You may be surprised to hear that the suffragette spent the next day in bed. A day in bed is not, of course, part of the Hair Shirt Theory, but this was a Sunday, and Sunday is a day of weakness, though it seems politer to the Old Testament to call it a day of relaxation. The suffragette always spent Sunday as she liked, with the hair shirt doffed and neatly folded on a chair beside her. She smoked as many cigarettes as she pleased, instead of the strict two of ordinary life, she occasionally ate as many as three large meals, she had been known to invest in nougat. Sundays were the oases in her desert, and if the gardener had chanced on one for the scene of one of his luckless spasms, this story might have been much prettier. It is very tiring to be yourself with such ardour as the suffragette employed, and to be somebody else for twenty-four hours once a week becomes almost a necessity.
Besides, she had court plaster on her forehead, and the publicly court-plastered pose was one that the suffragette loathed.
If the Chief M.S. had had the luck to catch a painless black eye in the Cause of the Vote, she would have flaunted it like a flag up and down Piccadilly. But the husband had been almost too effective. She had not even broken her eyeglass.
One of the most striking differences between the suffragette and the gardener was that the gardener told himself: “When I die, they will be sorry, and they will perhaps understand.” But the suffragette thought: “When I die, nobody except the charwoman will know.”
The suffragette went to see the Chief M.S. on Wednesday.
“How curious you should come this afternoon,” said the Chief M.S. “Some one was here asking for you only this morning.”
The suffragette hardly ever explained herself. She did not remind the Chief M.S. that she was there by appointment. Nor did she ask who had been inquiring for her. Perhaps she knew.
“He asked for your address,” said the Chief M.S. “But as he was a man, I didn’t give it to him. He didn’t leave his name, but he asked me to tell you that your dog was now in the hands of the quarantine officials. I attacked him on the suffrage question, as I always do strange men.”
“What did he say?”
“He had nothing to say. I pointed out to him how ludicrous was the argument that just because a person wore two tubes on his legs instead of one, he was competent to rule.”