Corra Harris

“ Sasnett,' and when did I cease to be Bob, pray? I've been Bob for a good many years to you, Selah. What's the matter? Have you seen me flirting with another girl? You have not! Have you heard of my calling on Mike Prim? You have not! Has some one told you of the last murder I committed? Certainly not! I haven't killed a man yet. Shall not do so until he becomes my rival in your heart. Now what is it? Why am I 'Mr. Sasnett' upon this beautiful moonlight night when of all times I should be most tenderly Bob? ”

“ She looked as if every mortgage held by her estate had been foreclosed at her expense."
"Yes, I know," said Mrs. Walton with a sigh. "She was pathetic in her submission. Most women submit, but still have enough to fuss about from time to time to keep them alive."
"She was really the least submissive of you all. She put on her thimble, threaded the needle of her robin-headed brain, and worked all your fuss and agitations and futile parades down to a formula by which you can actually obtain the ballot," he put in.
"Well, coming down to this formula, what shall we do with Briggs?" ”

“ The Yankees relieved us of the burden of a few unprofitable slaves. They slew the best and the bravest of our men. They took our wealth and reduced us to unimaginable poverty and hardship. But, thank God, we saved our women! We returned to them ragged, wounded, footsore, and despairing, and we found them faithful as the stars in their courses. More inspiring than 'pillows' of fire by night and of cloud by day, they led us back to hope and love and prosperity. ”

“ If I'd been gathering flowers for you, Selah, I should have brought bachelor buttons!" he answered as he passed out into the darkened avenue, still carrying his posy ludicrously upside down.
It was another month before she or any one else knew what he did with them.
She had tried to put Bob Sasnett out of her thoughts, but not very successfully. Love is the finest logic nature ever achieves. Nothing, no argument however reasonable and expedient, can withstand it. She thought continually of him as an enemy she must face sooner or later. ”

“ I admit that I prefer the dear woman to the abler ballot-bearing woman—every man must—but before your sex can become entirely like my sex except in gender, Susan, I shall be where Sarah Mosely is now. ”

“ If an outlaw, armed to the teeth, had passed up and down the streets and robbed every man in Jordantown, they could not have appeared more dejected and, at the same time, alarmed. Conversation languished beneath the awnings. Men sat in their shirt sleeves, side by side, perfectly silent. You do not discuss the thorn in your side—and they all had two thorns. They were not only outraged by Prim's demands, they were suffering from the neuralgia of suspense in regard to the Mosely Estate.
"It's about time for the Signal to be out," said Coleman, looking at his watch. ”

“ At this very moment a queer thing happened: a stream of women poured into the square and took their way down both sides of it, almost treading upon the toes of the men as they passed. And they were walking leisurely.
These were undoubtedly the same women who had passed at four o'clock on their way to the Civic League and Cemetery Association. Every man in the streets recognized them. Yet they were not the same. They did not return salutations. For the first time the men were ignored, not exactly snubbed, but literally not seen by the women in Jordantown. ”

“ Believe me, those little adolescent Citizenesses-to-be, the seminary girls, do not primp and pile their curls bewitchingly over their ears because they want the ballot. It's the daily petition they make of themselves for lovers!"
"That is your egregious masculine conceit, Bob, imagining every woman is thinking of winning lovers and husbands. We love ourselves. We do our best to look well because we have a satisfaction in our own appearance!" Selah exclaimed with indignant heat. ”

“ During this exchange of opinions both men had made their way slowly across the street and entered the group of men who were gathering about the schoolhouse door.
Far down in the cool brown shadows within, Selah Adams was standing upon the teacher's rostrum. She was speaking in low terms which could not be heard from the door, which had been left open for coolness. Fifty women sat below her in creaking split-bottom chairs, with faces as rapt and attentive as if they had been listening to a revival sermon. Some of them were mature maidens of thirty years ”

“ It was Saturday afternoon, two days since the funeral and two days since Mike Prim bent listening with such furious excitement at the keyhole of Judge Regis's office. Jordantown had become the stage upon which a mystery play was being enacted with all the farcical features of a comedy. Every man, especially, was doing exactly what he would have done and said if there had been footlights and an audience in front, only not one of them knew that this was so. ”

“ Transpose the conditions of each and the same beseeching look so often seen in women's faces will be ludicrously mixed with the whiskers on the faces of their lords. The only ineradicable difference between men and women is gender. They are singularly alike in every other particular. Give a woman liberty, and she will go a man one better in license. Take a man's liberty from him, and he surpasses any woman in timidity. If men have more strength, women have more endurance. ”

“ No man would seem quite a man. No woman would seem modest. Clothes, customs, beliefs, ambitions, and ideals would all have changed. And he himself would seem to them a pitiable reversion to type, ludicrously unequal to meeting the emergencies of advanced civilization. In short, there are no lasting standards of living. Education, morals, economics, finance, and politics are only the cards we play every generation in the progressive euchre of evolution. The honesty with which we play the game determines the worth of society. ”

“ No one is to blame. This movement of women is as natural as any other growth. We are migrating out of the legendary into the real; we are passing from sentiment and romance into history. And we have arrived! Nothing can stop us. You only shame yourselves, your manhood, and your honour if you oppose us. We must succeed because we are right! ”

“ In fact all domestic conversation in Jordantown was now censored as carefully both by the men and the women as if they belonged to opposing armies. Every man regarded his wife with suspicion, and he was at the same time conscious of a strange cheerful indifference on the part of his wife that was unnatural and offensive. Half the clinging-vine love with which women entwine their husbands is not love at all, but a nameless anxiety due to their sense of helplessness. ”

“ I have been more impressed by that dim little old woman than by all the arguments you, for example, ever made for suffrage. She was herself an unanswerable plea for the rights of women to live, for she had never really lived at all. ”

“ But we do not applaud an accusing angel, and they did not applaud Selah, who stood so elegantly fair and tall, a slim figure with earnest dark eyes bent in passionate appeal upon their faces.
"It was men," she went on, "who divided women into three great classes—virgins, wives, and prostitutes, a purely physical classification. You commanded chastity. We have never had the right to choose it. Women have never been real parents. They are only the mothers of the children of men. ”

“ She sniffed at the word. "They have lost confidence in you as manager of their political ends. They've begun to suspect your game. It's only a question of hours, I might say of one hour, before you get your walking papers, so to speak; for they are mad, Mike Prim. They are as angry as men always are when they realize that they've been duped and robbed——"
"If you were not a woman you couldn't sit there and say such things to me. Anyhow, I won't stand it! What's your business, as you call it?" he exclaimed, heaving his huge bulk from the chair and coming to his feet. ”

“ He is not a merchant, nor a lawyer, nor a real estate agent, nor a banker, nor a broker, nor anything else that has a name, but more men—prominent citizens, farmers, labourers, tramps, beggars, anybody and everybody—go and come from his office than to and from any other office in this town. He is the power of darkness in this county to be overcome before you can win suffrage, I can tell you that. ”

“ Making a will is like ordering your grave clothes. Takes nerve. Mrs. Mosely didn't have any. She was merely a little old gray barnacle sticking to her husband's estate. She—hello! What's the matter?"
The procession halted. Both men leaned forward and stared. An old-fashioned brougham was being drawn slowly by a very fat old white horse into the too narrow space between the hearse and Briggs's car. Seated in the brougham was the erect figure of a very thin old man. His hair showed beneath his high silk hat like a stiff white ruff on his neck. ”

“ A man, even the ablest, looks very helpless in his sleep. She saw his chin drop, his mouth open. Then the silence was parted by a certain sound, exactly the same sound she had heard every night since she had married—"Ha-a-w-s-ah! Ah-ha-a-w-sah." It was a cross between the bray of an ass and the excruciating grief of a cat.
Most men come down to this the moment they sink into the unconsciousness of slumber. It is a kind of reversion to type which they suffer without knowing it.
Agatha had often lain awake resenting the blasts which Coleman sent through his nose. ”

“ He moved with astonishing swiftness to the staircase, looked down, then fixed his black eyes with a kind of animal ferocity upon the closed door of the Judge's office until he reached it, and laid one of his little red ears to the keyhole.
If we were permitted to observe any man or woman of our acquaintance when that person supposed himself or herself to be absolutely alone, we should be astonished and often horrified at the unconscious revelations we would receive. The woman with the Madonna face may unmask and show the lineaments of a common shrew in her chamber. ”

“ Yes, I know you will; if not me, some other man. You will have discovered that doing the world's work even well is a thankless job, and that fame and success are the husks that swine do eat compared with even the tears and griefs of love. ”

“ One after another the attractions of the square failed, and the crowd surged into the avenue, where it was fed to repletion—all free of charge. The stomach of man is singularly elemental in its cravings, and not subject to political or any other influence which fails to meet this demand.
Long before three o'clock in the afternoon the Town Hall was filled and jammed to its doors with men and women. ”

“ For a man to be sufficiently conscious of himself, there must always be the possibility of a woman in sight before whom he may magnify himself at least in his own imagination. The Jordantown Square citizens lacked this mirror. ”

“ Their shoulders had that noble giving droop which only women show who have reached the sublimity of nurturing many children at their breasts. They were all moving palmetto fans with the serene air of fat, ugly old goddesses who had passed out of the desire of man and had now returned to their own woman's sanity. ”

“ When we are married I want to sit at home and darn your socks—you do wear holes in them, don't you?'"
"Bob!" she said, sitting up and looking at him solemnly, "I'll make a confession to you, now it's over and we have won; it's been horrid, from first to last. When we are married I want to sit at home and darn your socks—you do wear holes in them, don't you?" ”

“ It is a form of verbal hysteria, a kind of babbling dust which he stirs by way of concealing his incapacities. And the discourse is more characteristic of women than of the opposite sex, because the lives they live tend to the innocuous, if they do not tend to neuralgia and despair. Silence in a woman is always supernatural. But there are emergencies in life so dumbfounding and sinister in their aspect that they bind the tongue and inform even the foolish with the momentary wisdom of silence and prudence.
Magnis Carter as editor of the Signal was naturally loquacious, especially in print. ”

“ Do you think the ballot will satisfy your whole heart and nature, make life one glad song? Will women cease to love men when they can vote? Not on your life, dear! Look at [Pg 159] your Co-Citizens now. Didn't Susan Walton have a husband who honoured and obeyed her till the day of his death? Doesn't the fact that they have husbands add to the interest Mabel Acres and Agatha Coleman have in the suffrage question? Do you think poor Miss Mary Heath would refuse a proposal of marriage, even if she controlled every man's vote in the town? ”

“ They boxed the ears of their little boys, drove their little girls to the churning without mercy, clattered the breakfast dishes furiously, and in various ways indicated to their lords and masters that the day belonged to them, to them exclusively, and that no man could hope to remain in peace within range of their mops and brooms till every vestige of summer dust and dirt was removed, every feather bed sunned till it swelled tick tight, every quilt aired, every rug beaten, every floor scoured, and they themselves relaxed, exhausted, purified, and satisfied at the end of the day. ”

“ Love, Selah, is the one thing that must always come to pass in the hearts of men and women. It doesn't matter under what conditions they live, they must love or die unfulfilled in the very purpose for which they were created. ”

“ The sense of femininity is only a sense of weakness. And what we call masculinity is only the sense of strength, which may belong to women as well as to men under the same conditions. The men on the square had just witnessed a miracle, never seen before in this world—the rise of egotism in the feminine portion of the community, which caused every one of them to enter that zone of man on an equal footing with men in consciousness. ”