“I wish I could understand what you are up to, my dear?” she said. “Can’t I persuade you to leave that naughty gardener, or to marry him? You needn’t run away, or drown yourself or anything, just say to him, ‘This won’t do.’ I should be frightfully glad if I could feel you were all right. Why don’t you get married on landing?”
“We don’t want to,” said the suffragette, who was too inexperienced in the ways of The Generation to feel offended. “We neither of us ever pretended to want to.”
“Ou yes, of course I know the catchwords. I know you just came together as friends, and didn’t see any harm in it.”
“But we didn’t come as friends—we came as enemies.”
“Yes,” said Courtesy, with a furrowed brow. “But really, my dear, enemies don’t do these things.”
“They do. We do.”
“But, my good girl, you must know—you can’t be as innocent as all that.”
“Great Scott, no!” said the suffragette. “I’m not innocent!”
“Then am I to conclude,” said Courtesy, suddenly frigid, “that you fully realise the meaning of the life you are leading?”
“You are to conclude that,” said the suffragette, in a voice of growing militancy. “I realise its meaning much more fully than you do. I shall leave the gardener directly it becomes convenient to me to do so. For an utter stranger his behaviour has certainly been insufferable.”