“In whose hands should we leave it? In the hands of those who declare themselves to be our enemies? A fair question from a woman never gets a fair answer. Windows are smashed—not as an argument, but as a protest.”
“A protest strikes me as a futile thing. No one ever does anything that looks unfair or tyrannical without being perfectly sure that was the thing they meant to do. If a protest is successful it creates discord without altering what is done. If it’s unsuccessful, it leaves you with a high temperature and bruised hands, and what is gained by that?”
“Protest isn’t a thing you argue about,” said the suffragette. “It’s a thing you do when you see red. You seem to think that men have the monopoly of the last straw.”
“It is hard to believe that you have reached the last straw,” said Samuel. “It is very hard for men to picture women as an oppressed race. We are miles and miles away from each other. I can still think of a lot of things to say, but I can’t say them without a moral megaphone. Shall we call a draw?”
“Let’s,” said the suffragette, relaxing her militant expression. “Only let me have the last word—a rather long one. Of one thing I am certain—when we have the vote, men will see what a small gift it was, and future generations will ask why it was grudged so bitterly. Only to us who have fought for it and suffered for it, it will always seem high and splendid—like a flag captured in battle....”
“The country is looking pretty just now, isn’t it?” said Mr. Samuel Rust.
The gardener was standing at the window, watching the clipped yew bird outside curtseying to the wind. He had been pathetically silent, like a snubbed child, ever since he had consented to be a friend and not a lover. His white keen face was a striking illustration of enthusiasm damped. His jaw looked as if he were clenching his teeth on something bitter. I think he was regretting the days when gold hair with a ripple in it as laboured as the ripples in an old Master’s seascape, wide blue eyes alight with matrimonial instinct, and the very red lips of a very small mouth, were all that his heart needed.
And I wonder what the suffragette saw in his face that made her say in a very non-militant voice, “Come, gardener.”
They both shook hands in rather an absent-minded way with Mr. Samuel Rust. They started from the door with the wind behind them. It was with her hair blowing forward along her cheeks that the gardener always remembered the suffragette most vividly. It brought a brave idea to his mind, connected vaguely with a picture of Grace Darling with which he had been in love fifteen years ago.
“Gardener,” said the suffragette hurriedly. “Can you imagine me sitting by the fire bathing a baby?”