sbands who are influenced by their wives.
What's more, all this has gone on ever since there were husbands, and it
will go on as long as there are any left, and it's got no more to do
with women's voting than it has with their making cream tarts. No, not
half as much!' she laughed. 'Now, where's that question that you were
going to write?'

Some one handed up a wisp of white paper. Miss Claxton opened it, and
upon the subject presented she embarked with the promising beginning,
'Your economics are pretty wobbly, my friend,' and proceeded to clear
the matter up and incidentally to flatten out the man. One wondered that
under such auspices 'Question Time' was as popular as it obviously was.
There is no doubt a fearful joy in adventuring yourself in certain
danger before the public eye. Besides the excitement of taking a
personal share in the game, there is always the hope that it may have
been reserved to you to stump the speaker and to shine before the
multitude.

A gentleman who had vainly been trying to get her to hear him, again
asked something in a hesitating way, stumbling and going back to recast
the form of his question.

He was evidently quite in earnest, but either unaccustomed to the sound
of his own voice or unnerved to find himself bandying words in Hyde Park
with a Suffragette. So when he stuck fast in the act of fashioning his
phrases, Miss Claxton bent in the direction whence the voice issued, and
said, briskly obliging--

'You needn't go on. I know the rest. What this gentleman is trying to
ask is----'

And although no denial on his part reached the public ear, it was not
hard to imagine him seething with indignation, down there helpless in
his crowded corner, while the facile speaker propounded as well as
demolished his objection to her and all her works.

'Yes; one last question. Let us have it.'

'How can you pretend that women want the vote? Why, there are hardly any
here.'

'More women would join us openly but for fear of their fellow-cowards.
Thousands upon thousands of women feel a sympathy with this movement
they dare not show.'

'Lots of women don't want the vote.'

'What women don't want it? Are you worrying about a handful who think
because they have been trained to like subservience everybody else ought
to like subservience, too? The very existence of a movement like this is
a thorn in their sleek sides. We are a reproach and a menace to such
women. But this isn't a movement to c