'Like a woman!'
'The case before the Suffragists' was just coming on. I heard a noise. I saw the helmets of two policemen.'
'No, you didn't. They don't wear their helmets in court.'
'They were coming in from the corridor. As I saw them, I said to myself, "What sort of crime shall I have to sit and hear about? Is this a burglar being brought along between the two big policemen, or will it be a murderer? What sort of felon is to stand in the dock before the people, whose crime is, they ask for the vote[?"] But try as I would, I couldn't see the prisoner. My heart misgave me. Is it some poor woman, I wondered?'
A tipsy tramp, with his battered bowler over one eye, wheezed out, 'Drunk again!' with an accent of weary philosophy. 'Syme old tyle.'
'Then the policemen got nearer, and I saw'—she waited an instant—'a little thin, half-starved boy. What do you think he was charged with?'
'Travellin' first with a third-class ticket.' A boy offered a page out of personal history.
'Stealing. What had he been stealing, that small criminal? Milk. It seemed to me, as I sat there looking on, that the men who had had the affairs of the world in their hands from the beginning, and who've made so poor a business of it——'
'Oh, pore devils! give 'em a rest!'
'Who've made so bad a business of it as to have the poor and the unemployed in the condition they're in to-day, whose only remedy for a starving child is to hale him off to the police court, because he had managed to get a little milk, well, I did wonder that the men refuse to be helped with a problem they've so notoriously failed at. I began to say to myself, "Isn't it time the women lent a hand?"'