“I’ll excuse you,” said the suffragette, “though I don’t think it was a very artistic protest. I am most awfully sorry for you, Jenny, but I’m not surprised. For you know when you became a suffragette you agreed to fight, and now you’ve found out what you’re fighting, that’s all. Suffragettes are just soldiers—only more sober—and when they meet the enemy, they just get more determined, not more excited. If you were a soldier and got wounded, we should be sorry for you, but also rather proud of you. We must collect the suffragette girls somewhere else, and make the army grow.”
“I don’t believe you can, miss. I went to see ’Tilda, an’ she was pretty near soppy about it. She’s piece-work, an’ carn’ get ’er boss to rise ’er, so she ain’t done nothink to be turned out of the Club for, she ses. She ses as ’ow she won’t never ’ave nuffink more to do wiv them suffragettes. Then I met Lil, the tow-’aired gel—she was drunk—at the corner of the Delta. She puts it all on you, miss.”
“Do you feel like that?” asked the suffragette.
“Ow well, in a manner o’ speakin’, it wouldn’ ’ave ’appened if it ’adn’t bin for you, miss. But I don’t feel sore against you, not really. You did it for the best. You miy be right about fightin’ the enemy, on’y the enemy’s too strong. P’r’aps Farver Christopher’s right, an’ God mide women to starve till they marry, an’ get beaten till they die....”
“If there is a God,” said the suffragette in a low voice, “the only possible conclusion is that he is an Anti. Still, even a God can be fought.”
“Ow, I’m sick o’ fightin’,” said Miss Wigsky. “I shall go orf wiv my chap, though ’e is out of work....”
The gardener was at 21 Penny Street, waiting for an answer to his message. To pass the time he had found work, or rather work had found him, for he was a man of luck. Eventually, instead of an answer, Mrs. Paul Rust called on him.
“How’s your son?” asked the gardener, who was pleased to meet some one who had met the suffragette.
Beneath his superficial “unscathed” pose, there was a layer of deep faithfulness. He knew by now that the suffragette was not worthy of the love of a sober Assistant Secretary to a Society Which Believed Itself of Great Importance (one of his latest practical poses). But the thing one knows makes no difference to the thing one feels, if one is young. The gardener was under the impression that his wisdom had dethroned the suffragette from her eminence, but his heart, with the obstinacy peculiar to hearts, continued to look up.
“My son is bad. He gets no stronger. There is no reason why he shouldn’t get up, except that he isn’t strong enough to walk.”