speaker high above the heads of the audience stood a woman, speaking
with shrill ardour. Most of the hearers were men; and she was telling
them with logic and authority that the progress of civilization waited
upon the votes of women. The army of the world stood still until the
rear rank of its women could be brought into line! Morals languished,
religion faded, industries were brutalized, home life destroyed! If only
women had their rights the world would at once become a beautiful and
charming place! Oh, she was a powerful and earnest speaker; she made me
desire above everything, at the first opportunity, to use my share of
the power in this Government to provide each woman with a vote. And just
as I had reached this compliant stage there came a girl smiling and
passing her little basket. The sheer art of it! So I dropped in my coin
and took the little leaflet she gave me and put it side by side with the
other literature of my accumulating library.

And so I came away from those hot little groups with their perspiring
orators, and felt again the charm of the tall buildings and the wide
sunny square, and the park with Down-at-Heels warming his ragged shanks,
and the great city clanging heedlessly by. How serious they all were
there in their eddies! Is there no God? Will woman suffrage or socialism
cure all the evils of this mad world which, ill as it is, we would not
be without? Is a belief for forty years in the complete wisdom of the
Book the final solution? Why do not all of the seeking and suffering
thousands flowing by in Twenty-third Street stop here in the eddies to
seek the solution of their woes, the response to their hot desires?

So I came home to the country, thinking of what I had seen and heard,
asking myself, "What is the truth, after all? What _is_ real?"

And I was unaccountably glad to be at home again. As I came down the