“Now there’s you, burning yourself out ’cos your high principles won’t let you go for once in a way on the spree with this Rossiter—­s’posin’ ’e’s game, of course....  You’ve too much pride to throw yourself at his head.  But if he loves you as bad as you loves ’im, why don’t you ask him” (instinctively the old ministress of love speaks here) “ask ’im to take you over to Paris for a trip?  I’ll lay ’e ’as to go over now’n again to the Sorbonne or one of them scientific institutes. She’d never come to ‘ear of it.  An’ after one or two such honeymoons you’d soon get tired of ’im, specially now you’re gettin’ on a bit in years, and may be you’d settle down quietly after that.  Or if you ain’t reg’lar set on ’im, why not giv’ up this suffrage business and live a bit with me here?  There’s plenty of upstanding, decent, Belgian men in good positions as’d like to have an English wife. They wouldn’t look too shy at my money...”

Vivie:  “Get thee behind me, Satan!  Mother, you oughtn’t to make such propositions.  Don’t you understand, we must all have a religion somewhere.  Some principle to which we sacrifice ourselves.  Rossiter would be horrified if he could hear you.  His mistress is Science, besides which he is really devoted to his wife and would do nothing that could hurt her.  You don’t know England, it’s clear.  Supposing for one moment I could consent—­and I couldn’t—­we should be found out to a certainty, and then Michael’s career would be ruined.

“My religion, though I sometimes weary of it and sneer at it, is Women’s Rights:  women must have precisely the same rights as men, no disqualification whatever based merely on their being women.  Did you read those disgusting letters in the Times by the surgeon, the midwifery man, Sir Wrigsby Blane?  Declaring that the demand for the Vote was based on immorality, and pretending that once a month, till they were fifty, and for several years after they were fifty, women were not responsible for their actions, because of what he vaguely called ‘physiological processes.’  What poisonous rubbish!  You know as well as I do that in most cases it makes little or no difference; and if it does, what about men?  Aren’t they at certain times not their normal selves?  When they’re full up with wine or beer or whiskey, when they’re courting, when they’re pursuing some illicit love, when after fifty they get a little odd in their ways through this, that and the other internal trouble or change of function?  What’s true of the one sex is equally true of the other.  Most men and women between twenty and sixty jolly well know what they want, and generally they want something reasonable.  We don’t legislate for the freaks, the unbalanced, the abnormal; or if we do restrict the vote in those cases, let’s restrict it for males as well as females—­But don’t you see at the same time what a text I should furnish to this malign creature if I ran away to Paris with Michael, and made the slightest false step ... even though it had no bearing on the main argument?...”