“Are you? How does it feel?”
“Not at all natural. I don’t believe I’ll ever be satisfied till I’m chained to the car again. Boadicea, do you remember those words you spoke that day we met on the Garguantuan? Does your proposition still hold good?”
“What proposition?”
“Let us unite our forces. Let us fight side by side. Boadicea, will you not change your name to Madden? You know my sad history. Here then I offer you the fragments of my heart.”
“Oh, don’t. You make me feel like a cannibal.”
“Here then I offer you my hand and name. I will try to make you the most devoted of husbands.”
“I am sure you will. Horace, we will work together for the good of the Cause.”
A month after we were married and spent our honeymoon in London, chiefly in attending Suffragette meetings. Very soon I began to discover that being wedded to a woman who is wedded to a Cause is like being the understudy of your wife’s husband. And if that rather militant suffragette happens to be a millionairess then one’s negligibility is humiliatingly accentuated. I was only a millionaire in francs, while Boadicea was a millionairess in dollars, and the disparity of values in national currency began to become more and more a painful fact to me.
I was not long, too, in discovering that my sympathy with the Cause was only skin-deep. Indeed, my suddenly discovered enthusiasm had surprised even myself. It was unlike me to become so interested in real, vital questions, that more than once I suspected myself of being a hypocrite. At long distance the idea of Woman finding herself fascinated me just as socialism fascinated me. I could dream and idealise and let my imagination paint wonderful pictures of a woman’s world, but once the matter became concrete, my enthusiasm took wings. Then it was I had my first tiff with Boadicea.
“Boa, I don’t want to march in the demonstration on Sunday,” I said peevishly.