"And what about Thad Bailey and Baldwin and Saddler and all the other merchants?" he asked curiously, with his nose pointed like a terrier who smells a rat. "The sooner you or somebody persuades them to go to Judge Regis and make the same agreement, the sooner you'll get what you want," she replied. "And what we don't want! Do you think for a moment the men in this county would give women the vote even if they could, Mabel?" "I don't think about it, Martin, I know you are going to be forced to do it, and I want you to give in before it is too late to save your credit; you'll be a day labourer before you know it if you don't listen to reason," she concluded tearfully. "Reason! Reason! A set of crazy women dictating to men. What is reason?" shouted the furious little merchant as he rushed from the room. The domestic atmosphere of Jordantown from one end to the other was charged with thunderstorm possibilities. The wives of all the citizens were attending hurriedly to their household affairs, and then attending to other affairs which were not household. Every day some council or committee met in the Woman's Building. They even met in the evenings. Putting on their hats and taking the latchkey, they went out as nonchalantly as ever their husbands had gone. They weathered the rage of these husbands with singular calm, very much as mothers cheerfully witness the tantrums of their growing children. The fact that they went out in the evenings was not remarkable. The women of Jordantown were pious. They attended prayer meetings regularly: they made up the congregation on Wednesday evenings. But now they neglected this service and gathered in the upper chambers of the Woman's Building. The community was going to the dogs. Every man said so to every other man he met on the square, but no man confided to the other that his wife had been out until half-past ten o'clock the night before. One evening Stark Coleman was in the library reading the _Signal_. His wife came in, seated herself, and overflowed the low rocking-chair on the other side of the table with her voluminous skirts. She was tall and very large. Her face was as placid as that of a clock which has just marked the last hour of the day and has nothing to do but tick-tock until bed-time. This was the one hour of the day when they were alone together after the children had been put to bed. They usually spent it in silence. Probably no two people in the world have as little to say to one another as a husband and wife after they have been married a dozen years. Each knows all the other thinks. They become fearful mind readers of one another's most secret thoughts. Long ago they settled all their differences in the struggles of their first ardent loving years. Henceforth one commands while the other obeys. Everything is finished between them but their lives. These go on like weary vegetation from which their children gather the fruit.