Two Sides of the Face - 1903 Author:Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Mazed Election (1768) A PASSAGE FROM THE ORAL HISTORY OF ARDEVORA WOMAN Suffrage ? It's surprising to me how light some folks will talk—with a Provide... more »nce, for all they know, waiting round the corner to take them at their word. I put my head in at the Working Man's Institute last night, and there was the new Coastguard officer talking like a book, arguing about Woman Suffrage in a way that made me nervous. "Look 'ee here," he was saying, " a woman must be either married, or unmarried, or otherwise. Keep they three divisions clear in your heads, and then I 'll ask you to follow me " And all the company sitting round with their mouths open. I came away: I couldn't stand it. It put me in mind how my poor mother used towarn me against squinting for fun. " One of these days," she'd say, "the wind'll take and change sudden while you 're doing it; and there you 'll be fixed and looking fifty ways for Sunday until we meet in the land of marrow and fatness." And here in Ardevora, of all places!—where the womenkind be that masterful already, a man must get into his sea-boots before he can call his soul his own. Why, there was a woman here once that never asked for a vote in her life, and yet capsized an Election for Parliament—candidates, voters, and the whole apple-cart—as easy as you might turn over a plate. Did you ever hear tell of Kitty Lebow and her eight tall daughters ? No; I daresay not. The world's old and losing its memory when it begins to talk of Woman Suffrage. This Kitty, or Christian, or Christiana Lebow was by birth a Bottrell: and a finer family than the Bottrells, by their own account, you wouldn't find in all England. Not that it matters whether they came over with William the Norman, nor whether they could once on a time ride from sea to sea on the...« less