“How many do you know, Susanna?” inquired Fluffy sweetly.
“Celissa Seaton and—you,” retorted Susanna. “Of course you’re not a bore in general, Fluffy dear, but if you’re going off on that horrid subject——”
“Well, of course I can’t talk very interestingly about it,” Fluffy conceded diplomatically. “I don’t know enough to. But you should hear Miss Seaton. You’d have to find some other word besides bore to express your opinion of her, because you simply couldn’t call her that. She gets all pink and excited, and she looks positively pretty in spite of her hair. Don’t you know how Miss Ferris is always saying that everybody is interesting if you can only find the right thing to talk about? Well, Miss Seaton is just splendid on the woman question.”
“And are you really a suffragist, Fluffy?” inquired Sallie Wright, in an awestruck voice. Not being at all clever herself, Sallie admired the Duttons from a safe distance, and spent hours pondering over their idiosyncrasies.
“Oh, not so you’d notice it,” Fluffy told her. “Sorry to reduce the number of your suffragist friends to one, Susanna; but I’m still on the fence. I’ve chosen the anti-suffrage position for my final essay in the course, but so far, I may say, the arguments look to me pretty slim. If any idiotic man can vote, why in the world shouldn’t we?”
“I thought Montana Marie’s extra-special show settled all that foolishness,” said Timmy Wentworth. “It made fun of all those queer advanced notions, specially suffrage, and as far as I could see it did ’em up brown.”
Fluffy sighed again patiently. “There you go again. It made fun! You can make fun of anything—anything under the sun. But what have you proved? What did that silly suffrage skit prove? What did our ‘Before Breakfast, Never After’ farce prove? Nothing!” concluded Fluffy dramatically.
“Well, they were certainly oceans of fun,” declared Sallie Wright feelingly.
“And apparently they did oceans of harm,” Fluffy took her up, “if they gave you and Timmy and all your little pals the idea that nonsense like that is any real argument against the sensible modern ideas about women. Miss Seaton felt that way about the show, but I thought she was dippy. Now I’m almost sorry I went in for it.”
“I believe Fluff’s got a crush on Celissa Seaton,” Straight called across Fluffy in a stage whisper directed at Montana Marie. Before Fluffy had time to retort, the door opened and Georgia Ames appeared.