riches of the world." All smiles, he reached for her hands, planting a kiss atop each in turn. "By Jove, that bit about 'uniting to break the yoke of patriarchal serfdom' really had them going."
    From the corner of her eye, Callie caught Harriet rolling her eyes. "If you'll excuse me, those placards won't jump back into the boxes by themselves."
    As soon as Harriet was out of earshot, Teddy said, "She's warming to me, I can tell."
    Callie couldn't help but smile. "I shouldn't hold my breath if I were you."
    "Why not, what the deuce's wrong with me?"
    Callie allowed herself a brief disloyal glance at his mustache, the tips waxed so that they stood out like handlebars. Every time she'd tried imagining kissing the small pink mouth beneath, she found she simply couldn't.