Page:Women Wanted.djvu/97

 room, it seemed, parted and she stepped lightly across the window sill. She was gowned in a quaint, old-time costume. "They're not wearing them to-day," I smiled.

She looked down at her cotton gown stamped with the broad arrows of Holloway jail. There were women, you know, who suffered and died in that prison garb. The way of the broad arrow used to be the way of the cross for the woman's cause.

"You ought to see the new styles," I said. "Governments are getting out so many new decorations for women."

"Tell me," she answered. "Up in heaven we have heard that it is so. And I have come to see."

So we went out together, the Soul of a Suffragette and I, to look on the Great Push of the new woman movement that is swinging down the twentieth century in sweeping battalions. It has the middle of the road and all the gates ahead are open wide. No ukase of parliament or king halts it. No church dogma anathematises it. No social edict ostracises it. The police do not arrest it and the hooligans do not mob it. No, indeed! The applauding populace that's crying "Place aux dames" would not tolerate any such treatment as that. And in fact, I don't think there's any one left in the world who would want to so much as pull out a hairpin of this triumphant processional.

You see, it's so very different from the woman movement of yesterday. That was the crusade of the pioneers who gave their lives in the struggling