But now, so Kate believed,—­so her great instructors informed her,—­they were awakening to their privileges.  An intenser awareness of life, of the right to expression, and of satisfaction in constructive performances was stirring in them.  If they desired enfranchisement, they wanted it chiefly for spiritual reasons.  This was a fact which the opponents of the advancing movement did not generally recognize.  Kate shrank from those fruitless arguments at the Caravansary with the excellent men who gravely and kindly rejected suffrage for women upon the ground that they were protecting them by doing so.  They did not seem to understand that women desired the ballot because it was a symbol as well as because it was an instrument and an argument.  If it was to benefit the working woman in the same way in which it benefited the working man, by making individuality a thing to be considered; if it was to give the woman taxpayer certain rights which would put her on a par with the man taxpayer, a thousand times more it was to benefit all women by removing them from the class of the unconsidered, the superfluous, and the negligible.

Yes, women were wanting the ballot because it included potentiality, and in potentiality is happiness.  No field seems fair if there is no gateway to it—­no farther field toward which the steps may be turned.  Kate was getting hold of certain significant similes.  She saw that it was past the time of walls and limits.  Walled cities were no longer endurable, and walled and limited possibilities were equally obsolete.  If the departure of the “captains and the kings” was at hand, if the new forces of democracy had routed them, if liberty for all men was now an ethic need of civilization, so political recognition was necessary for women.  Women required the ballot because the need was upon them to perform great labors.  Their unutilized benevolence, their disregarded powers of organization, their instinctive sense of economy, their maternal-oversoul, all demanded exercise.  Women were the possessors of certain qualities so abundant, so ever-renewing, that the ordinary requirements of life did not give them adequate employment.  With a divine instinct of high selfishness, of compassion, of realization, they were seeking the opportunity to exercise these powers.

“The restlessness of women,” “the unquiet sex,” were terms which were becoming glorious in Kate’s ears.  She saw no reason why women as well as men should not be allowed to “dance upon the floor of chance.”  All about her were women working for the advancement of their city, their country, and their race.  They gave of their fortunes, of their time, of all the powers of their spirit.  They warred with political machines, with base politicians, with public contumely, with custom.  What would have crushed women of equally gentle birth a generation before, seemed now of little account to these workers.  They looked beyond and above the irritation of the