k blouse, open at the neck, in which she
looked very pretty and girlish. Ernestine stared at her in frank
admiration. Milly could not understand that she embodied to this "queer"
woman all that her heart had secretly longed for,--all the feminism in
which she knew herself to be utterly lacking. She tried to take Virginia
in her lap to caress her, but that demure little lady, submitting
politely for a few moments, slipped off at the first chance and took
refuge in her mother's lap, where she snuggled with conscious pleasure.
Ernestine did not know how to hold a child.

"That's a nice picter," Ernestine grumbled, covering mother and daughter
with glowing eyes. "Wished I had one of 'em in my place!"

"Perhaps you will some day," Milly replied politely. But Ernestine shook
her head.

"Not unless I took one out of an asylum. I've thought of that, but I
guess it ain't the same thing."

"Are you all alone?" Virgie asked gravely.

Ernestine nodded and added in a burst of confidence to Milly,--

"And it _is_ lonely, I can tell you, coming home every night from your
work to find just a hired girl waitin' for you and your food on the
table!"

To which Milly made some commonplace rejoinder, and as another pause
threatened she remarked pleasantly,--

"Where do you suppose I was last night, when I should have been at home
looking after my little girl? At a suffrage meeting. Wasn't that like
the modern mother?"

"Were you at that swell Mrs. ----'s house with all those big-bugs?"
Ernestine questioned excitedly.

"Yes.... There were speeches about the suffrage,--the reasons why woman
should have the vote, you know."

"I read all about it in the paper this morning."

Milly recalled what the interesting stranger had said to her about the
point of view of actual women workers, and inquired,--

"What do you think about suffrage, Miss Geyer?"

Ernestine gave a hoarse laugh.

"I don't think much," she said succinctly.

Milly made some remarks on the subject, quoting freely from Hazel
Fredericks on the injustices to women in this man-made world. Ernestine
listened with a smile of sceptical amusement on her homely face, and
slowly shook her head.

"There ain't much in _that_," she pronounced dogmatically. "The trouble
ain't there. Any working-woman will tell you she ain't bothered much by
lack of political power. We've got all the political powers we can
use.... What does it amount to, anyhow? Things aren't done in this wo