“ Her first caller! She decided that it would be best not to talk about George. Not one word about George! Her feelings were her secret—and his.
Marie ushered in two ladies. One, who rushed forward with outstretched hand, was a curiously vital-appearing creature in black—plainly a widow—hardly more than thirty-two or thirty-three, fresh of skin, rather prominent as to eyeballs, yet, everything considered, a handsome woman. This was Alys Brewster-Smith. The other, shorter, slighter, several years older, a faded, smiling, tremulously hopeful spinster, was Genevieve's own cousin, Emelene Brand. ”

“ The roseate dream had been followed by a cruel, and a lasting, awakening.
Some day Genevieve would laugh at the memory of this tragic evening, as she laughed at George's stern ultimatums, and at Junior's decision to be an engineer, and at Jinny's tiny cut thumb. But she had no sense of humor now. As she ran to the corner, and poured the whole distressful story into her husband's ears, she felt the walls of her castle in Spain crashing about her ears.
George, of course, was wonderful; he had been that all his life. He only smiled, at first, at her news. ”

“ Mr. Penfield Evans stepped into Mrs. Gallup's cool, exclusive parlor of better days, and delivering his card to a moist-fingered maid, sat himself among the shrouded furniture to await Mrs. Alys Brewster-Smith and Miss Emelene Brand.
Mrs. Gallup's boarding-house was finishing its noonday meal. Boiled odors lay upon a parlor that was otherwise redolent of the more opulent days of the Gallups. A not too ostentatious clatter of dishes came through the closed folding-doors. ”

“ Alys Brewster-Smith, her favorite Concentrated Breath of the Lily always in advance, rustled into the darkened parlor, her stride hitting vigorously into her black taffeta skirts. Even as she shook hands with Mr. Evans, she jerked the window shade to its height, so that her smoothness and coloring shone out above her weeds.
In the shadow of her and at her life job of bringing up the rear, with a large Maltese cat padding beside her, entered Miss Brand on rubber heels. She was the color of long twilight. ”

“ And she had packed his things, in case they wanted to spend the night at Sea Light, and the "cats" had gone off for library books, and he must have some ginger-ale, before it was time to go for Betty and Penny.
The day was perfection. The motor-car purred like a racing tiger under George's gloved hand. Betty and Penny were waiting, and the three young persons forgot all differences, and laughed and chatted in the old happy way, as they prepared for the start. ”

“ Despite any wavering I may have exhibited, I now stand, as George puts it in his article, 'ready to conserve the threatened flower of womanhood by also endeavoring to conserve her unpolled vote!' If you women want prohibition, it is in your power to sway man's vote to prohibition. If you women want the moon, let man cast your proxy vote for it! In my mind, that is the true chivalry. To quote again, 'Woman is man's rarest heritage, his beautiful responsibility, and at all times his co-operation, support and protection are due her. ”

“ Yet, let us be fair to George. Mere innocence of guile, of verbal trickery, had not alone sufficed for his passionate bluntness in the present crisis. At a later stage in his career as a husband he might have been equally blunt; yet never again, perhaps, would he have been so emotional in his opposition to woman polluting herself with the mire of politics.
Be it recalled that but five weeks had elapsed since George had solemnly promised to cherish and protect the fairest of the non-voting sex—at least in his State—and he was still taking his mission seriously. ”

“ Geneviève agreed. "I understand. Things that hurt are often for our good, aren't they? We have to be made to realize facts really to know them."
"Coffee, dear?" inquired Alys, assuming the duties of hostess.
Geneviève shook her head. "No. I find I've been rather wakeful of late: perhaps it's coffee. Excuse me. I must telephone."
A moment later she returned beaming.
"I have borrowed a car for tomorrow, and I want you and Emelene to come with me for a little spin. We ought to have a bright day; the night is wonderful. Poor George," she sighed, "I wish he didn't have to be away so much." ”

“ Out of his sudden need for reinstatement with himself, he raised in his mind the vision of woman as the men of Martin Jaffry's world conceived her—a tender, enveloping medium in which male complacency, unchecked by any breath of criticism, reaches its perfect flower—the flower whose fruit, eaten in secret and afar from the soil which nourishes it, is graft, corruption and civic incompetence. ”

“ Recollection of his wife's plight cut him like a knife. "The Brewster-Smith women have got to choose for themselves!" He felt about for his hat like a man blind with purpose.
The street sweeper was taking up the fragments of the shattered windows half an hour later, when Martin Jaffry found himself going rather aimlessly along Main Street with a feeling that the bottom had recently dropped out of things—a sensation which, if the truth must be told, was greatly augmented by the fact that he hadn't yet breakfasted. ”

“ I don't believe a woman like you could live without working."
"I didn't say I'd quit working," said E. Eliot. "I said I'd quit business. That's another thing. There's plenty of real work in the world that won't earn you a living. Lord! Don't I see it going by right here in this office! There are things I just itch to get my hands into, and I have to wait and tell myself 'some day, perhaps!' There's a thing I'd like to do now, and that's to take a hand in this political campaign for district attorney. It would kill my business deader than Pharaoh's aunt, so I've got to let it go. ”

“ I think it's perfectly wonderful that you should be doing what you are—showing that women can be just as successful in business as men can. Of course I know that you've got a perfect right to do just what a man would do—refuse to take a piece of business that wasn't worth while. But—but what we hope is, and what we want to show men is, that when women get into politics and business they'll be better and less selfish."
"Which do you mean will be better?" E. Eliot inquired. "The politics and the business, or the women?"
"I mean the politics and the business," Betty told her rather frostily. ”

“ Betty gave an affrighted cry—it was a long swift journey down from where she had just been. Her right hand, reaching drowningly out, fell upon a familiar shoulder.
"It's Pudge!" she cried. "Pudge"—shaking him—"snooping around, listening and trying to spy——"
"You stop that—it ain't so!" protested the outraged Pudge, his utterance throttled down somewhat by the chocolate cream in his mouth.
"Spying on people! And, besides, you've been stuffing yourself with candy again! You're ruining your stomach with that sticky sweet stuff—you're headed straight for a candy-fiend's grave. ”

“ You know what Cause I mean, George—the Suffrage Cause. When I see thoughtless girls handing over their whole lives to men who..."
It sounded like the beginning of an oration.
"Good Lord!" her victim cried. "Isn't there anything else than that to talk about—ever?"
"But just think how lucky you are, George," she said, "that at home they all think exactly as you do!"
He jumped up. Evidently this reminder of the purring acquiescences of Cousin Emelene and Mrs. Brewster-Smith laid no balm upon his harassed spirit. ”

“ Her go to big Cousin George and piddy Cousin Genevieve. By-by! By-by!"
The door swung shut, enclosing them. Down the quiet, tree-shaped sidewalk, Mr. Penfield Evans strode into the somnolent afternoon, turning down Huron Street. At the remote end of the block and before her large frame mansion of a thousand angles and wooden lace work, Mrs. Harvey Herrington's low car sidled to her curb-stone, racy-looking as a hound. That lady herself, large and modish, was in the act of stepping up and in.
"Well, Pen Evans! 'Tis writ in the book our paths should cross." ”

“ Evans, you don't mean to tell me that you and Betty Sheridan have quarreled! Such a desirable match from every point of view, family and all! It goes to show what a rattle-pated bunch of women they are! Any really clever girl with an eye to her future, anti or pro, could shift her politics when it came to a question of matri—"
"Mrs. Smith, there comes a time in every modern man's life when he's got to keep his politics and his pretty girls separate, or suffrage will get him if he don't watch out!" ”

“ George Washington might drop in. What I'm putting you wise to," he added sharply, "is that you'd better get on to your job."
There was a click as of a receiver hung up with a jerk, and a subdued giggle that testified to the innocent attention of the telephone operator.
With but a pale reflection of his usual courtesy the harassed candidate left the bosom of his family. No sooner had he taken his departure than the bosom heaved.
"My dear girl," said Alys, "if you take that tone with your husband you'll never hold him—never. Men won't stand for it. You're only hurting yourself." ”

“ George said impatiently. "But I'll tell you what to do," he added, after scowling thought. "You put it in Miss Eliot's hands; she was with Allen for some years. Now she's gone in for herself, and she's doing well. We've given her several things—" "Take it out of a man's hands to put it into a woman's!" Alys exclaimed. And Emelene added softly:
"What can a woman be thinking of, to go into a dreadful business like selling real estate and collecting rents!"
"Of course, she was trained by men!" Genevieve threw in, a little anxiously. Alys was so tactless, when George was tired and hungry. ”

“ Oh, you're learning politics fast, George!"
The thought of what Genevieve would say when she knew, through Noonan and Doolittle, that he had heard of the plot to kidnap Miss Eliot, and within an hour had talked to his wife casually at luncheon without saying anything about it, made George's heart stop. He realized that he was learning something more than politics. He walked the floor of the room.
"Well," he said at last, "let's call in Uncle Martin Jaffry. He——"
"Yes; he is probably paying for the job. He might know something! I'll get him." ”

“ And surely a more discerning sympathy might have been looked for from the seasoned Martin Jaffry. A bachelor full of years and therefore with illusions not only unimpaired but ripened, who more quickly than he should have divined that his nephew for the moment viewed all womankind as but one multiplied Genevieve, upon whom it would be heinous to place the shackles of suffrage? ”

“ Through the silence following the furniture man's departure, Betty, at the typewriter, clicked upon Georgie's ears. An evil impulse assailed him—impolitic, too, as he realized—impolitic but irresistible. It was the easiest way in which candidate Remington, heckled by suffragists, overridden by his campaign committee, mortifyingly tormented by a feeling of inadequacy, could re-establish himself in his own esteem as a man of prompt and righteous decisions. ”

“ Not George's the mellow gift to say, in effect, that of course woman should vote the instant she wishes to, though perhaps that day has not yet come. Meantime the speaker boldly defies the world to show a man holding woman in loftier regard than he does, or ready to accord her a higher value in all true functions of the body politic. Equal suffrage, thank God, is inevitable at some future time, but until that glorious day when we can be assured that the sex has united in a demand for it, it were perhaps as well not to cloud the issues of the campaign now opening ”

“ George said conclusively. Genevieve, who had appeared, shot Betty a triumphant glance as they started. Pudge waved to them from the candy store at the corner.
"There's a new candy store every week!" said Penny, shuddering. "Heaven help that poor boy; it must be in the blood!"
"Women must always have something sweet to nibble," George said, leaning back. "The United States took in two millions last year in gum alone!"
"Men chew gum!" suggested Betty.
"But come now, Betty, be fair!" George said. "Which sex eats more candy?" ”

“ He cut her short with a gesture of command, and applying his lips to her ear so that he would not be heard inside the house, he said, "You think all you see is Emelene and Alys taking dinner en famille with the Remingtons. Eyes that see not! What you are gazing upon is a reconstruction of the blessed family life that existed in the good old days, before the industrial period and the abominable practice of economic independence for women began! You are seeing Woman in her proper place, the Home,... if not her own Home, somebody's Home, anybody's Home... ”

“ He'd have shown the women that they needed the vote, and he'd have found out for himself—he and the other men who believe in fair human treatment for everybody—that they can't secure that treatment without women's votes. That's the real issue. It isn't that women are better than men, or that they could run the world better if they got the chance. It's that men and women have got to work together to do the things that need doing."
"You're perfectly wonderful," said Betty, and sat thereafter, for perhaps a minute and a half, in an entranced silence. ”

“ Though, of course, I'm taking her back now to Mrs. Gallup's boarding-house until—until—good-night, George; good-night, Geneviève." The little man went staggering down the walk with his burden of wraps; and after a minute there came the sound of his six-cylinder roadster buzzing away into the darkness.
"I didn't tell 'em they had to go tonight," said George doggedly. "But I did remark that even if every woman had a right to a home, every woman didn't have the right to make my home her home. Anyhow," his tone becoming softer, "I've at last got a home of my own. Our own," he corrected. ”