"Let us stay and hear them for a while. I never have."
"All right!—I'll pay the cab." He came back to her, and they moved across and under the trees. "Are you interested?"
"I think I am. I haven't made up my mind. We're so far South that as a movement it's all as yet only a rather distant sound. How do you feel about it?"
"Why, I think it's an honest proposition. I've never seen why not. We're all human together, aren't we? But building bridges for South American Governments has kept me, too, a little out of earshot. I see what the papers say, and they're saying a good deal."
"Ours chiefly confine themselves to being scandalized by the English Militants."
"Then your papers are very foolish. Who ever supposed there weren't Jacobins in every historic struggle for liberty? Sometimes they help and sometimes they hinder, and sometimes they do both at once. It's rather superficial to see only the 'left,' and not the movement of which it is the 'left.'"
They came beneath the trees upon the fringe of the crowd about one of the gold-swathed stands. This was an attentive crowd, not restless but listening, slanted forward. The man from the taxicab touched a young workman upon the arm. "Who is it speaking?" The other turned a pale, tense face. "It's one that can hold them. It's Rose Darragh, speaking for the working-women."
The two made their way to where they could see and hear. Rose Darragh, speaking with a lifted irony and passion, sent her last Parthian arrow, paused a moment, then cried with a vibrant voice, "Give the working-woman a vote!" and stepped back and down from the stand. "By George!" breathed the man from the cab. The crowd applauded—for such a meeting applauded loudly.
The young man to whom the two had appealed cried out also. "Give the working-woman a vote! She's working dumb and driven under your factory laws! Give her the vote!"
A large, bald-headed, stubborn-jawed man who had been making sotto-voce remarks, turned with anger. "And have them striking at the polls as well as striking in the shop! Doubling the ignorant vote and getting into the way of business! You'd better listen to what I tell you! Woman's place is at home—damn her!"