The suffragette was a rash woman. She always abode by her own first choice. Before she went to see the priest’s sister in the morning, she found herself a Brown Borough lodging. She did this by the simple device of knocking on the door of the first house she saw that displayed a notice, “Apartment.”
“Now then, wot’s the matter?” asked the lady who opened the door.
The suffragette, though impossible to silence, was easy to abash. And there is certainly something disheartening in such a salutation. However, she suggested that the notice in the window might excuse an intrusion.
She was very lucky; one always is when one doesn’t deserve to be so. She might have found a room with a brown wet ceiling curtseying floorward under the stress of many rains. She might have found a room peopled by a smell incredible, with rags stuffed into panes that had been broken by a merciful accident. She might have found walls discoloured by dark patches that looked like old blood. All these things are apt to decorate Woman’s Sphere in the Brown Borough.
But the suffragette had, by mistake, knocked on the door of the most respectable house in the most respectable street in the district. She found a clean, though dark room, with a window blinking against the sun at a back yard filled with snowdrops. The wall-paper talked in a loud voice of tulips: wine-coloured tulips trampled on each other and wrestled for supremacy over every inch of it. The tablecloth and carpet were the colour of terra-cotta, and firmly disagreed with every word the wall-paper said. Two horse-hair chairs, in sullen brown, looked moodily at each other across the table.
The suffragette never asked more than that her body might live in a clean place. She kept her mind detachable from colour schemes. After all, what is my body for but to enclose me?
“I’ll have the room,” said the suffragette, as if it had been a cake of soap.
It was like a dream to the landlady, a dream she had never been sufficiently feverish to indulge in.
“You’ll have it?” she gasped.
“Yes. Why not? What’s the rent, by the way?”