"It always kind of scares me to see myself showed up--and now it was like I had ripped a veil off the whole sex, and off me, too. I see us face to face. Why was it that before them men had come in, the women had all talked kind of doubtful and suffrage-leaning, and then had veered like the wind the minute the men had come on the scene? Mis' Toplady had defied Timothy time after time, both public and private; Mis' Hubbelthwait bosses her husband not only drunk but sober; Mis' Sturgis don't do a thing Jimmy wants without she happens to want it too--and so on. Yet at the mention of this one thing, these women that had been talking intelligent and wondering open-minded had all stopped being the way they was and had begun to say things sole to please the men. Even Libby Liberty had kept still--her that has a regular tongue in her head. And Letty, that believed in it all, and had talked to me so womanly that morning, she was listening and blushing for Elbert and holding her peace. And then I remembered, like a piece of guilt, sensing that nice, wild feeling I myself had felt that morning a-denying woman suffrage in the presence of Postmaster Silas Sykes. What in creation ailed us all? "_What in creation...._ Them words sort of steadied me. It looked to me like it was creation itself that ailed us yet. Creation is a thing that it takes most folks a good while to recover from.... " ... I remembered seeing Silas's delivery boy go whistling along the street one night, and pass a cat. The cat wasn't doing nothing active. It was merely idle. But the boy brought up a big shingle he was carrying and swished it through the air and says 'Z-t-t-t-t,' to the cat's heels, to see the cat take to them--which it done--like the cat immemorial has done for immemorial boys, delivery and other. And once, at dusk, a big, strange man with a gun on his shoulder passed me on Daphne Street, and when he done so, he says to me 'Z-t-t-t,' under his breath, just like the boy to the cat, and just like the untamed man immemorial has said when he got the chance. It seemed to me like men was created with, so to say, a shingle and a gun, for the hunting, and just as there is joy in their hunting, so there is a palpitatin' delight in being hunted and flattered by being caught and bound, hand and foot and mind. "'We like it--why, I tell you, we like it,' I says to myself, 'and us here in Mis' Sykes's parlour are burning with the old original, left-over fire, breathed at creation into women's breasts!' "And it seemed like I kind of touched hands with all the women that used to be. And I looked over to that row of grinning, tired men, not so very much dressed up, and I thought:-- "'Why, you're the men of this world and we're the women, and there ain't no more thrilling fact in this universe. And why don't we all reco'nize it and shut up?'