"Exactly! now you've got pockets in your skirts, with something like twenty thousand dollars to spend for a certain purpose. And that is not all you have. This Board of Trust owns the majority of stock in the National Bank, and has loaned money to nearly all the business houses in town. You hold mortgages on nineteen thousand acres of land in this county. You practically own the _Signal_. There is not a politician anywhere who would not know he held this county in the hollow of his hand if he had that much influence to back him. Influence, Susan, is not mere influence ever. It's power! You've got that!" "When did you become such an ardent suffragist, John?" Susan suddenly demanded. The Judge laughed. "I've been a kind of mugwump of the cause for years. If I were younger, I doubt if I should be ardently in favour of it now. I admit that I prefer the dear woman to the abler ballot-bearing woman--every man must--but before your sex can become entirely like my sex except in gender, Susan, I shall be where Sarah Mosely is now. It will not matter to me. I admit, however, that I was converted to active partisanship by Mrs. Mosely. I have been more impressed by that dim little old woman than by all the arguments you, for example, ever made for suffrage. She was herself an unanswerable plea for the rights of women to _live_, for she had never really lived at all. She looked as if every mortgage held by her estate had been foreclosed at her expense." "Yes, I know," said Mrs. Walton with a sigh. "She was pathetic in her submission. Most women submit, but still have enough to fuss about from time to time to keep them alive." "She was really the least submissive of you all. She put on her thimble, threaded the needle of her robin-headed brain, and worked all your fuss and agitations and futile parades down to a formula by which you can actually obtain the ballot," he put in. "Well, coming down to this formula, what shall we do with Briggs?" she asked shrewdly. "He looks like a dangerous factor in it to me." "Briggs will be of use. All he needs is an expert accountant to overhaul his books occasionally. And we shall need him as we need a pair of tongs to handle live coals. Besides, we cannot afford to dismiss him now and incur his enmity. We are not working up antagonism. We have one man against us already who counts for all we can overcome." "Who is that?" "Mike Prim. He owns nothing visible. So we have no mortgage to hold over his head. But he practically controls this town, politically speaking." "How?" "Don't ask me! He is not a merchant, nor a lawyer, nor a real estate agent, nor a banker, nor a broker, nor anything else that has a name, but more men--prominent citizens, farmers, labourers, tramps, beggars, anybody and everybody--go and come from his office than to and from any other office in this town. He is the power of darkness in this county to be overcome before you can win suffrage, I can tell you that."