I will not stand in your light any longer… Think the best you can of me. I die loving you if possible more than ever - I die to save you pain and sorrow in the future - may your lines be cast in pleasanter places than in the past four years. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Yours in death, George.

It is ten years ago since I first had the pleasure and privilege of making the acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth Robins. I remember it as if it were yesterday. It was in the summer of 1890. I had just brought out my book on Ober-Ammergau, when a card was brought in to me with the message that its owner wished to see me for a minute. Not having the least idea as to who she was, I told them to send her in, and the next moment found me face to face with Miss Robins. As I do not go to theatres, I apologised for not recognising her as the famous Ibsenite actress, who had virtually created the role of Hedda Gabler on the English stage. The remark diverted her from her original purpose, which had been merely for an introduction to somebody at Ober-Ammergua who would enable her to study the mounting of the Passion Play from the point of view of the stage manager. This however, immediately dropped into the background, and I found myself once more in the presence of a categorical imperative in petticoats. My first experience of the kind was when I met Olive Schreiner fifteen years ago, since which time I had not met as charming a representative of a prophetess with a message. Olive Schreiner's message those who know her can divine. Miss Robins's was of a different nature, but it was delivered with no less decision and earnestness, which was charming to behold. Her theme was the wickedness of boycotting the theatre, upon which she preached so fervent a sermon, so full of personal application and striking illustration, that it almost sent me to the penitent form. I fear that I was but imperfectly converted, for I have not yet paid my maiden visit to the theatre, not even to see Hedda Gabler on the boards; but from that day to this I have been proud to count Miss Elizabeth Robins as one of my best friends.

The children's mother has no legal right to a voice in deciding how they shall be nursed; how or where educated; what trade or profession they shall adopt; in what form of religion they shall be instructed.

If a father wants his child vaccinated, or if he is merely indifferent, and so does not lay an objection before the magistrate, the mother cannot prevent the child being vaccinated. If the father wishes the child to be left unvaccinated, the mother cannot legally have it done.

The late Sir Horace Davy introduced a Bill, which proposed that father and mother should be acknowledged equal guardians of their children. This just and logical reform secured only nineteen votes in the House of Commons.

My own adhesion to the Suffrage Cause was given largely because I saw that only through political equality may we hope to see established a true understanding and a happier relationship between the sexes.

Changes in society… have long been tending towards increasing separation between men and women, in practically all the interests of life save one. In the world of industry, of business, of thought - even in what is called society, the growing tendency has been to divide the world into two separate camps. Men who are "doing things," or want to do things, have less and less time to give to an order of beings having no share and, as it came to seem, no stake in the varies aspects - save one - of the great game of life. The conditions of modern life are more and more separating the sexes. Instead of still further dividing us, Women's Suffrage is in reality the bridge between the chasm.

In the early summer of 1909, when I was twenty-one, I met Elizabeth Robins. It was a turning point in my life… I had always read omnivorously and longed to write myself, and to meet so distinguished an author in the flesh was a terrific adventure. It was a small family luncheon at Phyllis Buxton's house. Elizabeth Robins was dressed in a blue suit, the colour of speedwell, which matched her beautiful deep-set eyes. I was introduced as Phyllis's friend who lives near Henfield. 'A neighbour then?' Said Elizabeth Robins, and with a charming grace and in an unforgettable voice asked me if I would come to tea one day and she would show me her modest little garden.

The magnificent platform work being done from various centres must be supplemented and further spread about the world through the medium of the written word. I don't mean by frankly propagandist writing (though I am the last to deny the importance of that) but even more valuable is, I think, the spirit which both men and women writers are able in a thousand ways to illustrate and justify.

My complaint is that not enough has been made of such traces as history preserves of significant lives lived by women.

The Great Adventure is before her (woman). Your Great adventure is to report her faithfully. So that her children's children reading her story shall be lifted up - proud and full of hope. "Of such stuff," they shall say, "our mothers were! Sweethearts and wives - yes, and other things besides: leaders, discovers, militants, fighting every form of wrong."

On June 21st an impressive historical and symbolical pageant, organised by the National Union of Suffrage Societies, marched through crowded, cheering streets from the Embankment to the Albert Hall. Under the chairmanship of the President, Mrs. Fawcett, a mass meeting was held of such size and enthusiasm as men of long political experience declared had seldom being equalled… A week later came the monster demonstration in Hyde Park, under the auspices of the Women' Social and Political Union. The Times said of it: "Its organisers had counted on an audience of 250,000. The expectation was certainly fulfilled, and probably it was doubled, and it would be difficult to contradict anyone who asserted that it was trebled… The Daily Chronicle said: "Never, on the admission of the most experienced observers, has so vast a throng gathered in London to witness an outlay of political force."

Elizabeth Robins was inadvertently responsible for this impetuous action, which altered the whole course of my life. I was sent by the Manchester Guardian, in the autumn of 1906, to Tunbridge Wells, to report the annual conference of the National Union of Women Workers and by a coincidence, the customary session on woman suffrage, usually rather an academic affair unheeded by the Press, fell on the day when my friend Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson and several other women, including Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, appeared in a London police court on charges of obstruction outside the House of Commons, whence they had been ejected for making a protest in the lobby the night before. This sensational news in the morning paper had the effect, that afternoon, of crowding the theatre at Tunbridge Wells, where the conference was meeting. No seat was unoccupied at the Press table, and Mrs. Fawcett rose to the drama of the occasion with a speech in which she reminded her audience that "if you treat women as outlaws, you must not be surprised to find them behaving as outlaws." Discussion was invited, and the first name to be read out was that of Elizabeth Robins.

Elizabeth Robins, then at the height of her fame both as a novelist and an actress, sent a stir through the audience when she stepped on the platform. I, who not only thought (and still think) The Open Question one of the finest of novels, but had also sat in the pit many times and admired her from afar in her Ibsen impersonations, was thrilled at this unexpected sight of her away from her natural background. The thrill was deepened when she, making her first suffrage speech and I know now what it must have cost her to make it -told quite simply in her wonderful voice how she had come straight from the police court to give the conference an eye-witness account of the women whose actions had been grossly travestied in most of the newspapers.

The impression she made was profound, even on an audience predisposed to be hostile; and on me it was disastrous. From that moment I was not to know again for twelve years, if indeed ever again, what it meant to cease from mental strife; and I soon came to see with a horrible clarity why I had always hitherto shunned causes.

The next time I saw Elizabeth Robins was at a stormy meeting in the Fulham Town Hall, a month or two later - I had joined the W.S.P.U. by that time - where I made my own maiden speech. At the end of it she came up from the audience and spoke to me, and from this circumstance dated a friendship of the kind that is readily understood by those who know from experience the sort of relationship, even when it is not an intimate relationship, that grows between people who are comrades in work or a cause. Her praise on this occasion was infinitely welcome, for I did not feel a success at all. The hall was nearly filled with Social Democrats, who were definitely hostile because at that time they thought ours was only a middle-class movement; and Christabel Pankhurst, who opened the proceedings, made no attempt to conciliate them. She won every one of the women who sat mutely on the front benches and had never before seen a woman stand up to a man in public; for, apart from her political insight, that was Christabel's great asset - to put fight into women and make them demand as a right what they were inclined to beg as a favour. But at Fulham her attitude drove the men in the audience, who also had never previously encountered this sort of thing in a woman, to a frenzy, and when I got up to speak I could not get a hearing for some minutes. After that I was more fortunate, probably because I did not look very militant, though it was left to a kind member of my first open-air audience, some weeks later, to silence my interrupters with the appeal: " There ain't much of her, so give 'er a chance!"

They gave me quite a good chance, even in the Fulham Town Hall; but neither then nor in the years to come, during which I addressed every kind of audience, indoor and outdoor, did I ever lose my distaste for the platform or overcome that cold feeling at the pit of the stomach which always proves the true locality of the emotions. I was not afraid of missiles, which varied from live mice to eatables - chestnuts I used to resent most, though they may not have been intended symbolically-for at least you knew what your listeners were feeling when they threw things at you, and open warfare is always preferable to the frozen hostility of the drawing-room crowd.

The State keeps 22,483 children in workhouses. Here is a description of a Government nursery: "Often found under the charge of a person actually certified as of unsound mind, the bottles sour, the babies wet, cold and dirty. The Commission on the Care and Control of the Feebleminded draws attention to an episode in connection with one feeble-minded woman who was set to wash a baby; she did so in boiling water, and it died."

"We were shocked," continues the Report, "to discover that infants in the nursery of the establishments in London and other large towns seldom or never get into the open air. "We found the nursery frequently on the third or fourth story of a gigantic block often without balconies, whence the only means of access even to the workhouse yard was a flight of stone steps down which it was impossible to wheel a baby-carriage of any kind. There was no staff of nurses adequate to carrying fifty or sixty infants out for an airing. In some of these workhouses it was frankly admitted that these babies never left their own quarters (the stench was intolerable) and never got into the open air during the whole period of their residence in the workhouse nursery. In some workhouses 40% of the babies die within the year.

I doubt if there exists in print a better plea for the urgency of Woman's Suffrage that that embodied in this Report of the latest English Poor Law Commission… What it reveals is an incompetence and legalised cruelty in the treatment of the poor… that thousands of innocent children are shut up with tramps and prostitutes; that there are workhouses which have no separate sick ward for children, in spite of the ravages of measles, whooping-cough, etc.

Men have talked about these evils for seventy-five years. We see now that until the portion of the community standing closest to the problems presented by care of the old and broken, the young children and the afflicted, until women have a voice in mending the laws on this subject, the inadequacy of the laws will continue to be merely discussed.

In 1912 Elizabeth Robins was greatly preoccupied with the Women's Suffrage agitation. "Mrs. Pankhurst in the Dock" said the placards and "Vain Search for Christabel". This was enough for the Henfield villagers to be convinced that Christabel Pankhurst was being concealed at Backsettown and Elizabeth Robins' correspondence was watched by the police! The Pankhursts would come to stay and were constantly seeking her advice… Lady Brassey and H. G. Wells also visited her. My family was critical of this visit. They did not know that he had invited himself, that he had stayed up till past midnight arguing with Elizabeth Robins, who disapproved of his affair with the daughter of one of her friends.

Elizabeth Robins was an even more remarkable woman than Octavia Wilberforce. She was born in Kentucky in 1862, a young lady belonging to the old slave-owning American aristocracy of the South. She did in Kentucky what Octavia was to do later on in Sussex; with extraordinary strength of mind and determination she broke the fetters of family and class, the iron laws which prescribe the life and behaviour of young ladies whether they be the Greek Antigone 600 years before Christ in Thebes or 2,500 years later in Kentucky, U.S.A., and Octavia in Lavington.

Octavia's relation to Elizabeth was that of a devoted daughter. If you had searched the earth from Kentucky in the United States to Lavington in Sussex, you would never and nowhere have found two other women more different from each other than they were. Elizabeth was, I think, devoted to Octavia, but she was also devoted to Elizabeth Robins; when we first knew her, she was already a elderly woman and a dedicated egoist, but she was still a fascinating as well as an exasperating egoist. When young she must have been beautiful, very vivacious, a gleam of genius with that indescribably female charm which made her invincible to all men and most women. One felt all this still lingering in her as one sometimes feels the beauty of summer still lingering in an autumn garden.

After the war, when she returned from Florida to Brighton, a very old frail woman, she used every so often to ask me to come and see her in bed, surrounded by boxes full of letters, cuttings, memoranda, and snippets of every sort and kind. In stamina I am myself inclined to be invincible, indefatigable, and imperishable, and I was nearly twenty years younger than Elizabeth, but after two or three hours' conversation with her in Montpelier Crescent, I have often staggered out of the house shaky, drained, and debilitated as if I had just recovered from a severe attack on influenza.