And there are some of us, I'm sure,"
she went on, "who would feel the way I do about it."

"Well,--some," E. Eliot admitted. "Not many, though. And then there are
the merchants. These are great times for them--town crammed with people,
all making money, and buying right and left. And then there's the labor
vote itself! A lot of laboring men would be against him. Their women
just now are earning as much as they are. There are a lot of these
men--whatever they might say--who'd take good care not to vote for a man
who would prevent their daughters from bringing in the fifteen, twenty,
or twenty-five dollars a week they get for that night work.

"Well, and who would be with him? Why, the women themselves. The one
chance on earth he'd have for election would be to have the women
organized and working for him, bringing every ounce of influence they
had to bear on their men--on all the men they knew.

"Mind you, I don't believe he could win at that. But, win or lose, he'd
have done something. He'd have shown the women that they needed the
vote, and he'd have found out for himself--he and the other men who
believe in fair human treatment for everybody--that they can't secure
that treatment without women's votes. That's the real issue. It isn't
that women are better than men, or that they could run the world
better if they got the chance. It's that men and women have got to work
together to do the things that need doing."

"You're perfectly wonderful," said Betty, and sat thereafter, for
perhaps a minute and a half, in an entranced silence.

Then, with a shake of the head, a straightening of the spine, and a
good, deep, business-like preliminary breath, she turned to her new
friend and said, "Well, shall we do it?"

This time it was E. Eliot's turn to gasp.

She hadn't expected to have a course of action put up to her in that
instantaneous and almost casual manner. She wasn't young like Betty.
She'd been working hard ever since she was seventeen years old. She'd
succeeded, in a way, to be sure. But her success had taught her how hard
success is to obtain. She saw much farther into the consequences of
the proposed campaign than Betty could see. She realized the bitter
animosity that it would provoke. She knew it was well within the
probabilities that her business would be ruined by it.

She sat there silent for a while, her face getting grimmer and grimmer
all the time. But she turned at last and looked into the eager fac