l issues you import into
politics--gambling, prostitution, Sunday closing, censored movies, and
the rest--the more corrupt and helpless and inefficient your government
will be." And, between them, for the next half-hour, they kept on
demonstrating it until the roar of their heavy artillery fairly drove
Jane from her trenches.

But all this was preliminary to the main topic of the evening, which got
launched when Rodney seized the advantage of a pause to say:

"A series of articles on women, eh! What are you going to do to them?"

With that the topic of feminism was on the carpet and it was never
thereafter abandoned. "Utopia to Brass Tacks," was the slogan Barry's
chief had provided him with, he said. We were about the end of the
heroic age of the movement, the age of myths and saints and prophecies.
A transition was about due to smaller, more immediate things. The
quality of the leaders would probably change. The heroines of the last
three or four decades, women like Naomi Rutledge Stanton, to take a fine
type of them.

"She's my mother," said Rose.

Barry Lake's aplomb was equal to most situations, but it failed him
here; for a moment he could only stare. The contrast between the picture
in his mind's eye, of the plain, square-toed, high-principled and rather
pathetic champion of the Cause--pathetic in the light of what she hoped
from it--facing indifference and ridicule with the calm smile of one
who has climbed her mountain and looked into the promised
land,--between that and the lovely, sensitive, sensuous creature he was
staring at, was enough to stagger anybody. He got himself together in a
moment, said very simply and gravely how much he admired her and how
high a value, he believed, the future would put on her work; then he
picked up his sentence where Rose had broken it.

The heroines and the prophets were going to be replaced, he believed, by
leaders much more practical and less scrupulous, and the movement would
follow the leaders. As far as polities went, he not only looked for no
millennium, but for a reaction in the other direction. There'd be more
open graft, he thought.

Rose asked him if he meant that he thought women were less honest than
men.

"It isn't a lack of old-fashioned honesty that makes a man a grafter,"
he said. "It's seeing the duties and privileges of a public office in a
private and personal way, instead of in a public, impersonal one; being
kind to old friends who need a helpi