“Not me.  They wouldn’t have touched me.”

“How was I to know that?  If they had I should have dished you.  And I’d have stayed away rather than do that.  I didn’t tell Michael or Nicky or Father for the same reason.”

“You’d have stayed at home rather than have dished me?  Do you really mean that?”

“Of course I mean it.  And I meant it.  It’s you,” she said, “who don’t care.”

“How do you make that out?”

He really wanted to know.  He really wanted, if it were possible, to understand her.

“I make it out this way.  Here have I been through the adventure and the experience of my life.  I was in the thick of the big raid; I was four weeks shut up in a prison cell; and you don’t care; you’re not interested.  You never said to yourself, ’Dorothy was in the big raid, I wonder what happened to her?’ or ’Dorothy’s in prison, I wonder how she’s feeling?’ You didn’t care; you weren’t interested.

“If it had happened to you, I couldn’t have thought of anything else, I couldn’t have got it out of my head.  I should have been wondering all the time what you were feeling; I couldn’t have rested till I knew.  It would have been as if I was in prison myself.  And now, when I’ve come out, all you think of is how you can rag and score off me.”

She was sitting beside him on the green bank of the lane.  Her hands were clasped round her knees.  One knickerbockered knee protruded through the three-cornered rent in her skirt; she stared across the road, a long, straight stare that took no heed of what she saw, the grey road, and the green bank on the other side, topped by its hedge of trees.

Her voice sounded quiet in the quiet lane; it had no accent of self-pity or reproach.  It was as if she were making statements that had no emotional significance whatever.

She did not mean to hurt him, yet every word cut where he was sorest.

“I wanted to tell you about it.  I counted the days, the minutes till I could tell you; but you wouldn’t listen.  You don’t want to hear.”

“I won’t listen if it’s about women’s suffrage.  And I don’t want to hear if it’s anything awful about you.”

“It is about me, but it isn’t awful.

“That’s what I want to tell you.

“But, first of all—­about the raid.  I didn’t mean to be in it at all, as it happens.  I meant to go with the deputation because you told me not to.  You’re right about that.  But I meant to turn back as soon as the police stopped us, because I hate rows with the police, and because I don’t believe in them, and because I told Angela Blathwaite I wasn’t going in with her crowd any way.  You see, she called me a coward before a lot of people and said I funked it.  So I did.  But I should have been a bigger coward if I’d gone against my own will, just because of what she said.  That’s how she collars heaps of women.  They adore her and they’re afraid of her.  Sometimes they lie and tell her they’re going in when their moment comes, knowing perfectly well that they’re not going in at all.  I don’t adore her, and I’m not afraid of her, and I didn’t lie.