With that Miss Ernestine sat down. They applauded her lustily; they revelled in laughing praise, yielding to a glow that they imagined to be pure magnanimity.
'Are there any questions?' Miss Claxton, with her eyes still screwed up to meet the returning sun and the volley of interrogatory, appeared at the side of the cart. 'Now, one at a time, please. What? I can't hear when you all talk together. Write it down and hand it to me. Now, you people who are nearer—what? Very well! Here's a man who wants to know whether if women had the vote wouldn't it make dissension in the house, when husband and wife held different views?' She had smiled and nodded, as though in this question she welcomed an old friend, but instead of answering it she turned to the opposite side and looked out over the clamourers on the left. They were engaged for the most part in inquiring about her matrimonial prospects, and why she had carried that dog-whip. Something in her face made them fall silent, for it was both good-humoured and expectant, even intent. 'I'm waiting,' she said, after a little pause. 'At every meeting we hold there's usually another question put at the same time as that first one about the quarrels that will come of husbands and wives holding different opinions. As though the quarrelsome ones had been waiting for women's suffrage before they fell out! When the man on my right asks, "Wouldn't they quarrel?" there's almost always another man on my left who says, "If women were enfranchised we wouldn't be an inch forrader, because the wife would vote as her husband told her to. The man's vote would simply be duplicated, and things would be exactly as they were." Neither objector seems to see that the one scruple cancels the other. But to the question put this afternoon, I'll just say this.' She bent forward, and she held up her hand. 'To the end of time there'll be people who won't rest till they've found something to quarrel about. And to the end of time there'll be wives who follow blindly where their husbands lead. And to the end of time there'll be husbands who are influenced by their wives. What's more, all this has gone on ever since there were husbands, and it will go on as long as there are any left, and it's got no more to do with women's voting than it has with their making cream tarts. No, not half as much!' she laughed. 'Now, where's that question that you were going to write?'
Some one handed up a wisp of white paper. Miss Claxton opened it, and upon the subject presented she embarked with the promising beginning, 'Your economics are pretty wobbly, my friend,' and proceeded to clear the matter up and incidentally to flatten out the man. One wondered that under such auspices 'Question Time' was as popular as it obviously was. There is no doubt a fearful joy in adventuring yourself in certain danger before the public eye. Besides the excitement of taking a personal share in the game, there is always the hope that it may have been reserved to you to stump the speaker and to shine before the multitude.
A gentleman who had vainly been trying to get her to hear him, again asked something in a hesitating way, stumbling and going back to recast the form of his question.
He was evidently quite in earnest, but either unaccustomed to the sound of his own voice or unnerved to find himself bandying words in Hyde Park with a Suffragette. So when he stuck fast in the act of fashioning his phrases, Miss Claxton bent in the direction whence the voice issued, and said, briskly obliging—
'You needn't go on. I know the rest. What this gentleman is trying to ask is——'
And although no denial on his part reached the public ear, it was not hard to imagine him seething with indignation, down there helpless in his crowded corner, while the facile speaker propounded as well as demolished his objection to her and all her works.
'Yes; one last question. Let us have it.'
'How can you pretend that women want the vote? Why, there are hardly any here.'
'More women would join us openly but for fear of their fellow-cowards. Thousands upon thousands of women feel a sympathy with this movement they dare not show.'