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Charles and Lady Jocelyn had been thorough modernists prior to their conversion to the Christian faith during their daughter’s seventh year. And though the change in their lives at the time was total—leading to Charles’ retirement from Parliament and Amanda’s alienation from the rest of the family—they yet recognized theirdaughter as a free moral agent accountable for her own decisions. They had not prevented her leaving once they saw that her mind was set. If their daughter was thankful for anything about her parents, she was grateful for that.
    Amanda Rutherford was now making the most of that freedom.
    During the years between her twelfth and seventeenth birthdays, the increasing constraint of the family’s new spiritual values created more and more estrangement from father and mother, as well as from brother and sister. Other than the judgment her parents had shown in allowing Amanda the freedom to leave home, she viewed her family as hopelessly prudish and backward in their thinking.
    Her older brother George showed every sign of entering adulthood the perfect image, as Amanda thought, of his father—obedient, dull, and unimaginative. He was good-looking enough, she supposed, and quite a skilled horseman. But the fact that he had full parental favor resting upon his shoulders was enough in itself to make Amanda resent him. Father and brother were typical of the weak sort of masculinity to which women were forced to spend their lives in meek compliance. That George had almost immediately given himself submissively to their parents’ new religious perspectives annoyed her all the more.
    Where her younger sister Catharine stood on matters of so-called faith, Amanda didn’t know, and cared even less. The two girls had never talked about it. But Catharine probably went along with all the Christian nonsense too. That was the trouble with them all—they were stuck in the dreary Victorian past.
    Amanda tried to convince herself that she loved justice, that she cared for the downtrodden and unprivileged, that she was a pioneer for modernism in the new century. But her activism was mostly just a means to an end—a way out of the drab and constricting confines of Heathersleigh Hall. If she was a wild sprout on the Rutherford family line, she certainly did not recognize herself as such, but rather saw herself as a bold and progressive thinker who would have an impact in society and the world. Notwithstanding her childish words to her father about becoming prime minister one day, Amanda Rutherford had matured enough to realize that Great Britain’s government would probably not be headed by a woman in her lifetime. But still she remembered Queen Victoria’s words on the day her father had beenknighted. Amanda had never forgotten her vow to “turn the world on its ear” in one way or another.
    Her opportunity had arrived in 1907. Shopping in Bristol, mother and daughters chanced upon a suffragette rally at which the two Pankhurst girls were speaking to a small crowd of ladies. Hearing their words and ignoring the protestations of her mother, sixteen-year-old Amanda had crossed the street and was immediately entranced with what met her ears. Not only did the message find sympathy with her fiery spirit, the two young ladies, whom she later discovered to be Christabel and Sylvia, seemed not that many years older than herself. By the end of the afternoon a friendship among the three young women had sprouted which nothing would be able to dim.
    How different can be two persons’ perception of the same event. To Amanda the encounter signaled the beginning of her emancipation. To her mother it signaled the end, she prayed temporarily, of her relationship with her daughter.
    Even now, three years later, it caused Jocelyn Rutherford renewed pain and a few tears to recall the conversation which had followed two or three months after the Bristol incident, when Amanda had