“Do you know any one in Greyville?” asked Miss Brown.
“No.”
“Were you going to an hotel?”
“I suppose so.”
Some kind deeds are so obvious that they are impossible to escape.
“Albert can move into the back room,” said Miss Brown.
And the train, as if relieved to have this affair settled, moved on up the hill.
By the time the chapel bell, which Island engines always wear, had begun to sound its warning to the pigs upon the line at Greyville Junction, the suffragette’s independence was a thing dissolved. Her protests had no weight. Constitutionally she was unable to be politely firm. She must either be militant or acquiescent; she knew not the half measures of civilisation. And it was impossible to be militant in the face of Miss Brown’s impersonal sense of duty.
“If only she had been a more interesting person this might have been like the beginning of a novel,” murmured the lady novelist to Mr. Wise. That young man, who was wearing the sheepish look peculiar to the Englishman in the presence of matters which he considers to be feminine, shrugged his shoulders.
At Greyville station Miss Brown emerged like an empress from incognito. A black coachman, with so generous an expanse of teeth that you suspected them of being the only line of defence between you and the inner privacies of his brain, was on the platform. He seemed torn between acquired awe of Miss Brown, and an innate desire to conduct the welcome heartily. The station-master bowed. The porter chirruped to Scottie.