So Milly went out to supper with the agreeable stranger.
"No," he resumed, after presenting her with a comforting beaker of champagne, "I've every sympathy with the woman with a job or with the woman who wants a job. All this silly talk about the sexes makes me tired. Man or woman, the job's the thing."
"Yes!" Milly assented with heartfelt emphasis.
"What every one needs is something to do, and women must be trained like men for their jobs."
He began to talk more seriously and entertainingly on the economic changes in modern society that had produced the present state of unrest and readjustment. He sketched quite feelingly what he called the old-fashioned woman, with her heavy duties and responsibilities in the pioneer days. "The real pillar of Society—and often a domestic slave, God bless her!" he said. "But her granddaughter has become either a parasite, or another kind of slave,—an industrial slave. And the vote isn't going to help her in either case."
Milly wondered in which class she fell. She didn't like the word "parasite,"—it sounded like a disease,—and yet she was afraid that was what she was.
"I think that I must be going," Milly said at last. She noticed that the rooms were fast emptying after the food had been devoured, and she could see Hazel nowhere. She would call her up in the morning and congratulate her on her speech. And so with a nod to the stranger she went for her wraps. But she found him again in the vestibule, and wondered if he had waited for her to come down.
"What's the name?" he asked, as the servant came forward to call her carriage.
"I haven't any cab," Milly replied bravely. It was her custom these days Cinderella-like to dispense with a return cab.
"But it's raining," the man protested. "You must let me set you down at your home."