"I've bluffed it so far, John Regis. I've reorganized the Civic League and Cemetery Association into the Co-Citizens' League, which was no small undertaking, I can tell you. Half the women would not have joined if they'd known what they were doing. I got them by not explaining how immediate the business of getting suffrage is, and by offering scandalous committee appropriations. But I'm shaking in my shoes. I don't know how we are to carry out the conditions of this trust. The more I think of it, the more I suspect Sarah Mosely of being plain crazy!"
"She's the first woman in this country to meet the issue of suffrage for women with the sanity of practical common sense," he answered.
"But she's limited her bequest to use in this county. Suffrage is a state issue. I should know. I have given years of thought to it."
"Yes, you've spent your energies like the rest of them, Susan, in mere agitation, in parades with transparencies bearing the legend, 'Votes for Women!' The last one of you might as well be blowing your breath against the order of things. Nothing could be more futile."
"We are beginning to create a sentiment for suffrage," she protested.
"Yes, in women. But can women give it to you? What's the good of undertaking the impossible? The income from this Foundation will not exceed twenty thousand dollars a year. That would not be a drop in the bucket in a state campaign, where you would be compelled to fight the most powerful political machines, and the graft and vice elements of the cities, all of which are naturally opposed to suffrage for women."
"Still, I don't see what we can do here in this county alone with the whole state against us," she objected.
"That is the question Mrs. Mosely answered. This little old woman fading into a mere shadow behind the doors of her house saw the solution which the rest of you missed with all your breadth of vision—too much breadth of vision, Susan, is as bad as not having any at all. No focus to it, not enough rays to burn through."
"I think you know I have had some experience in political affairs, more than most women, and I must say I don't see yet where Sarah Mosely focussed her rays," snapped Susan.
"I had several conferences with her. It appeared that she had thought of nothing else for years but this Foundation. She got the idea, she told me, from living with her husband. He was a man whose wife was his rib, not a separate human being. He was kind to her, but she had no more liberty than a child. She never knew anything of his affairs. She told me that she was and had always been absolutely incapable of attending to any business. She had been obliged to trust an agent. In any case she would have been forced to trust some one. She thought most women were in this condition of helplessness, and that they would remain so, always the prey of circumstances of the forces about them. And she wished to change that."