Signed and sealed by the above named Sarah Hayden Mosely as her last will and testament, and by us in her presence and at her request subscribed as witnesses.
Enos Cann.
Mary Cann.
In a brief paragraph beneath this extraordinary document the editor added that in an interview Judge John Regis admitted that all the trustees had accepted, that they were confident of carrying out the terms of the will, but that the board was not ready now to give information concerning its plans.
No woman had ever been "interviewed" in Jordantown by a newspaper reporter. This may have accounted for the fact that Carter did not call upon either Mrs. Walton or Selah Adams before going to press. Besides, the sixteen-hundred-dollar mortgage on the Signal was now owned by the Co-Citizens' Foundation. He could not trust himself even in the presence of these powerful women. The very form of his question, his manner, might betray his secret feelings and do incredible damage.
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. 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. If the one is more active, the other is the more persistent. And it depends entirely upon the emergency which will show the most courage. Place them side by side under the same conditions to accomplish the same thing, and while each will go about the business in a different manner, the same proportion of both sexes will succeed at the job.
The difficulty is that men and women neither live nor work under the same conditions. The former have the overwhelming advantage, owing to the fact that they create their own public opinion and hold the balance of power, prestige, and influence.
This was precisely the balance which had been destroyed in Jordantown. The women now had all the advantage. It was monstrous and called for the exercise of all the furnace language of which men are naturally capable.
The one hope expressed everywhere was that, being the timid things that they were, the women would not know how to keep the grip they had upon the situation.
"Hang it! They are our wives and daughters. We ought to be able to do what we always have done, direct them and control them through their affections," said Acres, turning up the ends of his moustache with a kind of bantam bravado.
"If a woman has nothing but her affections it is easy enough to manage her, but nobody knows what use she may make of her heels if she has everything else besides," growled Coleman, who had just come from a breakfast table where his wife, Agatha, had pointedly refused to give him certain information about the Co-Citizens' Foundation which he knew she had.