“I wasn’t,” said the gardener. Courtesy dropped the subject, because it was hardly possible to continue it. She was not the girl to do what was conventionally impossible. Besides the bugle was sounding to show that dinner was within hailing distance. Courtesy was a slave of time. Her day was punctuated by the strokes of clocks. Her life was a thing of pigeon-holes, and if some of the pigeon-holes were empty they were all neatly labelled. She was the sort of person who systematically allowed ten minutes every morning for her prayers, and during that time, with the best intentions, mused upon her knees about the little things of yesterday. It is a bold woman that would squeeze Heaven into a pigeon-hole. Theresa stopped in front of the gardener’s chair. Theresa’s surname had been blown away from her with the first Atlantic wind. So had the shining system in her yellow hair. So had most of her land conventions. She was not a thing of the ocean, but a thing of the ocean liner. She had immediately become Everybody’s Theresa. I could not say that everybody loved Theresa, but I know that everybody felt they ought to. “Captain said no dance this evening,” said Theresa, in her telegraphic style. “Too much sea on. Doctor said broken legs. But I went and wheedled. Called the Captain Sweet William. Dance at nine.” The dance was at nine. There were no limits to what Theresa could do—in her sphere. A proud quartermaster was superintending the last touches of chalk upon the deck, when the gardener and the suffragette led the exodus from the dining-saloon. In Paradise I hope I shall be allowed a furious walk around a windy rocking deck at frequent intervals throughout eternity. I know of nothing more poetic, and yet more brilliantly prosaic. At such moments you can feel the muscles of life trembling by reason of sheer strength. The suffragette and the gardener walked so fast that the smoke from the suffragette’s cigarette lay out along the wind like the smoke behind a railway train. The strong swing of the sea threw their feet along. There was a moon in the sky and phosphorus in the sea. But there are people who go down to the sea in ships, and yet confine their world to the promenade-deck. The heart of Theresa’s world, for instance, was the shining parallelogram, silvered with chalk, on the sheltered side of the deck. Theresa, looking extremely pretty, was superintending the over-filling of her already full programme. “Mustn’t walk round like that,” she said in the polite tones that The Generation always used to the suffragette. “Must find partners, because the orchestra will soon begin to orch.” “We are not dancing,” said the gardener. One always took for granted that the suffragette was not dancing. “If you will dance,” said Theresa, “I will give you number eight.” She assumed with such confidence that this was an inducement, that somehow it became one. “Thank you very much,” replied the gardener. “I’ll ask Courtesy Briggs for one, too.”