That sort of interruption did not so much embarrass her, but once or twice she was nearly thrown off her beam-ends by men and boys shouting, 'Wot's the matter with yer anyway? Can't yer get a husband?' and such-like brilliant relevancies. Although she flushed at some of these sallies, she stuck to her guns with a pluck that won her friends. In one of the pauses a choleric old man gesticulated with his umbrella.
'If what the world needed was Woman's Suffrage, it wouldn't have been left for a minx like you to discover it.' At which volleys of approval.
'That gentleman seems to think it's a new madness that we've recently invented.' The child seemed in her loneliness to reach out for companioning. She spoke of 'our friend John Stuart Mill.'
'Oo's Mill?'
'That great Liberal wrote in 1867——' But Mill and she were drowned together. She waited a moment for the flood of derision to subside.
'’E wouldn't 'ad nothin' to do with yer if 'e'd thought you'd go on like you done.'
'Benjamin Disraeli was on our side. Mazzini—Charles Kingsley. As long ago as 1870, a Woman's Suffrage Bill that was drafted by Dr. Pankhurst and Mr. Jacob Bright passed a second [reading.']
'The best sort of women never wanted it.'
'The kind of women in the past who cared to be associated with this reform—they were women like Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Martineau, and Josephine Butler, and the two thousand other women of influence who memorialized Mr. Gladstone.'