e, and I can't help it. If William had
stayed at home, this would never have showed out in me. I would have
gone on respectable and steady. But this is one of the prices we pay
for bringing up women to be men's chattels, with some one always
placed in authority over them. When the authority is removed, there's
the devil to pay!"

The President of the Red Cross looked at her in surprise. She had
never thought of it this way before; women were made to be protected
and shielded; she had said so scores of times; the church had taught
it and sanctioned it.

"The whole system is wrong," Mrs. Tweed continued, "and nice women
like you, working away in churches ruled by men, have been to blame.
You say women should be protected, and you cannot make good the
protection. What protection have the soldiers' wives now? Evil
tongues, prying eyes, on the part of women, and worse than that from
the men. The church has fallen down on its job, and isn't straight
enough to admit it! We should either train our women to take their own
part and run their own affairs, or else we should train the men really
to honor and protect women. The church has done neither. Bah! I could
make a better world with one hand tied behind my back!"

"But, Mrs. Tweed," said the president, "this war is new to all of
us--how did we know what was coming? It has taken all of us by
surprise, and we have to do our bit in meeting the new conditions.
Your man was never a fighting man--he hates it; but he has gone and
will fight, although he loathes it. I never did a day's work outside
of my home until now, and now I go to the office every day and try to
straighten out tangles; women come in there and accuse me of
everything, down to taking the bread out of their children's mouths.
Two of them who brought in socks the other day said, 'Do you suppose
the soldiers ever see them?' I did all I could to convince them that
we were quite honest, though I assure you I felt like telling them
what I thought of them. But things are abnormal now, everything is out
of sorts; and if we love our country we will try to remedy things
instead of making them worse. When I went to school we were governed
by what they called the 'honor system.' It was a system of
self-government; we were not watched and punished and bound by rules,
but graded and ruled ourselves--and the strange thing about it was
that it worked! When the teacher went out of the room, everything went
on just the same. Nob