The Brown Borough never protests if you surprise it; and in any case, Mrs. Wigsky’s soul was too dead for consistent protest. Also it was certainly a change to be visited by one who lacked the visitor’s apprising eye, who seemed unaware of an unswept floor and an unmade bed.
“As Father Christopher talked about the Brown Borough women ...” said the suffragette, “I wanted more and more to know them, because it seems to me so splendid to keep going at all in the Brown Borough. I must tell you I always love women. So you must forgive me for coming.”
“’Tain’t often as lidies come to admire us,” said Mrs. Wigsky. “They allus comes to show us ’ow wrong we are.”
“I’m not a lady,” said the suffragette.
“Ow, yus you are,” said the eldest girl, speaking for the first time.
“Are you the girl that’s out of a job?” asked the suffragette.
“Yus. Farver Christopher got me a job as general to the lidy oo keeps the post orfice. She give me three-an’-six a week an’ no food, an’ mother ain’t earnin’ now, an’ Tom’s in ’orsbital, so it weren’t good enough. I run awiy. She ’it me too, an’ mide me cerry up the coals. But ’er bein’ a lidy, I couldn’t siy much—I jus’ run awiy.”
“I wish you’d hit her back,” said the suffragette. “And I wish the word ‘lady’ had never been invented.”
“Lidies is lidies, an’ generals is generals,” said Mrs. Wigsky. “Gawd mide it so, an’ you carn’t get over it.”
“I’m sure God never made it so,” said the suffragette. “He made men and women, and nothing else. He made man in His own image, and left woman to make herself. And she’s doing it. That’s what makes us all so proud to be women.”