“Won’t you believe me ...” she said, “when I tell you it would be best to break up that poor little dream of yours—as I have broken mine. I told you once that I had somehow been born the wrong side of the ropes in the race. One can’t love across a barrier.” “Love is not a dream,” said the gardener. “It’s your barrier that’s a dream. Why don’t you try breaking that?” “You are a man, little gardener, and I am a thing. Not a bad thing, really, but certainly not a woman. And even a thing can reach the point which I have reached, the point at which there seems nothing to do but grope and cry....” They walked a little way in silence. “I seem to have come to the edge of the world by myself,” she went on. “And I can’t go on—by myself. Oh, gardener, couldn’t we be friends without being lovers?” “That has been suggested before,” said the gardener slowly. “And it has never succeeded. But—we—might—try....” All the rest of the way to the village I suppose they were practising being friends and not lovers. For neither spoke a word. “So this is the militant suffragette,” said Samuel Rust, who was sitting in the hospital sitting-room. “I am most interested to meet you. I have long wished to meet a suffragette to ask her why she wanted the vote.” “Why do men want it?” “Personally I don’t.” “Personally I do,” said the suffragette. “And mine is as good an answer as yours.” “Both answers are very poor,” admitted Samuel. “You want the vote so badly that you think it worth while to become hysterical over it.” “There is not much hysteria in the movement, only hysteria is the thing that strikes a hysterical press as most worthy of note. What hysteria there is, is a result—not a cause. Women never invented hysteria. How should we be anything but irresponsible, since you have taken responsibility from us? If we are bitter, you must remember that somebody mixed the dose. If the womanliness you admire is dead, bear in mind that nothing can be dead without being killed.” “But who is your enemy? Who are your murderers? I have never noticed that the majority of men are fiends incarnate. You may not believe me, but I do assure you that at frequent intervals in my life I have met honest, just, and moral men. Have you met none?” “In the Brown Borough I meet excellent men. Older and wiser men, who sit on committees and behave like one conglomerate uncle to the poor; young lovers too hopelessly out of work to marry, and yet always gay and good-hearted; large tired fathers who come in after a day’s work and sit under dripping washing and never slap the children.... But that such just men are not in a majority is proved by the fact that women continue to suffer.” “Yes, but perhaps they suffer at the hands—not of men—but of circumstances.” “Circumstances always favour people with a public voice.” “And do militant suffragettes really think that by smashing windows they will attain to a public voice?”