If you can't guess what they had got you must be obtuse.
The great procession of Women M.P.'s formed in Trafalgar Square. Behind them were the ruins of the National Gallery (the work of the immortal Miss Podgers, B.Sc.); before them were the fragments of the Nelson Column (Miss Tunk's world-famous feat).
The free fight concerning the leadership of the procession was settled by the intervention of mounted police. They decided that all the would-be leaders should march abreast with two armed policemen between each pair of them to prevent casualties by the way. So the head of the procession started off sixty abreast down Whitehall.
It was a magnificent spectacle. All the M.P.'s wore green-and-white wigs because it was the fashion, and in addition green-and-white whiskers to assert their equality with men. Each processionist carried a model of her greatest work. There was Mrs. Spankham with a superb model of Westminster Abbey—its petrolling had been the greatest stroke in convincing the voters of the pure motives of the feminists. Miss Sylvia Spankham bore aloft the City Temple, Miss Christabel Spankham the Albert Hall, whilst Mrs. Lawrence Pothook waved triumphantly a lovely representation of King's Cross Station. Magnificent too was Mrs. Drummit riding astride a fire-engine as an emblem of peace and goodwill.
The crowd viewed the procession with awed silence, only breaking into cheers when Miss Blithers, blushing modestly, held up a cardboard representation of the Albert Memorial she had nitro-glycerined. Miss Bliggs marched triumphantly in a bishop's mitre bearing a pastoral staff, in recognition of her great feat in forcibly feeding a wicked bishop who had written a letter to the Press against forcible, feeding. Misunderstood by the crowd was Mrs. Trudge, who wheeled a perambulator containing two babies. The onlookers thought that Mrs. Trudge was about to take her innocent offspring to the House of Commons, and those out of hat-pin range murmured, "Shime," "Give the kids a chawnce." They did not know that Mrs. Trudge was no base slave of man, that she had no children of her own, and that the wax babies she wheeled in the perambulator merely indicated that she was the heroine who had doped a nursemaid with drugged chocolate and abducted a Cabinet Minister's twins.
Unhappily Miss Bolland also passed unidentified, though she held a cardboard tube aloft. Not even a taxi-driver cheered as the intrepid lady passed who had blown up the electrical-generation station of the Tubes and made London walk for a month. There too was Mrs. Tibbs, brave in her misfortunes. She had missed her election by one vote just because, when she came to the booth to vote for herself, lifelong habit had been too strong for her and she had phosphorused the ballot box.
An unfortunate breeze from the river played havoc with the processionists' whiskers, and one or two of the weaker spirits in the ranks argued that some of the Government offices in Whitehall ought to have been left standing for protection—at any rate till the procession was over.
On they went, each of the twenty leaders in front explaining how she had led the movement to triumph. On the top of the fire-engine Mrs. Drummit danced a futurist dance, symbolic of the subjection of man. At last they reached the portals of the House. The leaders broke into a run to secure front places on the Government benches.
"Stop," cried a police superintendent, rushing from the building.
"The days of man's tyranny are over!" shouted twenty voices together.