They were strangely quiet, under the spell of the beautiful voice, and the eyes that were luminous and deep with tenderness:
"There are faithful Christians among you; brave earnest souls who have prayed to GOD for guidance among the difficulties that beset the way for working-women, and weaker souls have been maddened to frenzy and plunged into unbelief by the intolerance and the injustice, the shrieking wrongs and the unpurged evils that Man, who enters upon his heritage the world, by the Gate of Motherhood, has ignorantly accumulated upon the shoulders of the sex he professes to respect."
There was a murmur of approval at this. She lifted a hand, and they were silent.
"I say to those who have despaired, 'Despair no longer!' I say to those who have prayed—'Your prayer is answered!' Take up the work that has dropped from the hands that are busy with the rifle. Prove your right to the Parliamentary Franchise. Take your place amongst the World's Workers, for good and for all. The Vote will be granted: it cannot be denied! But if you had it now, passionately as you desire it, and the choice were offered you—Oh! my sisters!—would you not yield it up with gladness to bring those dead men back to life again?"
And after a pause of unbroken silence she added:
"For they have fought even better than they knew. They have re-conquered Woman. Freely and willingly as comrade and helper she takes her place and her share of the burden. Peace is proclaimed. The War between the sexes is at an end!"
We know how truly the speaker prophesied. Quietly as the vast Atlantic flows into and fills a labyrinth of empty, echoing, rock-caverns, the vast body of unemployed women took the places of the male workers called away to the Front. They had clicked into the slots before the world was well aware of it, or they themselves understood that a miracle had been wrought.
Said the breeched and gaitered lady-conductor of a North-West tram the other day:
"Now the ones that was brought up active has got their chance to do a bit, and the ones that was brought up idle 'ave found out that they like work, will they ever be content to sit and twiddle their thumbs again? I don't think!" She clipped pink tickets with zeal, and when a red-nosed, watery-eyed elderly man who had offered her a pewter shilling cursed her venomously as she thrust the coin back on him: "'Ere you! ... 'Op it!" she said to the offender, and caught him neatly by the scruff, hauled him down the cork-screw stairway, and deposited him in the Camden Road without turning a hair.
CHAPTER LXVIII