“I thought you were so interested—”
“As far as I am concerned the entire movement is concentrated in you. You may be the type, but I don’t believe it, and anyhow I don’t care.”
“Well, you saw some of them on the platform last night.”
“I saw no one but you. In fact I had an opera-glass trained on you throughout the whole show.”
“Oh! Did you? But you haven’t told me what brought you over.”
“We’re trying to open an important connection in London, and our representative cabled me to come over and help him. An American has to sit up nights to keep an Englishman from getting ahead of him, much as an Englishman has to sit up watching a Scot. This is the top of civilization, all right—and all that term implies. No wonder your women are ahead in their particular game.”
“But the American women are now almost as keen on Suffrage as we are.”
“Yes, but in their way, not yours. I’m for giving them the vote, for they’ll help us to clean up, and incidentally develop their minds. But your women are a century ahead—not that we’ll ever have such women. Thank God, we haven’t the men to breed them. You’re up against the hundred-per-cent male. That is enough to make women stronger than death. With us it’s more likely to be the other way.”
“You don’t look henpecked.”
“No more I am, nor ever shall be. Our women only think they do the tyrannizing. Give a woman her head in trifles, all the money she can whine or nag for, and she thinks she’s the whole show. That’s the way we manage ours. What they don’t know doesn’t hurt them.”