“Well, granting your premise, granting all your premises, Beulah—and I admit that most of them have sound reasoning behind them—your battle now is all over but the shouting. There’s no reason that you personally should sacrifice your last drop of energy to a campaign that’s practically won already.” 226
“If you think the mere franchise is all I have been working for, Peter,—”
“I don’t. I know the thousand and one activities you women are concerned with. I know how much better church and state always have been and are bound to be, when the women get behind and push, if they throw their strength right.”
Beulah rose enthusiastically to this bait and talked rationally and well for some time. Just as Peter was beginning to feel that David and Jimmie had been guilty of the most unsympathetic exaggeration of her state of mind—unquestionably she was not as fit physically as usual—she startled him with an abrupt change into almost hysterical incoherence.
“I have a right to live my own life,” she concluded, “and nobody—nobody shall stop me.”
“We are all living our own lives, aren’t we?” Peter asked mildly.
“No woman lives her own life to-day,” Beulah cried, still excitedly. “Every woman is living the life of some man, who has the legal right to treat her as an imbecile.”
“Hold on, Beulah. How about the suffrage states, how about the women who are already in 227 the proud possession of their rights and privileges? They are not technical imbeciles any longer according to your theory. The vote’s coming. Every woman will be a super-woman in two shakes,—so what’s devouring you, as Jimmie says?”
“It’s after all the states have suffrage that the big fight will really begin,” Beulah answered wearily. “It’s the habit of wearing the yoke we’ll have to fight then.”
“The anti-feminists,” Peter said, “I see. Beulah, can’t you give yourself any rest, or is the nature of the cause actually suicidal?”