“I wish I could understand what you are up to, my dear?” she said. “Can’t I persuade you to leave that naughty gardener, or to marry him? You needn’t run away, or drown yourself or anything, just say to him, ‘THIS WON’T DO.’ I should be frightfully glad if I could feel you were all right. Why don’t you get married on landing?” “We don’t want to,” said the suffragette, who was too inexperienced in the ways of The Generation to feel offended. “We neither of us ever pretended to want to.” “Ou yes, of course I know the catchwords. I know you just came together as friends, and didn’t see any harm in it.” “But we didn’t come as friends—we came as enemies.” “Yes,” said Courtesy, with a furrowed brow. “But really, my dear, enemies don’t do these things.” “They do. We do.” “But, my good girl, you must know—you can’t be as innocent as all that.” “Great Scott, no!” said the suffragette. “I’m not innocent!” “Then am I to conclude,” said Courtesy, suddenly frigid, “that you fully realise the meaning of the life you are leading?” “You are to conclude that,” said the suffragette, in a voice of growing militancy. “I realise its meaning much more fully than you do. I shall leave the gardener directly it becomes convenient to me to do so. For an utter stranger his behaviour has certainly been insufferable.” “O Lor’!” exclaimed Courtesy, falling back upon her original line of defence. “An utter stranger ... I must go and button Mrs. Rust into her evening gown.” There is something very annoying to a woman in being accused of innocence. The suffragette was quite cross. For the next two days the _Caribbeania_ threaded her way cautiously between shore and shore. The horizon was frilled with palm-embroidered lands. Dry, terrible-looking beaches, backed by arid brown hills, marred the soft character of those calm seas. It was as if the _Caribbeania_ saluted the coast of South America, and South America turned her back upon her visitor. At two or three ports in that forbidding land the boat touched. Drake had passed that way, and had left his ill-gotten halo upon the coast, but that was the only life of the land. The flat, dead towns seemed brooding over flat, dead tragedies. It was almost a relief to the travellers when the last night fell, and the ship was enclosed in darkness and its trivial insularity. There was a great dance that night. Captain Walters called it the Veterans’ dance, because the chalked deck was thick with non-combatants, who had determined to cast care aside and join with youth, because after all it was the last night, and one would never meet any of these people again. As a matter of fact, there was no youth to be joined, for youth sat out and began its farewells. Half a dozen hours is not an over-large allowance of time for farewells between people who have known each other three throbbing ocean weeks.