"Yes; aren't you? Let's get in the flap of that sail."
"Do I look like a suffragist?" the other man demanded.
Howard surveyed him. "I don't know the earmarks, but you show traces of intelligence, so I suppose you are."
"I'll tell you the earmarks—in the human male: amiable youth or doddering age."
"You're not guilty on the amiability charge, and you don't visibly dodder. So I suppose you're an anti."
"Not on your life! It's a case of a plague on both your houses."
They were silent for a while, looking across the lagoon at a low reef where, all day long, the palms bent and rustled in the hot wind; then Leighton broke out: "For utter absence of logic I wouldn't know which party to put my money on."
"Play the antis," Howard advised.
But the other man demurred. "It's neck and neck. Some of the arguments of the antis indicate idiocy; but some of the suffs' arguments indicate mania—homicidal mania! It's a dead heat. It's queer," he ruminated; "each side has sound reasons for the faith that is in it, yet they both offer us such a lot of—truck! One of the mysteries of the feminine mind, I suppose." He knocked the ashes out of his pipe on the deck-rail, and yawned. "As an example of 'truck,' I heard an anti say that for a woman to assume the functions of a man, and vote, was to 'revert to the amœba.' Can you match that? But, on the other hand, look at the suffs! My own sister-in-law (a mighty fine woman) told me that men 'were of no use except to continue the race.'"
"That's going some!"