That tickled the crowd, too; she was such a charming little pink-cheeked specimen of a hooligan.
'I'm being frightfully amused, Geoffrey,' said Jean.
He looked down at her with a large indulgence. 'That's right,' he said.
'We aren't hooligans, but we hope the fact will be overlooked. If everybody said we were nice, well-behaved women, who'd come to hear us? Not the men.'
The people dissolved in laughter, but she was grave enough.
'Men tell us it isn't womanly for us to care about politics. How do they know what's womanly? It's for women to decide that. Let them attend to being manly. It will take them all their time.'
'Pore benighted man!'
'Some of you have heard it would be dreadful if we got the vote, because then we'd be pitted against men in the economic struggle. But it's too late to guard against that. It's fact. But facts, we've discovered, are just what men find it so hard to recognize. Men are so dreadfully sentimental.' She smiled with the crowd at that, but she proceeded to hammer in her pet nail. 'They won't recognize those eighty-two women out of every hundred who are wage-earners. We used to believe men when they told us that it was unfeminine—hardly respectable—for women to be students and to aspire to the arts that bring fame and fortune. But men have never told us it was unfeminine for women to do the heavy drudgery that's badly paid. That kind of work had to be done by somebody, and men didn't hanker after it. Oh, no! Let the women scrub and cook and wash, or teach without diplomas on half pay. That's all right. But if they want to try their hand at the better-rewarded work of the liberal professions—oh, very unfeminine indeed.'
As Ernestine proceeded to show how all this obsolete unfairness had its roots in political inequality, Lady John dropped her glass with a sigh.
'You are right,' she said to Jean. 'This is Hilda, harnessed to a purpose. A portent to shake middle-aged nerves.'