Mrs. Higginson, checking names on her lists with a gold lead-pencil, looked up, at the abrupt method of introduction and smiled good-humoredly, at the assistant in pink, and then the assistant in blue. For her woman in the mass still included individuals, and amenities belonged to the life she knew.
"Every woman's name on the list you're to make, Miss Selina," she explained, "is a target at which we two are proposing to fire our convictions. It's a glorious thing at any time of one's life to have convictions, let me tell you, if you haven't discovered it." Was she laughing at them? "Mrs. Bruce and I are the two liveliest women in this town, and always will be, because our convictions, whatever they be, ride us."
Having finished unboxing the envelopes Aunt Juanita was going around distributing ink. She paused at this point in Mrs. Higginson's remarks, tweaked her nose with the side of the ink bottle in her hand, since that hand was occupied with the bottle, and addressed herself to this lady.
"Organize! _Organize!_ If we can just get that word and its significances over to the women in this town! If we can make 'em understand that woman's hope everywhere lies in this one word! If we can show 'em that it's the instrument of the whole era upon us, for class, labor, capital, too, Aurelius points out, as well as the one instrument for them! Organize and discover our strength as women and so on to our rights. That's the phrase. That's the slogan."
The clerical force in pink showed a bright spot on either cheek! The open heart and the open mind were ever hers! Her handsome, hazel-brown eyes beneath her red-brown hair were dilating with the beginnings of zeal, of fire!
The clerical force with the heavy masses of pale flaxen hair, the clerical force, that is to say, in blue brought some names on a bit of paper over to the visibly impressed force in pink. "Organize for what, Maud? Who'll organize? And where?"
"Hush," said Maud, "I don't know. But I feel right from the start I'm with 'em! So you're, Selina." And so were others all over this fair land to be with them; others as great in faith and zeal as Maudie, though no better equipped in comprehension as to what it was about! But it was glorious none the less to be there!