'No,' said the girl promptly, 'for soldiers and sailors don't vote.'
'It implies fitness for military service,' somebody amended.
'It shouldn't,' said Nineteen, calmly; 'it ought to imply merely a stake in the country. No one denies we have that.'
The crowd kept on about soldiering, till the speaker was goaded into saying—
'I don't say women like fighting, but women can fight! In these days warfare isn't any more a matter of great physical strength, and a woman can pull a trigger as well as a man. The Boer women found that out—and so has the Russian. I don't like thinking about it myself—for I seem to realize too clearly what horrors those women endured before they could carry bombs or shoulder rifles.'
'Rifles? Why a woman can't never hit nothing.'
'It is quite true we can't most of us even throw a stone straight—the great mass of women never in all their lives wanted to hit anybody or anything. And that'—she came nearer, and leaned over the side of the cart with scared face—'it's that that makes it so dreadful to realize how at last when women's eyes are opened—when they see their homes and the holiest things in life threatened and despised, how quickly after all they can learn the art of war.'
'With hatpins!' some one called out.
'Yes, scratching and spitting,' another added.