"Your influence won't be exerted against me, I hope, when the time comes?"
"By no means. Don't you see that I have already begun to help you?"
"By making it clear that my Radicalism is not of the most dangerous type?"
They laughed, together, and Quarrier, though the dialogue entertained him, rose as if to depart.
"I will leave you with your Greeks, Mrs. Wade; though I fear you haven't much pleasure in them from that special point of view."
"I don't know; they have given us important types of womanhood. The astonishing thing is that we have got so little ahead of them in the facts of female life. Woman is still enslaved, though men nowadays think it necessary to disguise it."
"Do you really attach much importance to the right of voting, and so on?"
"'And so on!' That covers a great deal, Mr. Quarrier. I attach all importance to a state of things which takes for granted that women stand on a level with children."
"So they do—with an inappreciable number of exceptions. You must be perfectly well aware of that."
"And so you expect me to be satisfied with it?—I insist on the franchise, because it symbolizes full citizenship. I won't aim at anything less than that. Women must be taught to keep their eyes on that, as the irreducible minimum of their demands."