“Men and women”—we still write the words in that order, though the Feminists, at the period of which I am typing, did their best to get it inverted. I cannot say that I sympathized at all with this agitation; I have always been old-fashioned, and felt that the proper sphere of woman is the flat. But I used to see a good deal in those days of Esther Margate, who was one of our most fanatical Feminists; and I think she ought to have her mention in this chapter, because there was a sort of mad consistency about her, which I believe to be a necessary element in all greatness of the reforming kind. She would always say, for example, “I do not suppose there is a woman, man or child in this country ... etc.,” because she maintained that woman was intellectually and morally man’s superior, and ought therefore to have the place of honour. I can still remember her asking Lord Billericay at dinner whether he didn’t think the women and men of London were better dressed now than they used to be: he said he was a bad judge, because he only came up to London once a year, for the Harrow and Eton match (he meant the cricket match, of course), and as a rule only stayed there till the Cambridge and Oxford match. Nobody ever quite knew whether Esther Margate realized what he was getting at. She used to dilate, too, on the unfairness of talking about “Man,” when you meant the human race in general: Archie Lock asked her if we ought to say “The proper study of mankind is Woman”; she answered quite sharply, no, “womankind,” of course. I believe some of her disciples went so far as to change their names; and you certainly do meet people called Goodwoman and Newwoman now, which you never used to. But her attempt to confine the suffrage to women was foredoomed to failure, even if Juliet Savage had not organized her campaign against it. It was conclusively shown that at least 27 per cent. of the men who had votes regularly exercised their right.