"Men and women," she began in her high virago voice, "we have listened to two very fine speeches this afternoon, one upholding the sentimentality of the past, the other mystically prophesying the sentimentality of the future. I'm an apostate from the past, and a disciple of the future. I've got one foot in the grave and the other foot on the ballot for women. I shall not deal in sentiment or prophecies, but in cold facts!" "Told you we'd understand her, boys!" shouted a voice. "Go it, Susan! we all know you, and we don't have to give you no quarter!" yelled a bearded farmer standing in the back of the hall. "Yes," screamed the old lady, shaking her fist at him, "and I know you, Tim Cates. You've been living on your wife's land ever since you married her. And you've made her mortgage it to pay your debts!" "Git a chip somebody and take po' Tim out on it. She's done ruin't him!" "Come ag'in, Susan! you drawed blood that time!" shouted the voice. "I'm coming, and I've got the facts with me!" she cried, flirting her head in the direction from which the voice came. "I know every man in this hall: how he lives, how he votes, what he owes, what he can't or don't pay. I know how hard you farmers work your wives, harder than you do your beasts, in spite of all that fine talk we listened to from Marshall Adams, and I know how little you give them, how little they are allowed to spend. There's one of you standing in plain sight of me right now who took the fancy bedquilts your wife and daughters pieced last winter and sold them to get money to pay his taxes, though he is worth five thousand dollars! You needn't dodge!" she laughed shrilly. "I'll not call your name if you keep quiet and behave. But if you men don't stop your fuss and listen to what I have to say, I'll tell everything I know about you." The titters of the women became distinctly audible for the first time in the indignant silence which followed this threat, for they knew that she was as good and could be even worse than her word.