"I suppose," she said, tauntingly, "that you were rather astonished to wake up from your fishing nap, and find yourself----" she considered the effect of her words, gazing at him insolently from under slightly lowered lashes--"find yourself all balled up in a fish net." He only grinned at her. "What are you laughing at?" she demanded, unsmiling. "Lying here flat on my back, I am smiling at Woman! at every individual woman on earth! at this ridiculous feminine uprising, this suffragette revolution--at your National Female Federation Committee; the thousands of local unions; this strike of your entire sex; this general boycott of my sex! What has it accomplished?" He tried to wave his hand. "You parade and make speeches in the streets, throw bricks, slap the faces of a few State Congressmen, and finally proclaim a general strike and boycott. "And what's the result? All social functions and ceremonies are suspended; caterers, florists, confectioners, cabmen, ruined; theatres, restaurants, department stores, novelists, milliners, in financial throes; a falling off of over eighty per cent. in marriages and births--and you are no nearer a vote than you were before the great strike paralysed the business of this Republic." The young lady had been growing pinker and pinker. "Oh! . . . And is that why you are laughing?" she asked. "Yes. It's the funniest strike that ever happened to a serious-minded sex. Because you know your sex, as a sex, is a trifle destitute of a sense of humour----" "That expression," she cut in with bitter satisfaction, "definitely determines _your_ intellectual and social limits, Mr. Langdon. You are what you appear to be--one of those dreary bothers whose stock phrase is 'a sense of humour'--the kind of young man who has acquired a florid imitation of cultivation, a sort of near-polish; the type of person who uses the word 'brainy' for 'capable,' and 'mentality' for 'intelligence'; the dreadful kind of person who speaks of a subject as 'meaty' instead of properly employing the words 'substance' or 'material'; the sort of----" Langdon, red and wrathful, sat up on the ground, peering at her through the enveloping net. "Never in my life," he said, "have I been spoken to in such terms of feminine contempt. Stop it! Can't you appreciate a joke?" "Mr. Langdon, the day is past when women will either countenance or take part in any disrespectful witticisms, slurs, or jests at the expense of their own sex. Once--and that not very long ago--they did it. Comic papers made my sex the subject of cartoons and witticisms; the stage dared to spread the contemptible misinformation; women either smiled or remained indifferent. The impression became general and fixed that women were gallinaceous, that a hen-like philosophy characterised the sex; that they were, at best, second-rate humans, tagging rather gratefully at the heels of the Lords of Creation, unconcerned with the greater and vital questions of the world.