"When I was a young lady—" she began, and instantly Frederica's lance was in rest! She did not mean to be cruel—but she couldn't help being smart. Her mother's injured sense of propriety was batted back to her across the dinner-table, like a shuttlecock from a resounding battledore.
"You may say what you like," Mrs. Payton said, obstinately, "but I don't believe it would make a bit of difference to give those perfectly uneducated Italian girls a vote. It hasn't," she ended, with one of those flashes of shrewdness so characteristic of dull women, "made any difference in the men's wages. And, anyhow, I don't understand why you like to mix yourself up with all sorts of persons."
"The Founder of your religion mixed Himself with all sorts of persons," Frederica said, wickedly; "but, of course, He would not be in society to-day."
"That is a very irreverent thing to say," Mrs. Payton said, stiffly.
("Now, why," Mr. Weston pondered, "why doesn't the atrocious taste of that sort of talk cure me? Because," he answered himself, "it 'amuses' me! Oh, Cousin Eliza, you are a wise old woman!")
As for Frederica, she was not conscious that her lack of taste was amusing; but she knew it was unkind, and felt the instant stab of remorse. ("I'm just like Father!" she groaned to herself); then with resolution she began to talk about puzzles; she said she thought the reason her mother couldn't work out that six-hundred-piece one was because the people who made it had omitted some pieces, and it never could be got out.
"Try it a few days longer," Fred said, "and then, if you want me to, I'll write to the people who manufactured it and ask them about it. Arthur Weston! I am going to stand by those girls in Hazelton until they win out!"
"When they do, their work will stop," he prophesied, mildly. "The factory hasn't paid a dividend for three years, and if wages go up, it will shut up. I happen to know how they stand."
"Laura's back," Fred said, abruptly; "they got home yesterday. I asked her if she'd walk in the parade, and she said, 'Howard wouldn't like it!' That sort of thing makes me tired."