“Won’t you believe me ...” she said, “when I tell you it would be best to break up that poor little dream of yours—as I have broken mine. I told you once that I had somehow been born the wrong side of the ropes in the race. One can’t love across a barrier.”
“Love is not a dream,” said the gardener. “It’s your barrier that’s a dream. Why don’t you try breaking that?”
“You are a man, little gardener, and I am a thing. Not a bad thing, really, but certainly not a woman. And even a thing can reach the point which I have reached, the point at which there seems nothing to do but grope and cry....”
They walked a little way in silence.
“I seem to have come to the edge of the world by myself,” she went on. “And I can’t go on—by myself. Oh, gardener, couldn’t we be friends without being lovers?”
“That has been suggested before,” said the gardener slowly. “And it has never succeeded. But—we—might—try....”
All the rest of the way to the village I suppose they were practising being friends and not lovers. For neither spoke a word.
“So this is the militant suffragette,” said Samuel Rust, who was sitting in the hospital sitting-room. “I am most interested to meet you. I have long wished to meet a suffragette to ask her why she wanted the vote.”
“Why do men want it?”
“Personally I don’t.”