MRS. THOM. You know about the petition and yet you refuse to subscribe to it! Mildred, dear, this is a question of your future happiness. I might almost say of your future safety. Reflect before it is too late what it means to put yourself in the power of a man who believes in the continued enslavement of women.
MR. MELVIN. Oh, Mrs. Thom, you are too severe. If I am in no hurry to see women voting and a reduplication of the ignorant vote, I refuse to be called a Bluebeard. I believe that noble women are inherent queens above the vote, not below it.
MRS. THOM. In England they class women with children and lunatics in barring them from political rights. In New York, the Constitution extends the vote to any male citizen over twenty-one years old regardless of whether he is sane or insane. Even a lunatic if he be a male is held superior to a woman.
MRS. BROWN. That’s because so many men are a little queer. If votes could be challenged for craziness as well as for illegal residence the watchers at the polls would never finish their tasks.
MR. VAN TOUSEL. I want to wish you every happiness, Miss Mildred, but like Mrs. Thom, I feel a little uncertain about your future. A woman who is so strong on the subject of Woman Suffrage as you are ought to marry a man who could sympathize with her.
MILDRED. Oh, but Edward does sympathize with me. He has been sympathizing with me all the week. I never met any one who understood me so well.
MR. VAN TOUSEL. Perhaps I should have said sympathize in “the cause.” A man and a woman who believe in the same cause when joined together can do so much for its advancement.
MILDRED. I will convert him after we are married.
MRS. THOM. It will be too late then. Conversion after marriage is like putting yeast in bread after it is baked. It cannot raise the fallen.
(Enter SOPHIE SLAVINSKY and BECKER. The latter a little shamefaced.)