"Every woman's name on the list you're to make, Miss Selina," she explained, "is a target at which we two are proposing to fire our convictions. It's a glorious thing at any time of one's life to have convictions, let me tell you, if you haven't discovered it." Was she laughing at them? "Mrs. Bruce and I are the two liveliest women in this town, and always will be, because our convictions, whatever they be, ride us."
Having finished unboxing the envelopes Aunt Juanita was going around distributing ink. She paused at this point in Mrs. Higginson's remarks, tweaked her nose with the side of the ink bottle in her hand, since that hand was occupied with the bottle, and addressed herself to this lady.
"Organize! Organize! If we can just get that word and its significances over to the women in this town! If we can make 'em understand that woman's hope everywhere lies in this one word! If we can show 'em that it's the instrument of the whole era upon us, for class, labor, capital, too, Aurelius points out, as well as the one instrument for them! Organize and discover our strength as women and so on to our rights. That's the phrase. That's the slogan."
The clerical force in pink showed a bright spot on either cheek! The open heart and the open mind were ever hers! Her handsome, hazel-brown eyes beneath her red-brown hair were dilating with the beginnings of zeal, of fire!
The clerical force with the heavy masses of pale flaxen hair, the clerical force, that is to say, in blue brought some names on a bit of paper over to the visibly impressed force in pink. "Organize for what, Maud? Who'll organize? And where?"
"Hush," said Maud, "I don't know. But I feel right from the start I'm with 'em! So you're, Selina." And so were others all over this fair land to be with them; others as great in faith and zeal as Maudie, though no better equipped in comprehension as to what it was about! But it was glorious none the less to be there!
Mrs. Higginson was replying to Aunt Juanita. Her voice was good-humored but ripe and decided. She was a person accustomed to being heard. "Now, Juanita Bruce, you haven't any grounds whatever for assuming I'm with you in any position. You know exactly where I stand in this movement among women all over this land. You know the stand I've taken in it as well as you know your own. And you know why I want to organize our own women in this town. I say this movement, this quiver, so to put it, running from side to side of this continent, has some underlying cause. I say it's woman's dissatisfaction with herself. I say she's roused and looked at herself and the sight's not pleasing to her. You put the cause outside of woman. I say to my sex, 'Organize and find out what's the trouble with yourself.' That's my slogan to my sex, and that's my present mission."
Aunt Juanita banged down the ink bottle still in her hand. Two hairpins leaped from her hair with the impact, and the switch of gray hair that all too palpably eked out her own scant store, promptly surged forward and threatened her left eye. But the uplift of the moment raised everybody's mind above such as that! The clerical force were so enthralled they couldn't keep to work if salvation depended on it. And on the other hand apparently salvation of some kind depended on their listening and finding out about this thing? Was there a movement among their sex, a movement wide as the continent? Where had they been during it? Why had they not heard of it? How had it manifested itself? Had it spoken?
So these young and ardent two! Nor knew that they in their gropings, their dissatisfactions, their restlessness, their eager scannings of horizons, their questionings, their discontents with inaction, they and Juliette in her revolt, they and Adele in her repinings, were part and proof with it and of it!