As for the suffragette, her heart, in defiance of anatomy, had gone to her head, and was thundering rhythmically there. She was despising herself passionately, and congratulating herself passionately. How grand—she thought: how contemptible—she thought. For she was a world’s worker, a wronged unit seeking rights, a co-heritor of the splendour of the earth, a challenger, a warrior. And now, quite suddenly, she discovered a fact the existence of which she had seldom, even in weak moments, suspected. She found that—taken off her guard—she was a young woman of six-and-twenty.
“How laughable,” she thought—and did not laugh—“I’m as bad as the ‘Oh my dear’ girls.”
“Now,” she said at last, “what did you mean by that?”
“Only that you look like a good friend,” replied the gardener, who, poor vagabond, was blushing furiously. “Mightn’t we be friends?”
“I am a friend to women,” said the suffragette slowly. “I’m a lover of women. But never of men. I wouldn’t stir an inch out of my way for a man. Unless I wanted to.”
“And do you want to?”
She looked at the gardener’s profile with the eyes of the newly discovered young woman of six-and-twenty. Hitherto she had seen him only with the militant eyes of armed neutrality. She looked at the rather pleasing restlessness of his eyes, and the high tilt of his head. His eyes were not dark with meaning, as the eyes of heroes of novels should be, they were light and quick. The black pupils looked out fierce and sharp, like the pupils of a cat, which flash like black sparks out of the twilight of its soul. The gardener’s eyes actually conveyed little, but they looked like blinds, barely concealing something of great value.
Presently the suffragette said: “Can you imagine what you feel like if you had been running in a race, and you had believed you were winning. The rest were miles behind wasting their breath variously; and then suddenly your eyes were opened, and you saw that you had been running outside the ropes of the course, for you were never given the chance to enter for the competition.”
“Good,” said the gardener enthusiastically. “So you’re tired of running to no purpose, and you’re coming back to the starting-place to begin again.”
“No,” said the suffragette, as firmly as though she had the muscular supremacy and could start back that moment to pit her three matches against the gods. “Never. There’s no such thing as running to no purpose. It’s excellent exercise—running, but I’ll never run with the crowd. There are much better things than winning the prize. There’s more of everything out here—more air, more light, more comedy, more tragedy. Also I get there first, you know. When you get the law-abider and the church-goer in a crowd, they increase its moral tone, but they lessen its power of covering the ground.”