When they were settled anew, she asked him to tell her something about the Gatehouse.
“It’s a lonely place,” he said. “It is quite out of the world. I don’t know, indeed, how you will exist after the life you have led.”
“The life I have led!” she protested. “But that is absurd! Though you saw me in the Princess’s salon, you know that my life had nothing in common with hers. I was downstairs no more than three or four times, and then merely to interpret. My life was spent between whitewashed walls, on bare floors. I slept in a room with twenty children, ate with forty—onion soup and thick tartines. The evening I saw you I wore shoes which the maid lent me. And with all that I was thankful, most thankful, to have such a refuge. The great people who met at the Princess’s——”
“And who thought that they were making history!” he laughed. “Did you know that? Did you know that the Princess was looking to them to save the last morsel of Poland?”
“No,” she said. “I did not know. I am very ignorant. But if I were a man, I should love to do things like that.”
“I believe you would!” he replied. “Well, there are crusades in England. Only I fear that you will not be in the way of them.”
“And I am not a princess! But tell me, please, what are they?”
“You will not be long before you come upon one,” he replied, a hint of derision in his tone. “You will see a placard in the streets, ‘Shall the people’s bread be taxed?’ Not quite so romantic as the independence of Poland? But I can tell you that heads are quite as likely to be broken over it.”
“Surely,” she said, “there can be only one answer to that.”
“Just so,” he replied dryly. “But what is the answer? The land claims high prices that it may thrive; the towns claim cheap bread that they may live. Each says that the country depends upon it. ‘England self-supporting!’ says one. ‘England the workshop of the world!’ says the other.”