"And then I realise that when women say they want to vote, it isn't because they're all piously set on saving the country. It's because they've peeped over the fence and got an idea of the game, and they're crazy to be in it." "But, mother, there's no game, except a dirty one of graft and politics. There's nothing in it." "No," said Mrs. Choate. "There isn't in most games. But people play them." "You don't think Amabel is in it for the game?" "Oh, no! Amabel's a saint. It wouldn't take more than a basket of wood and a bunch of matches to make her a martyr." "But, mother," said Alston, "you belong to the antis." "Do I?" asked his mother. "Yes, I believe I do." "Do you mean to say you're not sincere?" "Why, yes, of course I'm sincere. So are they. Only, doesn't it occur to you they're having just as much fun organising and stirring the pot as if it was the other pot they were stirring? Besides they attitudinise while they stir, and say they're womanly. And they like that, too." "Do you think they're in it for the game?" "No, no, Alston, not consciously. Nobody's in it for the game except your Weedon Moores. Any more than a nice girl puts on a ribbon to trap her lover. Only nature's behind the girl, and nature's behind the game. She's behind all games. But as to the antis--" said Mrs. Choate impatiently, "they've gone on putting down cards since the rules were changed." Alston rose and stood looking down at her. She glanced up brightly, met his eyes and laughed. "All is," said she, in a current phrase even cultured Addington had caught from its "help" from the rural radius outside, "I just happened to feel like telling you if you want to run away, you go. And if I weighed a hundred and ten and were forty-five, I'd go with you. Actually, I should advise you, if you're going to stay here, to stir the pot a little now it's begun to boil so hard." "Get into politics?" he asked, remembering Jeff. "Maybe." She smiled at him, pleasantly, not as a mother smiles, but an implacable mistress of destiny. In spite of her large tolerance, there were moments when she did speak. So she had looked when he said, as a boy, that he shouldn't go to gymnasium, and she had told him he would. And he went. Again, when he was in college and had fallen in with a set of ultra-moderns and swamped himself in decoration and the beguilements of a spurious art, he had seen that look; then she had told him the classics were not to be neglected. Now here was the look again. Alston began to have an uncomfortable sense that he might have to run for office in spite of every predilection he ventured to cherish. He could have thrown himself on the floor and bellowed to be let alone. "But keep your head, dear," she was saying. "Keep your head. Don't let any man--or woman either--lose it for you. That's the game, Alston, really."