As a matter of fact she had been born morally short-sighted. She had never seen the distant delight of the world at all. The priest did not believe in anything approaching metaphor. He considered himself to be too manly. So he deflected the course of the conversation. “And your husband. What are his views on the Great Question?” (A slight relapse into roguishness on the last two words.) “I have never asked him. I know he does not believe in concrete arguments from women. Though he approves of them from men.” She fingered a bruise on her arm. “The arguments about women’s lack of physical force are the most incontrovertible ones your cause has to contend with,” said the priest. “Say what you will, physical force is the basis of life.” “I think it is a confession of weakness.” “There is something in what you say,” said the priest. He did not really think there was, for he had taken no steps to investigate. He was busy thinking that this was an odd wife who did not know her husband’s views on a question that obsessed her own thoughts. The gardener had by now extracted Courtesy from the tangle, and was steering her towards a chair. “Your husband appears to know that young lady with the auburn hair,” said the priest. “He knew her before he came on board, did he not?” “Apparently he did,” said the suffragette. “I didn’t.” She was providing him with so many clues that he was fairly skimming along on the track of his prey. When he left her he felt like a collector who has found a promising specimen. “Altogether on the wrong lines,” he told himself, and added, “Poor lost lamb, how much she needs a helping hand”; not because he felt sorry for her, but because word-pity was the chief part of his stock-in-trade. Next morning the _Caribbeania_ had flung the winds and waves behind her, and had settled down to a passionless career along a silver sea under a silver sky,—like man, slipping out of the turmoil of youth into the excellent anti-climax of middle life.