According to Basil, it was he who finally thought of something. It seems that Vivian wrote out pages of a reply, saying that if the questioner compared man-made law with the ten commandments, then he made Parliament and the House of Lords divine, and that this was a reductio ad absurdum, which is Greek or something for ridiculous. But he almost went mad trying to make it short, and it wasn't funny at all. Whereas, as he knew very well, the only chance the speaker had, in such a case, was to get a laugh. What he really needed was a retort, not a reply.
We made rather slow progress. In the first place, Poppy learned that the chauffeur, who was a new one and quite intelligent, was not in favour of suffrage, and for hours we crawled along, while she argued with him. And in the second place, we stopped frequently to nail up posters along the roadside. Vivian said later that he trailed us quite easily, and that there were times when he was only one curve in the road behind. He used to get out and putter over the engine to pass the time and let us get ahead. He did not appear at Torquay, so I knew he wasn't getting along well with the ten commandments.
But except being put out of a hotel at Exeter for discovering a member of Parliament there, in bed with the gout, and flinging some handbills in through the transom, the rest of the trip was very peaceful. Dartmoor put Poppy into a trance; the heather was in bloom, and she made sketches and colour bits, and lay back in the car in a sort of dream, planning the next winter's work.
She was irritable when she was disturbed, too. The creative instinct is a queer thing. Once Bootles, the chauffeur, asked her a question when she was trying to catch some combination or other, and she answered him sharply.
"When the women go to vote, Miss," he said, turning around and touching his cap, "who is going to mind the children?"
"We intend to establish a messenger service," said Poppy, with a crayon in her mouth.
"A messenger service?" Bootles' eyes stuck out.
"Yes. To summon the fathers home from the pubs to hold the babies."
(A "pub" of course is an English saloon.)
The T. C. matter was still bothering Poppy at intervals. She knew as well as anyone that she needed a laugh in her retort, and as you have seen, Poppy is too earnest to be funny. I said this to Basil Ward the night we got to Tintagel.