_Meanwhile, although your woman’s talent for logic makes you see ahead of others, I hope you will allow yourself to be guided in this matter by a man’s intuition. Masculine intuition is so valuable sometimes! Please remember me most kindly to Lord Porstock; he will be back in England by now?_
It was, I confess, not without a tear in my eye and a quivering typewriter that I answered this kindly letter as follows:
_Thank you very much for your most kind letter, whose complimentary expressions are, I am afraid, far in excess of anything my poor intelligence deserves. I quite understand that the line of action I am adopting is a very unusual one. You, on your side, will understand that I would not be acting in this way if I did not feel deeply about the point at issue. That point is not, as I conceive, merely one of mathematical convenience. It is simply the question whether the constituents in any electoral division are to send a representative to Westminster, or a dummy. If the country wished its political life to be suspended by the sleep of an eternal compromise, it should not have allowed women into Parliament. I have been told from several quarters that the subject of my opposition is unimportant compared with the fact of my opposition; in short, that I am a test case. I believe it, and I am glad of it; it seems to me that the nation is drifting perilously near to the position in which it would be governed by a Cabinet instead of a Parliament._
I need hardly say that the Press was very amusing at my expense, but its comment was not always particularly intelligent. Indeed, the only sensible criticism I remember was a cartoon in which I was represented as an exhibit at a freak-show, with six fingers on each hand. But the greater part of my critics seemed to have entirely missed the point at issue. They all seemed obsessed with the idea, either that I multiplied three by four into ten, or that I multiplied five by two into twelve, or both. The words “tink” and “tonk” naturally caught on with the humorists of the day; indeed, I believe a revue entitled “Tink tonk” was still running at the outbreak of the Great War. Some of my serious critics were even more entertaining, and I was severely reproved by more than one religiously minded correspondent for upsetting the eternal laws of number, ordained for us by a wise Providence when it gave us fingers and toes. But I was not to be moved by any kind of opposition, and the support of Juliet Savage prevented the public from laughing me out of court. In the end, as my readers will probably remember, the situation became so acute that the Prime Minister actually came back from France and held a Round Table Conference at Chequers. For a time it looked as if no _modus vivendi_ could be arrived at, but at last statesmanship triumphed, and a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the relative merits of decimal and duodecimal numeration, which is still sitting to-day.