Don’t talk so loud! Max doesn’t like me to be called “Miss White.” You know he’s funny and old-fashioned, and though he’s willing for me to be a Feminist and to give money to the cause and everything, it makes him positively rage to hear me called “Miss White.” I tell him that a woman doesn’t give up her soul and her name and everything like a chattel mortgage just because she’s married, but he says that I’ve got to be called “Mrs. Johnson” because I’m no more Miss White than he is. LIONEL (_getting down from the bench and putting the colour print on the pianola_) Ah, well, he’ll wake up one of these days and learn what Feminism really is. Even the business men must wake up some time. There was a broker that marched beside me in the suffrage parade this year--a broker or a pawnbroker, I never know which is which. HELEN But what about Ryan? Why don’t you like him? LIONEL That janitor! Do you know, he is simply a degenerate! HELEN A degenerate? Like Lombroso? LIONEL No. Worse than that. He actually has nine children! Last week when I went around with Comrade May Robinson Dannenberg and Comrade Rebecca Idleheimer selling “Plain Facts about a Great Evil” and working up enthusiasm for the suffrage rally at the Church of the Social Revolution, I made a special effort to interest the janitors and their wives. We went into every basement from here to 125th Street, and we saw some things that made my heart bleed. And in the basement of this very house I saw this man Ryan rocking a cradle and drinking beer out of a tin pail. His wife was cooking something disgusting on the gas stove and nursing a baby with her left hand. Comrade May Robinson Dannenberg was treated with absolute discourtesy by them; in fact, the woman told her to “go to hell”! HELEN But then, those people, you know, they never do anything or read anything or anything. They are just like animals. LIONEL Yes, but you and I have got to keep them from being animals! That’s what Social Consciousness means. I won’t say duty--I hate the word--but it’s your right to change the lives of those people and you absolutely must exercise that right, just as you absolutely must vote. There is that woman--a woman, the creature of all our dreaming--(_He points to the statue._)--who might be out among the fields and the trees and the brooks and the birds and all the great and beautiful things of life, a sentient, social being; and what is she? What do we find her doing? Having a baby in a coalhole! HELEN I see what you mean. That dreadful janitor! I know; I tried to get her to come to my class in the Ferrer School, and she said she had too much work to do. LIONEL