Marie is a suffragette. But her jibe at me did not satisfy her. The thing was evidently on her mind. She came over and sat on the arm of my chair. "Don’t laugh at me, Daddy. It’s so serious. I think it’s all wrapped up in the big woman question. How can there be any real freedom except among equals? In the bottom of my heart I think it is a beautiful ideal. If I were in love with a man, I’d just want to be with him. It seems a little degrading to take a justice of the peace into one’s confidence in so private a matter. I would feel ashamed to tell a stranger I was going to love my sweetheart. And in a sense I like the idea of freedom. It would be horrible to have my husband kiss me because it was the law; because he’d promised to—if he didn’t really want to. "But that’s only a private personal view of it. It doesn’t seem to me the important thing, what the politicians call ’the main issue.’ This trying to be individually free, this fussing over individual rights, seems sort of early Victorian...." "What," I interrupted, "you wouldn’t call Ann—one of the first women to win distinction in a profession—you wouldn’t call her Early Victorian?" "Well. I don’t mean Ann. She’s an exception. No, she isn’t either. I mean her, too. Nowadays we think of things socially. It doesn’t matter so much whether I’m free, whether I get justice, it’s the others—the race—we must work for. Ann’s wonderful. You know how much I love her. But she don’t look at things the way we do. "We must think not only of the few women, here and there, the giants like Ann, who are strong enough to stand alone, but of all the women—and the children. That’s just the point. We’re trying to learn how not to stand alone—how to stand together. We’ve got to ignore our own preferences and rights and learn to fight for woman’s rights. "Doesn’t most of the prostitution come from the free love of weak girls? Even when the cadets go after them just to make money, isn’t it love on the girl’s part? What they think is love? We must fight and fight and fight to make women realize that they mustn’t love just for themselves. That it isn’t right towards the race for them to love blindly—that it’s a sin, a social sin, for us to love until we’re sure of ourselves, sure of the man, sure for the children. It’s a sin for a woman to sacrifice herself to a man just because she loves him—a sin even to take risks. "Somehow, until we’ve won freedom and equality and independence, we’ve got to insist on guarantees. I don’t see how we can get them except through laws, through old-fashioned marriages. We women who are stronger, and better educated and able to support ourselves and children, we must always think of the others who are less fortunate. And as long as you men take advantage of any of our sisters, we won’t listen to your free love talk. So there!"