Women -- Great Britain -- Social conditions; Women -- Suffrage -- Great Britain
The girl in green was by nature sentimental. Having once sold a suffrage
paper in the street for half a day, she found herself incapable ever
afterwards of resisting the appeal of the street hawker, with the result
that her flat became a depôt for patent toasting-forks, bone
collar-studs, and quivering, iridescent beetles. Her latest conviction
that a human link existed between her and all sandwich-men received,
however, a slight shock as soon as we encountered one of these. Melting
with compassion, she tried in a single look to express all she felt for
his hard lot, but was met by a still more eloquent expression of pity
from his eye--the one that did not wink--and became henceforth a little
dubious about that particular human link. We tried, but without much
success, to rekindle her faith in human links generally, by pointing out
that his scorn was probably aroused by the unprofessional appearance of
her sandwich boards, one of which was slipping its ribbon moorings as
she went by.
Perhaps the most startling conversion we made in the course of our
parade was that of the baby. Up to that moment it had been a plain and
placid, contented baby, banging its Teddy bear happily against the side
of the perambulator. When it saw our procession coming along, with
flying colours and flapping boards, it dropped the Teddy bear on the
pavement and emitted an amazing remark that sounded to all of us, except
our literary member, like "Ga-ga-ga-ga-_ga_!" Our literary member, being
imaginative, declared that what the baby really said was--"Hooray! Votes
for Women!"--and the baby's nurse, who had to soil her white cotton
gloves by picking the Teddy bear out of the mud, seemed inclined to
agree with her.
"Them 'orrible Suffragettes!" she said crossly; and remembering the
militant countenance of the baby we had converted, we felt bound to
forgive her for feeling uneasy about the baby's future. Our triumph was
short-lived, however, for we were scarcely out of hearing of the baby's
gurgles when a gentleman outside a public-house informed us, with some
difficulty of utterance, that we were a disgrace to our sex.
"What do they mean, blocking up the King's 'Ighway, undreds and undreds
of 'em?" he grumbled fiercely. As the girl in green observed, he was not
in a condition when it would be fair to challenge his ability to count.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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