Cally caught widening glimpses of the Cooney meanings.  She had been like a rider thrown from a gay fixed steed in a merry-go-round, who, having picked himself up and mended his wounds, looks about, and gets his first view of the carousel as part of a larger moving scene.  Cally, for the first time in her life, had been glancing over the fair-grounds.  Not even the knowledge of Hugo’s love could now wholly turn her gaze backward.

Pending the beginning of the oratory, clubbers and guests talked to the contentment of their hearts.  Cally said suddenly: 

“Hen, why is it that men are so opposed to this sort of thing?”

“It’s human,” said Hen, “if you have the upper hand, not to want to give it up.”

“You mean that men have the upper hand now?”

“Haven’t they?”

A tiny little woman in the row ahead of them turned round and smiled faintly at Henrietta.  She had a face like a small doll’s, a button of a nose and the palest little china-blue eyes imaginable.  Nevertheless, this woman was Mrs. Slicer, president of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, and those weak eyes had once stared a Governor of a State out of countenance.

“Hen, they have,” said she, in a fairy voice; and so turned back to her own affairs, dropping from these pages.

Henrietta presently said:  “But why should they oppose it, really, Cally?  If you were a man, would you insist on the privilege of marrying a helpless dependent, your mental and moral inferior?  Seems to me I’d rather have an intelligent comrade, my superior for choice—­”

But Hen discovered that her voice all at once sounded very loud.  There was a sudden lull in the conversational hum, and then a burst of hand-clapping.  The lady president of the Woman’s Club had entered at the head of the rooms, followed by the orators.  They ascended the platform; and when Cally saw but the Mayor of the city and Mr. Pond of the Settlement, she said at once to Henrietta: 

“Why, where’s your friend V.V.?”

“Somewhere up at the front,—­I hope!...  He wasn’t one of the regular speakers, you know....”

Hen added in a faint whisper:  “I doubt if he knows he’s going to be called on—­”

Being duly presented to the expectant women, his Honor the Mayor spoke first.  He was a middle-aged, mustachioed Mayor, who had achieved a considerable success by being all things to a few men, but those the right ones.  His reputation as an orator was well deserved, but his ability to make one speech serve many occasions had been commented upon by carpers here and there.  See the files of the “Post,” passim.  To-day his thesis was organized charity, lauded by him, between paragraphs of the set piece, as philanthropy’s great rebuke to Socialism.  And thrice his Honor spoke of the glorious capital of this grand old commonwealth; twice his arm swept from the stormy Atlantic to the sun-kissed Pacific; five times did he exalt, with the tremolo stop, the fair women of the Southland....