'Oh, there was a knock at the door that set the Master Builder's nerves quivering. He felt in his bones it was the Younger Generation coming to upset things. He _thought_ it was a young man----' 'And it was really Miss Ernestine Blunt? He has my sympathies.' The Younger Generation was declaring from the monument-- 'Our greatest debt of gratitude we owe to the man who called us female hooligans!' That tickled the crowd, too; she was such a charming little pink-cheeked specimen of a hooligan. 'I'm being frightfully amused, Geoffrey,' said Jean. He looked down at her with a large indulgence. 'That's right,' he said. 'We aren't hooligans, but we hope the fact will be overlooked. If everybody said we were nice, well-behaved women, who'd come to hear us? _Not the men._' The people dissolved in laughter, but she was grave enough. 'Men tell us it isn't womanly for us to care about politics. How do they know what's womanly? It's for women to decide that. Let them attend to being manly. It will take them all their time.' 'Pore benighted man!' 'Some of you have heard it would be dreadful if we got the vote, because then we'd be pitted against men in the economic struggle. But it's too late to guard against that. It's fact. But facts, we've discovered, are just what men find it so hard to recognize. Men are so dreadfully sentimental.' She smiled with the crowd at that, but she proceeded to hammer in her pet nail. 'They won't recognize those eighty-two women out of every hundred who are wage-earners. We used to believe men when they told us that it was unfeminine--hardly respectable--for women to be students and to aspire to the arts that bring fame and fortune. But men have never told us it was unfeminine for women to do the heavy drudgery that's badly paid. That kind of work had to be done by somebody, and men didn't hanker after it. _Oh_, no! Let the women scrub and cook and wash, or teach without diplomas on half pay. That's all right. But if they want to try their hand at the better-rewarded work of the liberal professions--oh, very unfeminine indeed.' As Ernestine proceeded to show how all this obsolete unfairness had its roots in political inequality, Lady John dropped her glass with a sigh. 'You are right,' she said to Jean. 'This is Hilda, harnessed to a purpose. A portent to shake middle-aged nerves.' With Jean blooming there before him, Stonor had no wish to prove his own nerves middle-aged. 'I think she's rather fun, myself. Though she ought to be taken home and well smacked.' Somebody had interrupted to ask, 'If the House of Commons won't give you justice, why don't you go to the House of Lords?' 'What?' She hadn't heard, but the question was answered by some one who had. 'She'd 'ave to 'urry up. Case of early closin'!' 'You'll be allowed to ask any question you like,' she said, 'at the end of the meeting.' 'Wot's that? Oh, is it question time? I s'y, miss, 'oo killed Cock Robin?'