The temperance reformer was less easy to rout because he was so desperately in earnest. It was no use pointing out to him that we were both travelling along the same road, really. His was the one and only possible scheme for regenerating the world, and the women who actually wanted the power to help him were wilfully obstructing his path. "Local option!" he repeated several times with enthusiasm, describing circles on the pavement with his umbrella and effectually keeping all possible customers at a distance. "Local option! That's the ticket. Votes for women, indeed!" I said mildly that I supposed the reform of the goose was always the fad of the gander, and was sorry to see that he appeared hurt. "Of course," I added hurriedly, "I admit that I am the goose." He still looked offended, but the remark happily put him to flight after he had spoilt the newspaper trade at our corner for nearly ten minutes. The most determined instance of the crank who sees all the rest of the world as faddists, or worse, is, I think, the animal faddist. Of course, we all advocate kindness to animals: but that is different from being a faddist about it. Still, I admit I am a little prejudice in the matter, owing to my encounter with the old lady, the toy dog, and the Kindness-to-pet-animals Christmas card. She arrived breathless on the kerb at my side, having been placed there by a policeman, while criticism of the toy dog rained plentifully from a brewer's dray, a bicycle, and a taxicab, all of which were mixed up in the road through their noble endeavours not to annihilate the yapping creature. I came into the situation because I unwound its chain, which had tied itself round the old lady's skirts, and placed the thing on her ermine muff. I received no acknowledgment of all this--first, because I picked him up by the head, seeing nothing else large enough to afford one a grip, and secondly, because she discovered I was a Suffragette. "You ought to be locked up in a lunatic asylum," she said sternly. For a moment I did not see the connection. Then I made allowances for her age and the peril she had just gone through and said--"Oh, no!" as soothingly as I could. She put the dog with some difficulty inside her muff, tail first, which I felt was an indignity it scarcely deserved, even if it had dislocated the traffic. "When the world is full of tortured and suffering dumb animals!" she went on, glaring at the contents bill that fluttered from my hand. I wished energetically that dumbness had been one of the disabilities of the particular tortured animal she was still trying to back into a hot ermine muff, for when I tried to say that my only objection to dumb animals was that they were never dumb, my remark was drowned in piercing yelps.