"Look at the unrest of women, everywhere. I don't mean the agitation for suffrage;--that is just a symptom of it. It is yeast," she said, with passion; "yeast! We can't help it; something is fermenting; something is pushing us. All kinds of women feel it. I know, because I go round to the factories and talk to the girls at their noon hour, trying to get them to organize--that's the only way we can get the men to do what we want. Organization! Women have got to get together! I've made a door-to-door canvass for our league, and I came up against this--this, I don't know what to call it! this _stirring_, among women. Every woman (except fat old dames whose minds stopped growing when they had their first baby) is stirred, somehow. Twenty years from now the women who are girls to-day won't be putting picture puzzles together for want of something better to do." The contempt in her voice revealed nothing to Howard Maitland, who scarcely knew the poor, dull lady in the sitting-room on Payton Street; but he wondered why Fred's face suddenly reddened. "No; girls are doing things! When they get to middle age their brains won't be chubby. Look at the factories, and shops, and offices--all full of women! Girls don't have to knuckle down any more, and 'obey'; they can say 'Thank you for nothing!' and break away, and support themselves. I tell you what! this life servitude that men have imposed upon women of looking after the home, is done, _done_, for good and all! That sweet creature, 'the devoted wife,' is being labeled 'kept woman,'--but the ballot is the key to her prison door!" "Bully simile," he said. "But isn't it all queer--the change in things?" she said, her voice suddenly vague and wondering; "it's a sort of race movement, with Truth as the motive power. It's bigger than just--people. Even our parlor-maid, Flora, feels it! She wants to do something; she doesn't know what. (I wish she'd put her energies into laundering the centerpieces better, but I regret to say she has a soul above laundry.) Yes, things are stirring! It's yeast." Such talk was new to Howard. Until now, his young Chivalry had concerned itself only with women's demand for suffrage--which, as Frederica Payton had very truly said, is only a symptom, alarming, or amusing, or divine, as you may happen to look at it--of the world-unrest which she called "feminism." He was keenly interested.