“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. “How good the world is,” said the gardener, “to provide such excellent material. The sea, and the earthquake, and a fighting woman to love. Just think—an earthquake—on my first day. I am a man of luck.” “You have broken your leg,” Mrs. Rust informed him. “I have,” admitted the gardener rather fretfully. “But then everything has its price.” “A good many other people have come off much worse,” said Mrs. Rust. “I’m not complaining, mind, but any other woman would say you were disgracefully selfish. A lot of people are dead, and a lot of other people’s people are dead....” “The longer I live ...” said the gardener, from the summit of his twenty-three years, “the surer I am that we make a fuss which is almost funny over death. We run after it all over the world, and then we grumble at it when it catches us up from behind. It’s an adventure, of course, but then—so is—shaving every morning. Compare death with—love, for instance.” He felt ashamed of this after he had said it, and tried to cover it with a little laugh which shook him, and changed into a yelp. After breathing hard for a little while he went on. “We who have survived this ordeal have gained much more than we risked. I know that anything is worth a risk, the risk in itself is the gain, and to risk everything for nothing is a fine thing. Why otherwise do we climb Alps, or hunt the South Pole? In theory, I would run in front of an express train to save a mou. In theory I don’t mind what I pay for danger. That’s why I love the suffragette; she would risk her life for a little vote, and her honour for a bleak thing like independence.” “Do you love the suffragette?” asked Mrs. Rust, who was at heart a woman, although she believed herself to be a neutral intelligence. “I do, I do,” cried the gardener, suddenly and gloriously losing his pose of One Who Evolves a New Scale of Values—in other words, the pose of a Paradox. But his emotion awoke his nerves, and for a while, although the suffragette obsessed his imagination, pain obsessed the rest of the universe. When Courtesy and the doctor came in, they found the gardener with a temperature well into three figures. So for some time Mrs. Rust was not allowed to see the patient.