ves Solicitors we can--or at any
rate we do--give legal advice. We can't figure on the Stock
Exchange, but we can advise clients about their investments and buy
and sell stock and real estate (By the bye I want you to give me
your opinion on the tithe question, the liability on that Kent fruit
farm). We are consulted on contracts ... I'm going to start a women
authors' branch, and perhaps a tourist agency. Some day we will have
a women's publishing business, we'll set up a women's printing
press, a paper mill.... Of course as you know I am working hard on
law ... not only to understand men's roguery in every direction, but
so that if necessary I can add pleading in the courts to some other
woman's solicitor work. That's going to be my first struggle with
Man: to claim admittance to the Bar.... If we can once breach that
rampart the Vote must inevitably follow. Oh _how_ we have been dumb
before our shearers! The rottenness of Man's law.... The perjury,
corruption, waste of time, special pleading that go on in our male
courts of _in_justice, the verdicts of male juries!"

_Norie_: "Just so. But can't you find a little time to be social?
Why be so morose? For instance, why not come and be introduced to
Michael Rossiter? He's a dear--amazingly clever--a kind of
prophet--Your one confidant, Stead, thinks a lot of him."

_Vivie_: "_Dear_ Norie--I can't. I swore two years ago I would drop
Society and run no risk of being found out as 'Mrs. Warren's
daughter.' That beast George Crofts revenged himself because I
wouldn't marry him by letting it be known here and there that I
_was_ the daughter of the 'notorious Mrs. Warren'; whereupon several
of the people I liked--you remember?--dropped me--the Burne-Joneses,
the Lacrevys. Or if it wasn't Crofts some other swine did. But for
the fact that it would upset our style as a firm I could change my
name: call myself something quite different....

"D'you know, I've sometimes thought I'd cut my hair short and dress
in men's clothes, and go out into the world as a man ... my voice is
almost a tenor--_Such_ a lark! I'd get admitted to the Bar. But the
nuisance about that would be the references. I'm an outlaw, you see,
through no fault of mine.... I couldn't give _you_ as a reference,
and I don't know any man who would be generous enough to take the
risk of participating in the fraud.... unless it were Praed--good
old Praddy. I'm sure it's been done now and again. They call Judge
FitzS