day, and why
had he done it with that strange look?

XXVI

Concerning Women who won't remember their Place, and a
Speech to Two Hundred of them, by Mr. V.V., no less; also
revealing why Hen Cooney never found V.V. in the Crowd around
the Platform.

It was an interesting time to be alive, as Hen Cooney remarked again
next day. Absorbing matters were afoot in the old town, provided that
you had an eye in your head to see them. One thing led to another with
startling rapidity. Only the other day, it seemed, some one had risen
and flung against the ideals of generations the discordant cry of Votes
for Women. Rebukes for the unseemliness were copious and stern enough.
Many spoke acidly of the lengths to which childless females would go for
lack of occupation. Droll fellows of a pretty wit giggled and asked who
would mind the baby while the madam went out to vote. Serious-minded
persons of both sexes disposed of the whole foolishness forever by
saying (and wondering why nobody had ever thought of it before) that
woman's place was the home. But few there were who perceived a symptom
here; not even when the League grew with unintelligible rapidity, and
croaking diagnosticians here or there professed to see other
manifestations not unrelated.

Cassandras remarked that women wearied of thinking "through their
husbands." The census revealed to the close student that some women even
had no husbands. It was a fact that year before last women had appeared
at legislative "hearings" for the first time in the history of the
State. These women, plague on them, failed to fortify the wags by
powdering their noses in front of pocket mirrors while they talked, or
making sweet-eyes at the chairmen of committees. They appeared, to tell
the honest truth, with late reference-books under their arms, and in
their heads the faculty for asking the most annoying sort of questions.
More than one honest Solon was seen to stammer and turn red under their
interrogations, so often stiffened by a date and a little figure or so.

And these troublesome "thinking women" had not retired when the
legislature did. Editors nowadays were often surprised in their sanctums
by committees of three from some pestiferous unwomanly club or other,
and they had not come, alackaday, to have their handkerchiefs picked up
with courtly speeches, graced with an apt quotation from "Maud." The
Civic Improvement League, with a woman presiden