Past Caring by Robert Goddard Page A

upon my failure.” She blushed, as if regretting this frankness. “I will meet you on Sunday.”
    “Thank you, Miss Latimer. And by all means report your evening’s work. I shall advise the newspapers of the attack upon my house. Privately, you are welcome to the credit.”
    “Though you and your colleagues are completely in the wrong, Mr. Strafford, I must concede that you are at least a gentleman.”
    This seemed the most harmonious note we were likely to find on which to close. I called Prideaux and asked him to show her out. He did so with a disapproving grimace. I stood by the broken window of the drawing room and watched as Miss Latimer walked away down the street, still limping slightly. She did not look back, but I looked after her until she was out of sight, wondering if she would keep our appointment, whether, for that matter, I ought to keep it.
    Now that she had gone, it seemed an absurd thing to have agreed.
    Yet, already, I was looking forward to Sunday, determined in my heart to go, and do the worrying later.
    Sunday May 30 duly came and I with it to Hyde Park in the sunshine. Parents were frolicking with their children by the Serpentine as I made my way with as much nonchalance as I could muster towards the Round Pond. There I saw an old man selling balloons to clamouring children. As a group of them scampered away, a view opened up of the benches. Seated on one of them, dressed in cream and reading a book in the shade of a pale blue parasol, was Miss Latimer. She did not look up as I approached.
    “Good afternoon , Miss Latimer,” I said, doffing my hat.
    “Good afternoon
    , Mr. Strafford,” she replied, looking up gravely from her book. “Won’t you sit down?”
    “It’s a lovely day,” I ventured conversationally as I sat beside her.
    “It is indeed.”
    “May I ask what you have been reading?”
    “It’s a new book of poems by Thomas Hardy— Time’s Laughingstocks .”
     

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    “Do you think that we are Time’s laughingstocks, Miss Latimer?”
    “We may be one day, Mr. Strafford.”
    “One day, when women have the vote?”
    “Touché.”
    “Alas, it was a sophist’s thrust.”
    “It is good that you should recognize it as such.”
    “Thanks to you, Miss Latimer, I have lost faith in sophistry.”
    “I am glad to hear it, but doubtful. How can you so suddenly have lost faith in something which has served you so well in your career?”
    “Let me try to explain.”
    “Please do.”
    And so it was that, on that bench in the warmth of a Sunday afternoon , with the sounds of ducks and children at play as accompaniment, I told Miss Latimer more of the effect of a political career on a politician than I had previously told anyone save myself. Perhaps my solitude had left me in unwitting need of such an opportunity.
    Certainly, Miss Latimer’s sincerity had reminded me how much of that commodity I had been obliged to shed in the pursuit of public office. I told her how, in the effort to master each new brief, to establish a Parliamentary reputation , and to achieve good standing in the eyes of the Liberal leadership, I had perforce neglected those other aims which had been in my mind when first I solicited the support of the electors of Mid-Devon. I also explained that my rise to a Cabinet post and the small degree of fame that went with it gave me a measure of that independence necessary to implement some of those neglected aims. And in all this, I contended, there was a lesson for Miss Latimer and her fellow-Suffragettes: something could only be achieved after an apprenticeship of respectable endeavour, not simply by the power of argument, however forceful; in other words that they should emulate my example, serve their time and await their opportunity.
    This was not best-calculated to appeal to an impetuous twenty-year-old. But Miss Latimer’s counter-argument was based on other grounds, namely that the women’s suffrage movement had served its time, since