"I never noticed her looks," Howard Maitland was saying, as he and another member of the Survey Expedition lounged against the railing of their tubby little vessel and looked idly down on an oily sea. They had been talking about women—or Woman, as Frederica Payton would have expressed it; and, naturally, she herself came in for comment.

"Pretty?" Thomas Leighton had asked, sleepily. It was very hot, and the flats smelt abominably; both men were muddy and dripping with perspiration.

Howard meditated: "I never noticed her looks. She keeps you hustling so to know what she's talking about, that looks don't count. She says things that make you sit up—but lots of girls do that."

"They do. Boring after the first shock. But they enjoy it. It draws attention to 'em. Our grandmothers used to faint all over the lot, for the same purpose."

"Sometimes," Howard said, grinning, "when they get going about sex, I don't know where to look!"

"Look at them. That's what they want. And as most of 'em don't know what they're talking about, you needn't be uncomfortable. When they orate on Man's injustice to Woman—capital M and capital W—I get a little weary."

[Pg 128]

"I'm with 'em, there!" Maitland said.

The older man gave a grunt of impatience: "It isn't men who are unfair to women; it's Nature. But I don't see what can be done about it. Even the woman's vote won't be very successful in bucking Nature."

"I don't agree with you! Nature is perfectly impartial. Brain has no sex!"

"Nature impartial?" Leighton repeated, grimly; "Maitland, when the time comes for you to sit outside your wife's room, and wait for your first-born, you will not call Nature impartial. Theories are all very pretty, but just try waiting outside that door—" his face twitched; and Howard, remembering vaguely that Mrs. Leighton had been an invalid since the birth of their only child, changed the subject:

"Miss Payton's just sent me a cartload of suffrage literature; came on the tug yesterday."

"Suffragist?—you, I mean?"

"Yes; aren't you? Let's get in the flap of that sail."

"Do I look like a suffragist?" the other man demanded.

Howard surveyed him. "I don't know the earmarks, but you show traces of intelligence, so I suppose you are."

"I'll tell you the earmarks—in the human male: amiable youth or doddering age."

"You're not guilty on the amiability charge, and you don't visibly dodder. So I suppose you're an anti."

"Not on your life! It's a case of a plague on both your houses."

They were silent for a while, looking across the lagoon at a low reef where, all day long, the palms bent and[Pg 129] rustled in the hot wind; then Leighton broke out: "For utter absence of logic I wouldn't know which party to put my money on."

"Play the antis," Howard advised.

But the other man demurred. "It's neck and neck. Some of the arguments of the antis indicate idiocy; but some of the suffs' arguments indicate mania—homicidal mania! It's a dead heat. It's queer," he ruminated; "each side has sound reasons for the faith that is in it, yet they both offer us such a lot of—truck! One of the mysteries of the feminine mind, I suppose." He knocked the ashes out of his pipe on the deck-rail, and yawned. "As an example of 'truck,' I heard an anti say that for a woman to assume the functions of a man, and vote, was to 'revert to the am?ba.' Can you match that? But, on the other hand, look at the suffs! My own sister-in-law (a mighty fine woman) told me that men 'were of no use except to continue the race.'"

"That's going some!"

"But of course," the older man said, "it is ridiculous to make sex either a qualification or a disqualification for the ballot; and it's absurd that my wife shouldn't have a vote when that old Portuguese fool from Gloucester, Massachusetts, who guts our fish and can't speak English so that an American dog could understand him—has it."

"That's just it!" Howard said, surprised at his fairness.

"Why multiply him by two?" Leighton said, dryly.

"We wouldn't be a democracy if we discriminated against the uneducated!"

"I don't. I discriminate against the unintelligent.[Pg 130] You'll admit there's a difference? Also, allow me to remind you that democracy is not the ballot; it's a state of mind."

"Very well!" Maitland retorted. "Make intelligence the qualification: the women put it over us every time! They are far more intelligent than men."

"I'd like to hear you prove it."

"That's easy! Girls can stay in school longer than boys, so they are better educated."

"But I'm not talking about schooling!" Leighton broke in; "I mean just common sense as to functions of the ballot. Let women ask for an intelligence qualification, and I'll be the biggest kind of a suff! But while they don't know any more about what the ballot can and can't do, than to gas about its raising woman's wages—oh, Lord!" he ended, hopelessly.

"Suffrage in itself is educating," Howard instructed him.

Leighton nodded. "It ought to be. But I can't see that it has perceptibly educated our fish-gutter. Still, you'd like to meet his wife at the polls?"

The suffragist hesitated: "When women get the vote, they'll change the election laws, and weed out the unfit."

Leighton lifted despairing hands: "When you say things like that, I feel like putting my money on the suffs! Mait, get out of the cradle! Our grandfathers made a mess of it, by dealing out universal male suffrage; and our fathers made a worse mess in giving it to the male negro; now th............