THE VOTE.
"And now," I said, "that you've got your dear vote, what are you going to do with it?"
"If," said Francesca, "you'll promise to treat it as strictly confidential I'll tell you."
"There you are," I said. "Unless you can make a secret out of it you take no pleasure in it. You're just like a lot of girls who—"
"I'm not. I'm not even like one girl. I wish I was."
"I don't. I like your mature intellect. I can't do without your balanced judgment."
"Thanks; it's pleasant to be appreciated as one deserves. And now I'll tell you what I'm going to do with my vote. When the time comes I shall take it with me into what's called a polling-booth, and I shall demand a piece of paper, and then—yes, then I shall destroy the sanctity of the home and neglect my children, and, incidentally, I shall break up the Empire, and do all the other dreadful things that you and the others have been prophesying; and I shall do them simply by making a cross opposite the name of the candidate who's got the nicest eyes and the prettiest moustache. That's what I shall do with my vote. I shall vote with it by ballot. What else could I do?"
"Great Heaven! Francesca, how can you be so frivolous? Are you aware that politics, in which you are now to play a part however humble, are a serious matter?"
"I know," she said, "and that is why they'll be all the better for an occasional touch of lightness. There's some Latin quotation about Apollo, isn't there, my Public School and University man? Well, I'm all for that."
"But," I said, "you don't know how dangerous it is to be light and humorous at public meetings or in the House of Commons. A man gets a reputation for that sort of thing, and then he's expected to keep it up; and, anyhow, it gives him no influence, however funny he may be. The other men laugh at him, but distrust him profoundly."
"Pooh!" said Francisca. "That's all very well for men—they have little humour and no wit—"
"My dear Francesca, how can you venture to fly in the face of all experience—"
"Men's experience," she said; "it doesn't count. You've often said that smoking-room stories are the dullest in the world."
"How you do dart about," I said, "from subject to subject. Just now you were in a polling-booth and now you're in a smoking-room."
"And heartily ashamed to be found there—stale tobacco and staler stories. Why have a smoking-room at all when everybody's grandmother has her own cigarette case and her own special brand of cigarettes?"
"We ought rather," I said, "to have two smoking-rooms to every house, one for me and the likes of me and the other for the grandmothers."
"Segregating the sexes again! Surely if we have mixed bathing we may have mixed smoking."
"And mixed voting," I said.
"That is no real concession. We have wrung it from you because of the force and reasonableness of our case."
"Say rather the force and Christabelness of your case."
"Anyhow, we've got it."
"And now that you've got it you don't really care for it."
"We do, we do."
"You don't. It's not one of the important subjects you and your friends talk about after you've quite definitely got up to go and said good-bye to one another."
"What," said Francesca, "does this man mean?"
"He means," I said, "those delightful and lingering committee meetings, when you have nearly separated and suddenly remember all the subjects you have forgotten."
"Now," she said, "you are really funny."
"I'm a man and can only do my best."
"That's the pity of it; but now you've got the women to help you."
"So I have. Well, au revoir in the polling-booth."
"Anyhow, à bas the smoking-room."
R.C.L.
