Aunt Juanita retwisting her hair with that impatience called out in the human breast by the depravity of inanimate objects such as hair switches, was flinging back words at Mrs. Higginson.
"Don't expect me to believe in any such stand as that, Harriet Higginson? There isn't but one issue to this thing. In a word, women have discovered they haven't their inalienable rights, and they want 'em."
"I'm so certain in my stand, Juanita Bruce, that I've come into this local thing with you to work for the issue as I believe it to be. I've given not a little thought and investigation and observation to the matter, for a good many years, and so have you. But I tell you, Juanita, your suffrage bee shall be proved a mere side issue in the final adjustment, whenever this does come, sooner or later. You and your adherents are diverting us from the main issue. We may lose it through you for years. For just to the extent that you do divert us you're putting the final outcome back."
Aunt Juanita snorted and started to reply. Mrs. Higginson, using the gold eye-glasses in her hand, waved her to unwilling silence.
"No, let me finish, Juanita, and then take your say. This is mine. I claim, and I'll go on claiming—I went up to your meeting in Rochester and stood for it from the platform. I'm going over to Chicago week after next and put it to 'em again from their platform. I claim that our rights, as you call 'em, will come to us as our capabilities push ahead of us, exactly as the flood follows the channel. I see it so plain, it's come to be an obsession with me. Let me illustrate. Take this town we live in, you and I. We're not the big mould of women now our mothers and our grandmothers were. Reasonable and intelligent administration of our homes and our servants and our income is the exception, and who shall say this town's not typical? For my part, my slogan is, and I'm here to cry it from your housetop, 'Organize and find out what's the matter.' Ability engendered among us, Juanita, and the rest of what you want will follow," Mrs. Higginson flipped the air again with her eye-glasses, "as the night the day."
The clerical force drew breath. It was a thrilling and momentous morning! They wouldn't have missed it!
"As the day the night is rather what my kind is demanding," from Aunt Juanita grimly. "We're benighted enough in all conscience now. Harriet Higginson, hear me. Not one woman in a hundred in this town, no, not one in five hundred or a thousand, owns a bank-book. I've investigated," grimly. "And if this is so in this town, why not the same thing elsewhere?"
The clerical force in blue felt this to be a sidelight. It brought in Tuttle Jones. Had he in the end secured the information for Aunt Juanita? How far away from this present battlefield seemed Tuttle and his world?
Mrs. Higginson was replying. "H'm, now that's valuable data, Juanita, I owe you some gratitude for giving me that. Putting that with some conclusions I've arrived at myself, sheds light on my problem. The whole cause of our present economic unfitness as I see it in woman, may lie in this fact you give me—no bank account of her own. It's worth looking into. It's only fair a woman should handle and apportion the money through which she is expected to administer the home. And what I've discovered for myself is this. Not one woman in your thousand in this town knows the price of flour, or sugar, or bacon or any other staple she uses every day in her household, except as quoted to her at her nearest grocery. No, nor can tell you her running expenses of this year as compared with any other year under her management. Nor but is so harassed by the servant problem as it's grown to be, that her peace and comfort and almost her self-respect is undermined. And our mothers bequeathed us a wonderful article in servants here in the South, too, in the house-servants of slave-time. Organize and find out what's the matter, I say. If the fault's not in us, then find out where it is, even unto bank-books," laughing. "And at all events, Juanita," pacifically and smiling again, "we're agreed on one point, the essential point right now. Organize 'em. Put it to 'em, pro and con, you and I, and let 'em choose. But first, organize 'em."
It was a thrilling and momentous morning as may be seen! The clerical force in pink and the clerical force in blue, entirely unable to hold its mind to the task in hand, felt that they were in touch at last with issues, real issues, throbbing, vital and essential issues!