"She's not the only one," Miss Graham said; "those three girls who passed us have done it. That nice Wharton child is going to study law, if you please! Yes, Freedom! It's gone to their heads; it's champagne on empty stomachs. Empty only for the last two generations—before that there were endless occupations to fill our stomachs. (My metaphors are a little mixed!) When I was a girl, the daughters of a house, even when people were as well off as Father, always had things to do—'Duties,' we called them. But nowadays there's not enough housework to go round; so if girls are rich, they play at work in—in anything, just to kill time! Like your Miss Freddy."
"Fred is making a success of her real-estate business," he said; "I hadn't a particle of faith in it, but she's making it go."
"It doesn't matter whether you have faith or not; the change has come: she had to have something to do! That's the secret of the situation, and there's no use kicking against it. You men have just got to accept the fact of the change. All you can do is to fall back on the thing that hasn't changed, and never can change, and never will change. Give girls that and they will get sober!"
He looked puzzled.
"My dear boy, let them be women, be wives, be mothers! Then being suffragists, or real-estate agents, or anything else, won't do them the slightest harm. Marry them, Arthur, marry them!"
"All of them?" he protested, in alarm.
She laughed, but held her own. "I always tell Mary that all that nice, bad child, your Freddy Payton, needs, is a husband. Which Mary thinks is very indelicate in me. But it's true. As for suffrage that the women are all cackling about, I don't care a—a—"
"Damn?" he suggested.
"Copper," she reproved him. "I don't care a copper about it! I've always called myself an anti, but I never really gave it much thought, one way or the other, until I went to an anti-suffrage meeting last year; that made me a suffragist! I declare, the foolishness of some of their arguments against voting went a long ways toward proving that perhaps they really haven't the brains to vote! Somebody said—Bessie Childs, I believe it was—that the ballot would take woman out of the Home. I reflected that Bridge took Bessie out of her home, for three or four hours once a week, and voting would take her out for three or four minutes, once a year. But I kept quiet until somebody intimated that the 'hand that rocks the cradle' is not competent, if you please, to deposit a ballot! Then I stood right up in meeting, and said, 'I'm only a poor old maid, but to my way of thinking, if the hand is as incompetent as that, it is far more dangerous to trust a cradle to it than a ballot!'"
"What did they say to that?"