"And Womankind, surely, Mr. Gladstone?" subjoined the Strong-minded Woman, glaring reproachfully through her spectacles at the Anti-Woman's-Rights Premier. "I wish I could say as much of you, Sir!"
"Labour and the Ladies seem to have small share in his thoughts," began the Striker, hotly, when Lord Rosebery touched him gently on his fustian-clad shoulder, and he subsided.
"Am I not a lady?" queried Hibernia, with an affectionate glance at her aged champion.
"Golly, and me too?" added a damsel of dusky Libyan charms, clinging close to the stalwart arm of Napoleonic Cecil Rhodes.
"Yes—with a difference!" said the Oracle, drily. "'Place aux dames' is a motto of partial and rather capricious application, is it not, my evergreen Premier?"
"A principle of politeness rather than of politics or Parliament—at present," murmured the G. O. M.
"Pooh!" sniffed the Strong-minded Woman. "It will spread. Read Mr. H. Fowler's Bill, and Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace's Woman and Natural Selection; put this and that together, and perpend!"
"The Penny Phonograph," pursued Mr. Oracle Punch, "is now prodigiously patronised. For the popular penny you can hear an American band, a Chevalier coster ballad, the 'Charge of the Light Brigade,' a comic song by 'Little Tich,' or a speech by the Old Man eloquent. No; for the latter I believe they charge twopence. That is fame, my Pantagruelian Premier. But in my Funograph—charge the unchangeable Threepence—you can hear the very voice of Wisdom and Wit, of Humanity and Humour, of Eloquence and Essential Truth, of Music and of Mirth!"
"Hear! hear! hear!" chorussed everybody.