“But the puzzling part of it all is, Mrs. Hays, that it appears to be decent women who are doing it.  Moreover, it’s not an impulse with them but a plan.  That rather sets one thinking, doesn’t it?  You see, it’s a sort of revolution.  Revolutions have got us almost everything we have that is really worth while in the way of personal liberty; but I don’t suppose any of them seemed very ‘decent’ to the non-combatants who were looking on.  Then, too, you have to realize that women are very much handicapped in conducting a fight.”

“What have they got to fight against, I should like to know?” demanded Mrs. Hays, dropping her sewing and grasping the arms of her chair in her indignation.

“Well,” said Kate, “I fancy we American women haven’t much idea of all that the Englishwomen are called upon to resent.  I do know, though, that an English husband of whatever station thinks that he is the commander, and that he feels at liberty to address his wife as few American husbands would think of doing.  It’s quite allowed them to beat their wives if they are so minded.  I hope that not many of them are minded to do anything of the kind, but I feel very sure that women are ’kept in their place’ over there.  So, as they’ve been hectored themselves, they’ve taken up hectoring tactics in retaliation.  They demand a share in the government and the lawmaking.  They want to have a say about the schools and the courts of justice.  If men were fighting for some new form of liberty, we should think them heroic.  Why should we think women silly for doing the same thing?”

“It won’t get them anywhere,” affirmed Clarinda Hays.  “It won’t do for them what the old way of behaving did for them, Miss.  Now, who, I should like to know, does a young fellow, dying off in foreign parts, turn his thoughts to in his last moments?  Why, to his good mother or his nice sweetheart!  You don’t suppose that men are going to turn their dying thoughts to any such screaming, kicking harridans as them suffragettes over there in England, do you?”

Kate heard a chuckle beyond the door—­the disrespectful chuckle, as she took it, of the master of the house.  It armed her for the fray.

“I don’t think the militant women are doing these things to induce men to feel tenderly toward them, Mrs. Hays.  I don’t believe they care just now whether the men feel tenderly toward them or not.  Women have been low-voiced and sweet and docile for a good many centuries, but it hasn’t gained them the right to claim their own children, or to stand up beside men and share their higher responsibilities and privileges.  I don’t like the manner of warfare, myself.  While I could die at the stake if it would do any good, I couldn’t break windows and throw acid.  For one thing, it doesn’t seem to me quite logical, as the damage is inflicted on the property of persons who have nothing to do with the case.  But, of course, I can’t be sure that, after the fight is won, future generations will not honor the women who forgot their personal preferences and who made the fight in the only way they could.”