"We have four who are doing it. They are in training for their honeymoons. You are to be the fifth to begin training," she said coolly.
He laughed again derisively, and lay watching her. She walked up close beside him and seated herself on the rock marked "Votes for Women."
"I suppose," she said, tauntingly, "that you were rather astonished to wake up from your fishing nap, and find yourself——" she considered the effect of her words, gazing at him insolently from under slightly lowered lashes—"find yourself all balled up in a fish net."
He only grinned at her.
"What are you laughing at?" she demanded, unsmiling.
"Lying here flat on my back, I am smiling at Woman! at every individual woman on earth! at this ridiculous feminine uprising, this suffragette revolution—at your National Female Federation Committee; the thousands of local unions; this strike of your entire sex; this general boycott of my sex! What has it accomplished?" He tried to wave his hand.
"You parade and make speeches in the streets, throw bricks, slap the faces of a few State Congressmen, and finally proclaim a general strike and boycott.
"And what's the result? All social functions and ceremonies are suspended; caterers, florists, confectioners, cabmen, ruined; theatres, restaurants, department stores, novelists, milliners, in financial throes; a falling off of over eighty per cent. in marriages and births—and you are no nearer a vote than you were before the great strike paralysed the business of this Republic."
The young lady had been growing pinker and pinker.
"Oh! . . . And is that why you are laughing?" she asked.