The gardener being thus removed, Courtesy and the suffragette sat on the promenade-deck, and discussed the day. The suffragette was astonished to find herself in this position, being addressed as “my dear,” by a contemporary. “Just like a real girl,” she thought, for as she had never passed through the mutual hair-brushing stage with other girls, she always expected to be hated, and never to be loved. She found it rather delightful to have Courtesy’s hand passed through her arm, but she also found it awkward, and hardly knew how to adjust her own arm to the unaccustomed contact. The very small details of intercourse are very hard indeed to a snake, though pleasant by reason of novelty. “So you didn’t want to come back, and he bullied you?” said Courtesy, frankly inquisitive. “After all, my dear, that’s what women are for.” “It is NOT!” shouted the suffragette. “Women are not born with a curse on them like that. I chose to come back; I made a great effort, and came.” “O Lor’!” said Courtesy, and tactfully changed the subject. Courtesy’s tact was always easily visible to the naked eye. “My dear, I must tell you what a killing interview I had with old Mrs. Rust. She clutched my arm when I got into the launch—think of that, my dear—and presently she said in a gruff sort of frightened voice, as if she was confessing a crime, ‘Miss Courtesy, I refuse to part with you; you are what I have been looking for; you are not to pay any attention to anybody else—do you hear? I forbid it.’ I screamed with laughter—on the quiet, you know. I said, ‘Do you want me to be a substitute for Hammer, Mrs. Rust?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Hammer was only a stopgap; I was keeping the position open for a person like you. I will give you two hundred a year if you will promise to stay by me as long as you can bear me’—and then she shouted as if she had made a mistake, and thought that noise could cover it—‘I mean as long as I can bear you.’” “So what did you answer?” asked the suffragette. “My dear, two hundred a year—what could I say?” “But what were you originally going out to Trinity Island for?” asked the suffragette. “To visit relatives, weren’t you? What will they say?” “Oh, they won’t say anything—to two hundred a year. I was really only coming out as a globe-trotter. I loathe colonial relations.” The matrimonial motive was the skeleton in Courtesy’s cupboard. “But wasn’t it killing, my dear?” “Very killing,” agreed the suffragette gravely. She felt like one speaking a foreign tongue. And then it occurred to Courtesy that she was squeezing the arm of one who, after all, had a criminal disregard of convention. She withdrew her arm, and proceeded to try and storm that house which she considered to be built on sand.