'No,' she said, 'it is you who are ignorant--of how pressing the need is. You say it is "out of order." If treating the women of the country fairly is out of order, it is only because men have made a poor sort of order. It is the _order_ that should be changed.' Of course that dictum received its due amount of hooting. 'The vote is the reward for defending the country,' said a voice. 'No,' said the girl promptly, 'for soldiers and sailors don't vote.' 'It implies fitness for military service,' somebody amended. 'It _shouldn't_,' said Nineteen, calmly; 'it ought to imply merely _a stake_ in the country. No one denies we have that.' The crowd kept on about soldiering, till the speaker was goaded into saying-- 'I don't say women like fighting, but women _can_ fight! In these days warfare isn't any more a matter of great physical strength, and a woman can pull a trigger as well as a man. The Boer women found that out--and so has the Russian. I don't like thinking about it myself--for I seem to realize too clearly what horrors those women endured before they could carry bombs or shoulder rifles.' 'Rifles? Why a woman can't never hit _nothing_.' 'It is quite true we can't most of us even throw a stone straight--the great mass of women never in all their lives wanted to hit anybody or anything. And that'--she came nearer, and leaned over the side of the cart with scared face--'it's that that makes it so dreadful to realize how at last when women's eyes are opened--when they see their homes and the holiest things in life threatened and despised, how quickly after all _they can learn the art of war_.' 'With hatpins!' some one called out. 'Yes, scratching and spitting,' another added. That sort of interruption did not so much embarrass her, but once or twice she was nearly thrown off her beam-ends by men and boys shouting, 'Wot's the matter with yer anyway? Can't yer get a husband?' and such-like brilliant relevancies. Although she flushed at some of these sallies, she stuck to her guns with a pluck that won her friends. In one of the pauses a choleric old man gesticulated with his umbrella. 'If what the world needed was Woman's Suffrage, it wouldn't have been left for a minx like you to discover it.' At which volleys of approval. 'That gentleman seems to think it's a new madness that we've recently invented.' The child seemed in her loneliness to reach out for companioning. She spoke of 'our friend John Stuart Mill.' 'Oo's Mill?' 'That great Liberal wrote in 1867----' But Mill and she were drowned together. She waited a moment for the flood of derision to subside. ''E wouldn't 'ad nothin' to do with yer if 'e'd thought you'd go on like you done.' 'Benjamin Disraeli was on our side. Mazzini--Charles Kingsley. As long ago as 1870, a Woman's Suffrage Bill that was drafted by Dr. Pankhurst and Mr. Jacob Bright passed a second reading.' 'The best sort of women _never_ wanted it.'