the pitiful spectacle that voting women
make of themselves, he galvanized the audience into a semblance of real
life and interest.

Dr. Earl found the speeches entertaining if not enlightening, and after
the second, gave himself up to the silent enjoyment of collating the
arguments presented in juxtaposition. No sooner had one speaker
convinced his hearers that women would precipitate anarchy by their
radicalism than the next proved equally conclusively that an era of
dilettantism and millinery shop legislation would be the inevitable
result of woman suffrage; no sooner were they filled with the horror of
the degradation of politics by the class of women certain to participate
in it, than another speaker assured them that politics was already so
vile that any woman would be hopelessly contaminated who had anything to
do with the gangrenous growth, and yet another showed that women
wouldn't vote anyhow. It was all he could do to control the muscles of
his face when the Reverend Mr. Yerkes told them in one sentence of the
dissension that would rend families and in the next that married women
simply voted as their husbands dictated, and he could not repress a
smile when the doctor and the professor made it clear that if woman is
to reproduce the race she must not be expected to do anything else, only
to have Mrs. Werther show how woman must be free to take part in the
ennobling activities of the world, philanthropy, charity, etc., if she
is to "bring to motherhood that crown which is the glory of the race,"
and much more of the same sort. He heard the ancient argument about
bullets and ballots, and in the same breath his attention was called to
Semiramis conquering Assyria, the Amazons invading Asia, the triumph of
Sappho in song, Aspasia in the salon, Deborah among the Judges of
Israel, George Eliot in literature, and a host of others who had won
distinction.

The audience was told that it was entirely proper to agitate, cajole,
coax, beseech, threaten, bully and browbeat men into voting for
candidates and measures desired by the women; anything that stopped
short of blackmail and personal intimidation bore the hallmark of
refined femininity, but to take two minutes to accomplish results for
themselves by depositing a ballot on election day meant everlasting
damnation to all feminine traits! And Leonora patted her pretty little
hands, and looked up to Earl for approval, feeling that at last he must
see that Silvia and h