On deck, a few enterprising spirits were playing deck quoits against the elements. The general geniality whose rule only lasts for the first three days of a voyage was reigning supreme. Young men were making advances to young ladies with whom they would certainly quarrel in forty-eight hours’ time, and young ladies were mocking behind their hands at the young men they would be engaged to before land was reached. The priest, with an appearance of sugared condescension, was showering missiles upon the Bullboard as though they were blessings. (And they were misdirected.) The inevitable gentleman who has crossed the Atlantic thirty times and can play all known games with fatiguing perfection, was straining like a greyhound on the leash towards the quoits which mere amateurs were usurping. Captain Walters, who has a twin brother on every liner that ever sailed, was brightly collecting signatures for a petition to the Captain concerning a dance that very evening. The gardener, with unusual cordiality, gave the reeling Courtesy his arm, as they threaded the maze of amusements towards the garden. There was only one deck-chair unoccupied. It was labelled loudly as belonging to some one else, but Courtesy, always bold, even when physically weakest, advanced straight upon it. It was next to the suffragette’s. And the gardener became for the first time aware of a cat in a bag, and of the fact that the cat was about to emerge. The suffragette was the sort of person next to whom empty chairs are always to be found. She had plenty to say, and what she said was often rather amusing, but it was always a little too much to the point, and the point was a little too sharp. She had a certain amount of small talk, but no tiny talk. She was not so much ignored as avoided. She had altogether missed youth, and its glorious power of being amused by what is not, correctly speaking, amusing. Her generation thought her “brainy,” it was very polite to her. Do you know the terrible sensation of being invariably the last to be chosen at Nuts in May? This was the suffragette’s atmosphere. My poor suffragette! It is so much more difficult to bear the snub than the insult. Insult is like a bludgeon thrown at the inflated balloon of our conceit. With the very blunt force of it we rebound. But the snub is a pin-prick, which lets our supporting pride out, and leaves us numb and nothing. I always feel the insult is founded on passion, while the snub springs from innate dislike. “May I introduce Miss Courtesy Briggs ...” began the gardener, hoping for an inspiration before the end of the sentence. “Miss Courtesy Briggs....” Both women looked expectant. “Miss Courtesy Briggs ... my wife.” “O Lor’!” said Courtesy, and then, with her healthy regard for conventions, remembered that this was not the proper retort to an introduction. “When you left Penny Street, a week ago ...” she said to the gardener, as she shook the suffragette’s hand, “you didn’t tell me you were engaged.”