Joan accomplished much in the way of by-product to this satisfaction of her vanity. Her youthful charm and her good breeding got her a hearing frequently where more strenuous representatives of the cause had failed; and through her many hitherto uncertain lambs were gathered safely into the fold. On one occasion, to her astonishment, Joan discovered the three Misses Darcy in her audience, wearing expressions of shrinking alarm. But if they had come--not to scoff, they were too polite for that: let us say to deprecate,--they remained to join. "I declare it's _shameful_ the way we women have been treated all this time!" cried Miss Iphigenia afterwards, truculently signing the card which made of her a suffragette. "I'd no idea! Not allowed a word in edgewise, the gentlemen spending all the money and making all the laws, ordering us about like we were so many white slaves--" "I don't recall that darling mama was ever treated in just that way by dear papa?" interjected Miss Virginia, uncertainly. "Pooh! Exceptions," snorted Miss Iphigenia (if one so gentle could be said to snort). "Exceptions can be made to prove anything, can't they, Joan? Why, we haven't even had a say-so as to whether we should marry or not. Simply had to sit back and say 'Thank you, sir!' to any gentleman who was kind enough to ask us!" Here Miss Virginia was able thoroughly to concur. "And if nobody _was_ kind enough to ask us--Oh, my dears, I begin to think that if we could have had the ballot in time--!" "What's more," cried Miss Iphigenia, inspired, "I mean to bring our Susy to hear you the next time you make a speech, Joan. Yes, I do! If they try to keep her out, we shall say she is there as our maid. If we are all to be allowed to vote about things, colored and white alike, it's time for the colored women to be taught how!"--Which Joan justly regarded as a signal victory. But at the same time she chuckled inwardly over the mental vision of an audience of colored lady voters, swaying to and fro with occasional unctuous shouts of, "Bress us, dat's so! Um, yas, my Lawd! Come down, come down and gadder us sinners into de fold!" Occasionally, in the pursuance of her various public successes, Joan was thrown into contact with people whom she classified under the heading of Intelligentzia. There were plenty of these in Louisville, thinkers and students and writers, a growing number of names which were rather better known away from the city than in it. But of these Joan fought a little shy. She cared more for books than for the making of them, had no wish to peep behind the scenes for fear of losing her illusions. She got the impression, too, that professional thinkers and writers were so busy observing and interpreting the life about them as to have somehow lost human touch with it. And Joan was nothing if not a humanist. She had a youthful horror of being classified among the _bas bleux_. "Men do so hate a bluestocking," she said once pensively to her friend Emily.