d by inadequate trusteeship, would once have taught school
according to a gentle ideal, now went away and learned to be social
workers, and came back to make self-possessed speeches at the Woman's
Club and present it with new theories to worry. This all went on under
the sanction of Addington manners, and kept concert pitch rather high.

On all topics but one Addington agreed to such an extent that discussion
really became more like axioms chanted in unison; but when it came to
woman suffrage society silently but exactly split. There were those who
would stick at nothing, even casting a vote. There were those who said
casting a vote was unwomanly, and you couldn't possibly leave the baby
long enough to do it. Others among the antis were reconciled to its
coming, if it came slowly enough not to agitate us. "Of course," said
one of these, a Melvin who managed her ample fortune with the acumen of
a financier, "it will come sometime. But we are none of us ready. We
must delay it as long as we can." So she and the like-minded drove into
the country round and talked about preventing the extension of the
suffrage to women until hard-working, meagre-living people who had not
begun to think much about votes, save as a natural prerogative of man,
thought about them a great deal, and incidentally learned to organise
and lobby, and got a very good training for suffrage when it should
come. It did no harm, nor did the fervour of the other side do good. The
two parties got healthfully tired with the exercise and "go" of it all,
and at least they stirred the pot. But whatever they said or did,
suffragists and antis never, so to speak, "met". The subject, from some
occult sense of decorum, was tabu. If an anti were setting forth her
views when a suffragist entered the room she instantly ceased and began
to talk about humidity or the Balkans. A suffragist would no more have
marshalled her arguments for the overthrow of an equal than she would
have corrected a point of etiquette. But each went out with zeal into
New England villages for the conversion of social underlings.

When they elected Jeffrey into a cause they did it with a rush, and they
also elected his wife. Through her unwelcoming door poured a stream of
visitors, ostensibly to call on Madame Beattie, but really, as Esther
saw with bitterness, to recommend this froward wife to live with her
husband. Feeling ran very high there. Addington, to a woman, knew
exactly the ideal thi