her face!

"Look at them," she said, indicating with a slight revealing gesture the
swarming, dowdy, listless occupants of the crowded trench. "How patient
they are, how resigned to the dreadful life they drag on here from day to
day, full of the horror and the pain and the suffering that you say is
inevitable. Why should it be inevitable? Did these women who are the chief
victims of it and the greatest losers by it, choose that there should be
War? See that poor soul with the rag of crape upon her hat, who sits at
her door peeling potatoes. Did she desire it? Yet her young husband was
shot in the trenches a week ago and her little baby died of fever this
morning.... And, did those other women whose homes have been wrecked and
ruined, whose sons and husbands and fathers may be shot, and whose
children may sicken with the same fever before night, demand of their
Governments, Imperial or Republican, that there should be War? You see
them patient and submissive because they neither realise their wrongs or
understand their rights. But a day will come when they will understand,
and then"--her eyes grew dreamy--"I do not know exactly what will happen.
But these international questions, with others, will be decided by a
general plebiscite, the women will vote as well as the men; and as women
are in the majority, and every woman will vote for Peace--how can there be
War?"

"You are an advocate of Universal Suffrage, then? You believe that there
must be absolute sex-equality before the world can be--I think 'finally
regenerated' is the stock phrase of the militant apostle of Women's
Rights? I have heard this outcry from many feminine throats in London, but
Gueldersdorp," said Saxham drily, "is about the last place one would
expect to ring with it."

"'Universal Suffrage, Sex-Equality, Women's Rights....'" The shibboleth
that Saxham quoted was evidently unfamiliar to the girl. "I know"--there
was a sombre shadow in her glance--"what Women's Wrongs are, but I am not
very well informed about the things you speak of. The Mother tells me that
there are many well-educated women in London and Paris, in Berlin and in
New York, who have devoted their lives to the study of such questions. Who
write and speak and labour to teach their fellow-women that they have only
to band themselves together to be powerful, only to be powerful to be
feared, only to will it to be free. When I am twenty-four I mean to go out
into the world and meet thos