As the daughter of your respected and beloved father and as the hereditary flower of womanhood of Roma, I owe you both allegiance and admiration. But holding, as I do, the sincere conviction that women belittle themselves and lower the standards of all humanity when they enter the public arena, I feel justified in announcing myself your opposition candidate. I have just consented to allow my name to be used, and I feel that I wish you to know it at once. Yours respectfully, John Allingham." And having read it, she placed it on the glowing coals, smiling softly to herself the while. CHAPTER VI A Political Trick The campaign was a furious one after that. The women, instead of leaving the management of things to men, were stirred to wonderful activity. They worked, not only among the men of their own acquaintance, but among the working-people; they held meetings in factories at noon, or in school-rooms or cheap halls at night in the districts where the factory-hands lived. They spoke at mass-meetings and rallies, and if they did not appear in torchlight processions, they saw that many banners were carried in them, bearing the women's motto and legend. It was a hard fight, but a good one, and the cause of womanhood as well as of good government was advanced by it. When Sam Watts, for instance, with his pockets well-lined, went down into the district where lived the employees of the Roma Ice Company, he did not find it so easy to disburse that money as he had expected. "No," said one man, "I can't forget that Miss Van Deusen's been good to me and mine." "O, she is the Roma Ice Company, of course," returned Watts. "That is one of her assets; but you people are being ground down to hard labor every day to keep her in luxury--don't you see that?" "I see," answered the man, "that she is almost the only employer I know who takes a personal interest in us." "Yes, when votes are to be counted," sneered Watts.