'Good God! can't you see that this crazed campaign you'd start her on--even if it's successful, it can only be so through the help of men? What excuse shall you make your own soul for not going straight to the goal?' 'You think we wouldn't be glad,' she said, 'to go straight to the goal?' 'I do. I see you'd much rather punish me and see her revel in a morbid self-sacrifice.' 'You say I want to punish you only because, like other men, you won't take the trouble to understand what we do want--or how determined we are to have it. You can't kill this New Spirit among women.' She went nearer. 'And you couldn't make a greater mistake than to think it finds a home only in the exceptional or the unhappy. It is so strange to see a man like you as much deluded as the Hyde Park loafers, who say to Ernestine Blunt, "Who's hurt _your_ feelings?" Why not realize'--she came still closer, if she had put out her hand she would have touched him--'this is a thing that goes deeper than personal experience? And yet,' she said in a voice so hushed that it was full of a sense of the girl on the other side of the door, 'if you take only the narrowest personal view, a good deal depends on what you and I agree upon in the next five minutes.' 'You recommend my realizing the larger issues. But in your ambition to attach that poor girl to the chariot-wheels of Progress'--his voice put the drag of ironic pomposity upon the phrase--'you quite ignore the fact that people fitter for such work, the men you look to enlist in the end, are ready waiting'--he pulled himself up in time for an anti-climax--'to give the thing a chance.' 'Men are ready! What men?' His eyes evaded hers. He picked his words. 'Women have themselves to blame that the question has grown so delicate that responsible people shrink for the moment from being implicated in it.' 'We have seen the shrinking.' 'Without quoting any one else, I might point out that the New Antagonism seems to have blinded you to the small fact that I for one am not an opponent.' 'The phrase has a familiar ring. We have heard it four hundred and twenty times.' His eyes were shining with anger. 'I spoke, if I may say so, of some one who would count. Some one who can carry his party along with him--or risk a seat in the cabinet over the issue.' 'Did you mean you are "ready" to do that?' she exclaimed. 'An hour ago I was.' 'Ah! an hour ago!' 'Exactly! You don't understand men. They can be led; they can't be driven. Ten minutes before you came into the room I was ready to say I would throw in my political lot with this Reform.' 'And now?'