“Now I’ve a good mind to hold a meeting for your benefit,” said Audrey, striving to recall the proper phrases of propaganda which she had heard in the proper quarters in London during her brief connection with the cause. However, she could not recall them, “But there’s no need to,” she added. “A gentleman of your intelligence must be of our way of thinking.”
“About what?”
“About the vote, of course. And so your conduct is all the more shocking.”
“Why!” he exclaimed, laughing. “If it comes to that, your own sex is against you.”
Audrey had heard this argument before, and it had the same effect on her as on most other stalwarts of the new political creed. It annoyed her, because there was something in it.
“The vast majority of women are with us,” said she.
“My wife isn’t.”
“But your wife isn’t the vast majority of women,” Audrey protested.
“Oh yes, she is,” said the detective, “so far as I’m concerned. Every wife is, so far as her husband is concerned. Sure, you ought to know that!” In his Irish way he doubled the “r” of the word “sure,” and somehow this trick made Audrey like him still more. “My wife believes,” he concluded, “that woman’s sphere is the home.”
("His wife is stout,” Audrey decided within herself, on no grounds whatever. “If she wasn’t, she couldn’t be a vast majority.")