"Why, she's a Suffragist!"
Delia shrugged her shoulders. "Pour rire!"
"Let's leave the horrid subject alone—shall we?"
Delia assented; and they set out, just as the winter sun of a bright and brilliant afternoon was beginning to drop towards its setting.
* * * * *
When Delia afterwards looked back on those two hours in Mark Winnington's company, she remembered them as a time enskied and glorified. First, the mere pleasure of the senses—the orange glow of the January evening, the pleasant crackling of the frosty ground, the exhilaration of exercise, and of the keen pungent air; then the beauty of the village and of the village lanes in the dusk, of the blue smoke drifting along the hill, of the dim reds and whites of the old houses, and the occasional gleams of fire and lamp through the small-paned windows; the gaiety of the children racing home from school, the dignity of the old labourers, the seemliness of the young. It was good to be alive—in England—breathing English air. It was good to be young and strong-limbed, with all one's life before one.
And next—and greater—there was the pleasure of Winnington beside her, of his changed manner, of their new comradeship. She felt even a curious joy in the difference of age between them. Now that by some queer change, she had ceased to stand on her dignity with him, to hold him arrogantly at arm's length, there emerged in her a childish confidence and sweetness, enchanting to the man on whom it played. "May I?—" "Do you think I might?—" she would say, gently, throwing out some suggestion or other, as they went in and out of the cottages, and the humbleness in her dark eyes, as though a queen stooped, began to turn his head.
And how beautiful this common human life seemed that evening—after all the fierce imaginings in which she had lived so long! In the great towns beyond the hills, women were still starved and sweated,—still enslaved and degraded. Man no doubt was still the stupid and vicious tyrant, the Man-Beast that Gertrude Marvell believed him. But here in this large English village, how the old primal relations stood out!—sorrow-laden and sin-stained often, yet how touching, how worthy, in the main, of reverence and tenderness! As they went in and out of the cottages of her father's estate, the cottages where Winnington was at home, and she a stranger, all that "other side" of any great argument began to speak to her—without words. The world of politics and its machinery, how far away!—instead, the world of human need, and love, and suffering unveiled itself this winter evening to Delia's soul, and spoke to her in a new language. And always it was a language of sex, as between wives and husbands, mothers and sons, sisters and brothers. No isolation of one sex or the other. No possibility of thinking of them apart, as foes and rivals, with jarring rights and claims. These old couples tending each other, clinging together, after their children had left them, till their own last day should dawn; these widowed men or women, piteously lost without the old companion, like the ox left alone in the furrow; these young couples with their first babies; these dutiful or neglectful sons, these hard or tender daughters; these mothers young and old, selfish or devoted:—with Winnington beside her, Delia saw them all anew, heard them all anew. And Love, in all its kinds, everywhere the governing force, by its presence or its absence!—Love abused and degraded, or that Love, whether in the sunken eyes of the old, or on the cheeks of the young, which is but "a little lower than the angels."
And what frankly amazed her was Winnington's place in this world of labouring folk. He had given it ten years of service; not charity, but simply the service of the good citizen; moved by a secret, impelling motive, which Delia had yet to learn. And how they rewarded him! She walked beside a natural ruler, and felt her heart presently big with the pride of it.
"But the cripples?" She enquired for them, with a touch of sarcasm. "So far," she said, "the population Maumsey, appeared to be quiet exceptionally able-bodied."