"You see, when I went to their flat and met their literary friends and heard them talking about their work, I felt out of it. I was an alien in their world. I had no interest in the details of book-writing. I'd just put down what happened to come into my mind. I wondered what they wrote about. Love I suppose. I'd sit and look about me and try to imagine what those people would have thought of the old _Corydon's_ engine-room. Humph! Do _you_ know what those thin, half-fed men and women thought the most important thing in the world? Not husbands and wives and children, not war, nor even courage; not books nor pictures; nothing of this. No; they were wearing their souls out clamouring for a _Vote_!" We sat very still. You could have heard a pin drop. "There was Gladys. She was only nineteen, and ought to have been helping her mother at home; but no, she was emancipated, as she called it. Her experience with my brother taught her that the _Vote_ was necessary. Miss Flagg told me that unless women got the Vote England would drop behind. They all said that. To me it was amazing. It showed me how far I'd travelled away from the old ideas. It angered me to see women acting like that, spoiling themselves, making themselves ridiculous and ugly, all for that! "I'd been home a couple of months, not more, when I began to get restless. My mother asked me why I didn't get a job on shore. But I couldn't see myself going to Victoria Street every day, clean collar and umbrella, sitting at a desk dictating silly little letters to silly little people. Those who wanted it let them do it. I went to my uncle and asked for a job. His eyes twinkled when he said, 'Well, the _Corydon's_ chartered for the Mediterranean, and they want a Second.' "'When shall I join?' I said. "'Oh, I was only joking,' says he. 'We'll get you a better ship than that now.' "'No,' I said, 'I'll go back to the _Corydon_. I know her and she knows me. When shall I join?'" Again Mr. Carville paused, and appeared to be lost in thought, oblivious of our presence. An expression of gentle earnestness had settled upon his face, almost melancholy. I imagined for a moment that he was endeavouring to arrange his thoughts. "I do hope," he remarked, without looking at us, "I do hope that anything I've said hasn't given offence." He turned to us with a slight smile. "I mix up so little with genteel people nowadays--you see?" I nodded vaguely, and he relapsed into thought again. "I was thinking," he observed presently, "as you are so quiet, I might have said something. I remember that was the way they signified dissent, so to speak. And--I wouldn't like to offend--anybody." "Pray go on," I said. "We are not genteel in that sense of the word." It was plain that, apart from any scruples concerning our gentility, he had some difficulty in picking up the thread of his story. It was a relief when he began to speak.