Of a modest woman with a heavy jaw, the world would have said, “A dear good creature, but dreadfully underhung.” Of a well-chinned woman with dyed hair, it said, “There goes a strong character.” The hair did it, and the hair was dyed by human agency. Providence had no hand in the making of Mrs. Rust’s forcible reputation. Nowadays we leave it to our dressmaker, and our manicurist, and our milliner, and our doctor, and our vicar, to make us what we are. This is an age of luxury, and it is so fatiguing to assert a home-made personality. Shall I go to my hairdresser and say, “Here, take me, dye me heliotrope. Make an influential woman of me”? The gardener did not quail before the terrifying outer wall of Mrs. Rust’s fortress. Believing as he did that man makes himself, and that the pose of victor is as easy to assume as any other, he was unaware of the reality of the word ‘defeat.’ Whether woman also makes herself, I never fully understood from the gardener at this stage. But I gathered that woman takes the rôles that man rejects. The gardener, as a protégé of Mr. Abel, who, on the _Caribbeania_, was respected because he was not personally known, found himself treated _à la_ junior officer, streaked with a certain flavour of second-class passenger, but distinctly suggesting ship’s orchestra. He was allowed to have his meals in the first-class saloon, he was occasionally asked about the weather by lady passengers, and the captain and officers looked upon him good-naturedly, as a sort of example of poetic licence. It seemed a good thing when dinner was over. One had proved one’s courage, and the strain was past. The suffragette, who had given a proof rather of obstinacy than of courage, retired weakly to her cabin. And the gardener stood on deck and looked at the sea, while the moon followed the ship’s course with her eyes. A table companion, an Anglican priest, with a weak chin and piercing eyes, came and leaned upon the rail at the gardener’s side. “You smoke?” he asked, and you could hear that he was very conventional, and that he believed that he was not. A man-to-man sort of man. “No,” said the gardener, and added, “I have no vices.” He said this sort of thing simply to exasperate. The pose of indifference to the world’s opinion is apt, sooner or later, to lead to the pose of wilful pricking of the world’s good taste. The gardener had a morbid craving for unpopularity; it was part of the unique pose. Unpopularity is an excellent salve to the conscience; it is delicious to be misunderstood. The priest did not appear exasperated. He was tolerant. The man who aims at unlimited tolerance, as a rule, only achieves the absorbent and rather undecided status of spiritual blotting-paper. But he is a dreadfully difficult man to anger.