Bethlehem Road Read Online Free PDF

instantly. Her eyes were intent on the speaker, afraid lest she lose a word. She seemed oblivious of the women packed close to her; indeed, when one jostled against her and a feather from a rakish hat brushed her cheek she did no more than blink without turning to see who the offender might be.
    With the third speaker, a thin, overearnest woman of indeterminate age, the hecklers began. Their voices were still moderately good-natured, but their questions were sharp.
    “Yer sayin’ as women knows as much abaht business as men? That don’t say much fer yer man, then, do it?”
    “That is if yer ’as one!” There was a roar of laughter, half raucous, half pitying: a single woman was in most eyes a sad object, a creature who had failed in her prime objective.
    The woman on the platform winced so very slightly that it might even have been Charlotte’s imagination. She was used to this particular taunt and had grown to expect it.
    “You have one?” she flung back with certainty blazing in her face. “And children, do you?”
    “Sure I ’ave! Ten of ’em!”
    There were more shouts of laughter.
    “Do you have a maid, and a cook, and other servants?” the woman on the platform asked.
    “Course I don’t! Wotcher think I am? I ’ave one girl as scrubs.”
    “Then you manage the household yourself?”
    There was silence, and Charlotte glanced at the woman with the remarkable face and saw that already she understood what the speaker was intending. Her face was keen with appreciation.
    “Course I do!”
    “Accounts, budgeting, the purchase of clothes, the use of fuel, the discipline of your ten children? Seems to me you know a great deal about business—and people. I daresay you are a pretty good judge of character too. You know when you are being lied to, when someone is trying to give you short change or sell you shoddy goods, don’t you?”
    “Yeah ...” the woman agreed slowly. She was not yet ready to concede, not in front of so many. “Don’t mean I know ’ow ter run a country!”
    “Does your husband? Could he run a country? Could he even run your house?”
    “Isn’t the same!”
    “Does he have a vote?”
    “Yeah, but—”
    “Isn’t your judgment as good as his?”
    “My dear good woman!” another voice burst in, rich and piled with scorn, and heads turned towards the wearer of a plum-colored hat. “You may be very proficient at buying enough potatoes to feed your family and assessing the cost any given week; I don’t doubt you are. But that is hardly on the same level as choosing a Prime Minister!”
    There were giggles of stifled mirth, and someone called out, “Hear, hear,” in agreement.
    “Our place is in the home,” the woman with the plum hat continued, gathering momentum. “Domestic duties are among our natural gifts, and as mothers, of course we know how to discipline our children—such instincts awake in us when we bear our young. It is God’s order of the world. But our judgments on matters of high finance, foreign affairs, and concerns of state are utterly hopeless. Neither nature nor the Lord designed us to meddle in such things, and we rob ourselves and our daughters of our proper place, and the respect and protection due us from men, if we try to go contrary to it!”
    There were more murmurs of approval, and a sprinkling of tentative applause.
    The woman on the platform was exasperated at the irrelevance of the argument. There were spots of color high on her thin cheeks. “I am not suggesting you become a Minister of State!” she said sharply. “Only that you have as much right as your butler or your poulterer has to choose who shall represent you in the Parliament of your country! And that your judgment of character is probably just as competent as theirs!”
    “Oh! You impertinent creature!” The woman in plum was quite outraged; her face colored darkly and her rather heavy jowls shook as she raced through her mind for words scalding enough to satisfy the