“But I left Courtesy as an apple core,” she said. “Men ought to be as good philosophers as robins, any day.”
You and I are getting tired of this scene. And so was the suffragette. She shook herself.
“I must wake up,” she said. “The incident is closed. I’m glad it’s closed. But I’m very glad it was once open. By mistake I came alive for a little while. I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in love. But I thank God I have met love—in a dream.”
She might possibly have been referring to the robin drama. But I don’t think she was.
She put her chin up, and buttoned up the hair shirt, and exchanged the snowdrops for a ’bus.
It was the day after this that the priest was addressing his sister’s Girls’ Club in the Brown Borough. He was supplying food for the soul while his sister prepared food for the body. The girls were listening with the polite though precarious attention which Brown Borough girls always bring to bear on the first three hundred words of any address, especially if the addresser be a man. Factory girls are amiable creatures with something inborn that very closely resembles good manners. Unless you are so unfortunate as to stumble upon their sense of humour, they will always give you a hearing. Their sense of humour is broad, but only touched by certain restricted means. If you have a smut on your nose, or if your hat is on one side, or if you stammer in your speech, or if it is obvious that you have just sat in a puddle on alighting from your ’bus, you need cherish no hopes, but be sure that every word you say is only adding to the comedy of the situation.
The priest was extremely neat, as usual. His piercing eyes under his grey hair looked dignified, and he was concealing moral quack remedies in gilded anecdotes with marked success. He had reached the critical point in a comic story about his recent adventures in the tropics, and was just preparing to lead the roar of amusement, when, over the heads of his audience, he saw a face that seemed terribly familiar. He finished the story with such gravity that nobody dared to smile.
“How unwise I was to put the idea into her head,” he told himself, and, descending from his eminence, went to meet her.
“This is indeed a surprise, yerce, yerce,” he said, shaking her coldly by the hand. He thought that she would be cut to the heart by the fact that he failed to qualify the surprise as pleasant. She did not notice the omission. She was not accustomed to being made very welcome.
“I have followed your advice,” she said. “I have come down to ask you for work.”