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When a man knows his wife and daughters are at home, he feels safe. He is in no hurry to be there himself. This was the hour when every man in Jordantown was accustomed to know that. If any one had asked a single one of them the question, "Where's your wife?" he would have answered, "At home, of course!"
They were supposed to control municipal elections, but not one of them had ever "run" for an office. Deities don't. They are the powers behind the throne. These men represented Providence in Jordantown. And Providence is always behind the scenes. The trouble now was that by an ordinary and inevitable process of nature they had lost control of the situation.
But the men sat silent, staring in amazement at the little fat old lady who was smiling at them like a gratified mother. "Now I have told you, and all you have to do at present is to sign that petition," she went on very pleasantly. "We have already secured to-day and yesterday the names of many of the leading citizens of Jordantown.
It was at her suggestion that all the work of committees in Jordantown should be conducted as quietly as possible. The women were pledged not to betray plans to any one but women belonging to the League. So when women of all classes discovered that they would be received most cordially in an organization fostered by the leading ladies of the place, they hastened to join.
They had both failed to get the usual spring loan from the National Bank, due entirely to the fact that at the first directors' meeting, the new director had demanded to know exactly how much they owed already, and she refused to sanction the advance of another dollar to any merchant in Jordantown.
Jordantown had taken off its coat and was busy in its shirt sleeves trying to make up for the trade lost during the morning. Customers came and went, merchants frowned, clerks smiled. Teams passed. Children returning from school added, by their joyous indifference, irritation to the general situation. All the sparrows were back in the dust of the street discussing its merits.
Add to this the fact that she was a suffragist in the days when there was only one other woman in the state who believed in citizenship for women, and that she never ceased to "agitate" for suffrage, and you receive a faint impression of this old termagant celebrity who had put Jordantown "on the map" and had given it a reputation for broadmindedness at a distance which it in no way deserved.
In the first place, why had he not been notified of the citizens' meeting. He usually presided on these occasions when the tutelary deities of Jordantown gathered in Coleman's office, or more frequently in his own office, to discuss the ways and means by which the principles of the Democratic party could be made to contribute most liberally to the liberty of man, especially in Jordantown.
For a man to be sufficiently conscious of himself, there must always be the possibility of a woman in sight before whom he may magnify himself at least in his own imagination. The Jordantown Square citizens lacked this mirror. They wandered from corner to corner expecting to find it, to see somewhere near or far the flutter of a woman's skirt, the sky of a woman's eyes.
A town without women in the streets is like a meadow without flowers, a bay tree without leaves, like the air without the wings of birds in it and the sweet sounds they make there about their feathers and affairs. Now since four o'clock not a woman had been seen on the streets of Jordantown, if one excepted an occasional bandanna-headed negress.
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