“Yes.”
“You don’t. I mean that I am a man, and I am not going to let you go, because you must come with me to the uttermost ends of the earth.”
“Why?”
“Because I love the shape of your face, you dear little thing.”
The gods should not be disturbed. Also there was something very potent in the impotent trembling of her arm.
There was an unnaturally long pause. Then she turned round.
“Let us discuss this matter,” she said, and gave him her portmanteau to carry. The gardener loosed her arm and walked beside her. Silence and a distance of a yard and a half were maintained between them for some way.
The gardener was gazing in blank astonishment at that ass, the gardener of three minutes ago. Into what foolery had he not plunged?
If I could always be the Woman I Am, I should be a most rational and successful creature. It is the Woman I Was who makes a fool of me, and leaves me nervous as to the possible behaviour of the Woman I Shall Be.
There was something in the way the suffragette’s neck slipped loosely into her collar which took a little of the sting out of the gardener’s regrets. But the little plain eyes of her, and the aggressive manners of her, and the misguided morals of her—that was the sequence in which the gardener’s thoughts fell into line.