"Listen to me, I beg of you, sir. It is contrary, you tell me, to your sense of what is right and becoming that young women should preach the Gospel. Now, if Miss Charlesworth and I had come to Geneva to act in one of your theatres, I have no doubt we should have met with sympathy and approval from your public. We could have sung and danced on your stage; we could have dressed in a manner very different from, and much less modest than, that in which you see us dressed; we could have appeared before a miscellaneous audience, men and women, young and old, and of every class; members of the Grand Council, M. Herdier himself and others, would have come to see us act; we should have got money; Geneva would have paid ungrudgingly in that case; and you would all have sat and approved; you would have clapped your hands and cheered us; you would have brought your wives and daughters to see us, and they also would have applauded. There would have been nothing to _froisser_ you, no immorality in all that, according to your ideas and customs. The noise (_bruit_) we should have thus made would not have caused our expulsion. But when women come to try and save some of the forty or fifty thousand of your miserable, scoffing, irreligious population who never enter any place of worship, when they come with hearts full of pity and love for the ignorant and sinful, and stand up to tell the glad tidings of salvation to these rebels, this mob, among whom many accept the tidings with eager joy—then you cry out that this is unseemly and immodest. You would not bring your wives and daughters to hear us speak of Jesus, though you would bring them to hear us if we danced and sang upon the stage of your theatre. Now you have expelled us; but still there are those multitudes in Geneva who are dark, lost, unsaved; and you know it. There they are; they exist. What will you do with them? Say—what will you do? Are they not a danger? Does not their lost condition cry out against you?" The Councillor was not only silenced, but sank into his chair in a state of temporary lapse. For the moment, at least, the reality of the picture presented to him had touched his heart. Nevertheless the Maréchale’s Appeal was rejected, and M. Pictet wrote to her: "The wretched storm of anger and prejudice which you witnessed and which your friends deplore so much, has not blown over by any means. I, for one, despair of ever seeing my fellow-citizens properly understand what religious liberty and respect of other people’s opinion mean,—therefore the only course left to the Army seems to be the one indicated in St. Matthew x. 23! _You_ have done your duty, you cannot be expected to do more than Paul and Barnabas did (Acts xiii. 51)." Meantime the enemies of righteousness rejoiced. The theatrical paper of Geneva complimented the authorities upon the expulsion. "Our theatre," it said, "has lost a formidable rival, and the crowd is beginning to find its way back to us."