here,
asking her to follow up the matter. George, dear," asked Betty
maternally, "_why_ did you do it? Why couldn't you let well enough
alone!"

"What's your other letter?" asked George.

"It's just from Mr. Riker, of the _Sentinel_, George. He wants you to
drop in. It seems that they want a correction on one of your statistics
about the number of workingwomen in the United States who don't want
the vote. He says it only wants a signed line from you that you were
mistaken--"

Refusing to see Colonel Jaynes, or to answer the Colonel's letter,
George curtly telephoned the editor of the _Sentinel_, and walked home
at four o'clock, his cheeks still burning, his mind in a whirl. Big
issues should have been absorbing him: and his mind was pestered instead
with these midges of the despised cause. Well, it was all in the day's
work--

And here was his sweet, devoted wife, fluttering across the hall, as
cool as a rose, in her pink and white. And she had packed his things,
in case they wanted to spend the night at Sea Light, and the "cats" had
gone off for library books, and he must have some ginger-ale, before it
was time to go for Betty and Penny.

The day was perfection. The motor-car purred like a racing tiger under
George's gloved hand. Betty and Penny were waiting, and the three young
persons forgot all differences, and laughed and chatted in the old happy
way, as they prepared for the start. But Betty was carrying a book:
_Catherine of Russia_.

"Do you know why suffragists should make an especial study of queens,
George?" she asked, as she and Penny settled themselves on the back
seat.

"Well, I'll be interlocutor," George smiled, glancing up at the house,
from which his wife might issue at any moment. "Why should suffragists
read the lives of queens, Miss Bones?"

"Because queens are absolutely the only women in all history who had
equal rights!" Betty answered impassively. "Do you realize that? The
only women whose moral and social and political instincts had full
sway!"

"And a sweet use they made of them, sometimes!" said George.

"And who were the great rulers," pursued Betty. "Whose name in English
history is like the names of Elizabeth and Victoria, or Matilda or Mary,
for the matter of that? Who mended and conserved and built up what the
kings tore down and wasted? Who made Russia an intellectual power--"

Again Penny had an odd sense of fear. Were women perhaps superior to
men, after all!

"I do