Half the clinging-vine love
with which women entwine their husbands is not love at all, but a
nameless anxiety due to their sense of helplessness. Transpose the
conditions of each and the same beseeching look so often seen in women's
faces will be ludicrously mixed with the whiskers on the faces of their
lords. The only ineradicable difference between men and women is gender.
They are singularly alike in every other particular. Give a woman
liberty, and she will go a man one better in license. Take a man's
liberty from him, and he surpasses any woman in timidity. If men have
more strength, women have more endurance. If the one is more active, the
other is the more persistent. And it depends entirely upon the emergency
which will show the most courage. Place them side by side under the
same conditions to accomplish the same thing, and while each will go
about the business in a different manner, the same proportion of both
sexes will succeed at the job.

The difficulty is that men and women neither live nor work under the
same conditions. The former have the overwhelming advantage, owing to
the fact that they create their own public opinion and hold the balance
of power, prestige, and influence.

This was precisely the balance which had been destroyed in Jordantown.
The women now had all the advantage. It was monstrous and called for the
exercise of all the furnace language of which men are naturally capable.

The one hope expressed everywhere was that, being the timid things that
they were, the women would not know how to keep the grip they had upon
the situation.

"Hang it! They are our wives and daughters. We ought to be able to do
what we always have done, direct them and control them through their
affections," said Acres, turning up the ends of his moustache with a
kind of bantam bravado.

"If a woman has nothing but her affections it is easy enough to manage
her, but nobody knows what use she may make of her heels if she has
everything else besides," growled Coleman, who had just come from a
breakfast table where his wife, Agatha, had pointedly refused to give
him certain information about the Co-Citizens' Foundation which he knew
she had.

"It's all a huge joke, that's what this damphule will is," said Briggs
gloomily.

"Of course the suffrage part of it is a joke. The state constitution is
plain on that question. Only males can vote," Acres agreed.

"But, hang it! They've got this vast estate, which aff