oons, when I'm pretty busy, I haven't been able
to get 'round.

"I'm curious about Remington," she went on. "I've known him a little,
for years. When I worked for Allen, I used to see him quite often in the
office. And I'd always rather liked him. So that I was surprised, clear
down to the ground, when I read that statement of his in the _Sentinel_.
I'd never thought he was _that_ sort. And from the fact that you work in
his office and like him well enough to call him George one might almost
suppose he wasn't."

Clearly Betty was puzzled. "Of course," she said, "I think his views
about women are obsolete and ridiculous. But I don't see what they've
got to do with liking him or not, personally."

E. Eliot's smile became grim again, but she said nothing, so Betty asked
a direct question.

"That was what you meant, wasn't it?"

"Yes," the other woman said, "that was what I meant. Why, if you don't
mind plain speaking, it's been my observation that the sort of men
who think the world is too indecent for decent women to go out into,
generally have their own reasons for knowing how indecent it is; and
that when they spring a line of talk like that, they're being sickening
hypocrites into the bargain."

Betty's face had gone flame color.

"George isn't like that at all," she said. "He's--he's really fine. He's
old-fashioned and sentimental about women, but he isn't a hypocrite. He
really means those things he says. Why..."

And then Betty went on to tell her new friend about Cousin Emelene and
Alys Brewster-Smith, and how George, though he writhed, had stood the
gaff.

"A grown-up man," E. Eliot summed up, "who honestly believes that women
are made of something fine and fragile, and that they ought to be kept
where even the wind can't blow upon them! But good heavens, child, if
he really means that, it makes it all the better for what I was thinking
of. You don't understand, of course. I hadn't meant to tell you, but
I've changed my mind.

"Listen now. That statement in the _Sentinel_ has set the town talking,
of course, and stirred up a lot of feeling, for and against suffrage.
But what it would be worth as an issue to go to the mat with on election
day, is exactly nothing at all. You go out and ask a voter to
vote against a candidate for district attorney because he's an
anti-suffragist, and he'll say, 'What difference does it make? It isn't
up to him to give women the vote. It doesn't matter to me what his
pri