“Then you would give us the vote?”
Her eyes glimmered with sudden mischief, and his answered them.
“Certainly, to the normal women. Why not?”
“Are all the male voters normal?”
“Don’t make me say cynical things. If so many hundreds of thousands of fools have the vote at present, I do not see that it matters much if many more thousands of fools are given it.”
“That isn’t you!”
“It is a sensible, if a cynical conclusion. But I hope for something better. We are at school, we moderns, and we may be a little too clever. But if any parson tells me that we are not better than our forefathers, I can only call him a liar.”
She laughed.
“Oh, that’s healthy—that’s sound. I’m tired of thinking—criticising. I want to do things. It may be that quiet work in a corner is better than all the talking that ever was.”
“Of course. Read Pasteur’s life. There’s the utter damning of the merely political spirit.”