“Meanwhile,” said George, with a timid attempt at gallantry, as they now commenced the quadrille, “I take encouragement from the belief that I have the good wishes of Miss Travers. If ladies had votes, as Mr. Mill recommends, why, then—”
“Why, then, I should vote as Papa does,” said Miss Travers, simply. “And if women had votes, I suspect there would be very little peace in any household where they did not vote as the man at the head of it wished them.”
“But I believe, after all,” said the aspirant to Parliament, seriously, “that the advocates for female suffrage would limit it to women independent of masculine control, widows and spinsters voting in right of their own independent tenements.”
“In that case,” said Cecilia, “I suppose they would still generally go by the opinion of some man they relied on, or make a very silly choice if they did not.”
“You underrate the good sense of your sex.”
“I hope not. Do you underrate the good sense of yours, if, in far more than half the things appertaining to daily life, the wisest men say, ‘Better leave them to the women’? But you’re forgetting the figure, cavalier seul.”
“By the way,” said George, in another interval of the dance, “do you know a Mr. Chillingly, the son of Sir Peter, of Exmundham, in Westshire?”
“No; why do you ask?”
“Because I thought I caught a glimpse of his face: it was just as Mr. Steen was bearing me away down that plantation. From what you say, I must suppose I was mistaken.”
“Chillingly! But surely some persons were talking yesterday at dinner about a young gentleman of that name as being likely to stand for Westshire at the next election, but who had made a very unpopular and eccentric speech on the occasion of his coming of age.”