The other men laugh at him, but distrust him profoundly."
"Pooh!" said Francisca. "That's all very well for men--they have
little humour and no wit--"
"My dear Francesca, how can you venture to fly in the face of all
experience--"
"Men's experience," she said; "it doesn't count. You've often said
that smoking-room stories are the dullest in the world."
"How you do dart about," I said, "from subject to subject. Just now
you were in a polling-booth and now you're in a smoking-room."
"And heartily ashamed to be found there--stale tobacco and staler
stories. Why have a smoking-room at all when everybody's grandmother
has her own cigarette case and her own special brand of cigarettes?"
"We ought rather," I said, "to have two smoking-rooms to every house,
one for me and the likes of me and the other for the grandmothers."
"Segregating the sexes again! Surely if we have mixed bathing we may
have mixed smoking."
"And mixed voting," I said.
"That is no real concession. We have wrung it from you because of the
force and reasonableness of our case."
"Say rather the force and Christabelness of your case."
"Anyhow, we've got it."
"And now that you've got it you don't really care for it."
"We do, we do."
"You don't. It's not one of the important subjects you and your
friends talk about after you've quite definitely got up to go and said
good-bye to one another.
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