“Then you would understand, but still you wouldn’t believe that this thing was really happening to you. You would see the houses curtsey sideways in a leaping dust, and a house front, with its windows, all complete, would shoot across the street with an unbearable roar, pricked by cracking noises....”
“Why would it dot fall od you?”
“Because things don’t. And there would be a great chord of screams. And men running a few yards this way or that, and then back again, yelping, with lighted pipes still in their mouths....”
“What ad ugly picture. How cad you see it all so clearly?”
“I have been thinking all day—of a friend of mine, who must have seen it. I don’t expect an earthquake is a pretty thing, although there is something beautiful about any curious happening.”
“I doad’t agree with you,” said Albert. “There are oadly a few beautiful thigs. Roses ... ad sudsets ... ad love....”
“Really, Albert,” protested the suffragette, “what do you know about love?”
“Well, if it cobs to that—what do you dow about earthquakes? I cad picture love, easily. A bad, kissing a girl, udder a cocoadut palb....”
“Nonsense,” exclaimed the suffragette, bounding so violently in her bed as to cause a serious storm in her soup. “Kissing’s not love. Everything that was ever said or written about kissing, I think, must have been said or written by a man. It’s only another of their tyrannies, to which, for the sake of love, women have had to submit.”
“You sowd like a suffragette whed you talk like that,” mocked Albert.