ack the
Suffrage cause as much as Parnell's adultery postponed Home
Rule; and above all that I am already thirty-five and shall
soon be thirty-six and that it wouldn't be very long before
you in comfort-loving middle age sighed for the well-ordered
life of No. 1, Park Crescent, Portland Place!

On the whole, I think the most rational line I can take is
to continue resolutely this struggle for the Vote. With the
Vote must come the opening of Parliament to women. I'm not
too old to aspire to be some day Secretary of State for Home
Affairs. Because the General Post Office has already become
interested in my correspondence, and because this is really
a "pivotal" letter I am not trusting it to the post but am
calling with it at No. 1 and handing it personally to your
butler. I look to you to destroy it when you have read its
contents--if you go to that length.

Yours,
VIVIE.

Rossiter read this letter an hour or so after it had been delivered,
frowned a good deal, made notes in one of his memorandum books; then
tore the sheets of typewriting into four and placed them on the
fire. Having satisfied himself that the flames had caught them, he
went up with a sullen face to dress for dinner: Linda was giving a
New Year's Eve dinner to friends and relations and he had to play
the part of host with assumed heartiness.

In the perversity of fate, one piece of the typewritten letter
escaped the burning except along the edge. A puff of air from the
chimney or the opened door, as Linda entered the room, lifted it off
the cinders and deposited it on the hearth. Linda had dressed early
for the party, had felt a little hurt at the locked door of
Michael's dressing-room, and had come with some vague intention into
his study, to see perhaps if the fire was burning brightly: because
to avoid unnecessary journies upstairs they would receive their
guests to-night in the study and thence pass to the dining-room.
But the fire had gone sulky, as fires do sometimes even with
well-behaved chimneys and first-class coal. She noted the charred
portion of paper lying untidily on the hearth, with typewriting on
its upper surface. Picking it up she read inside the scorched
margin:

ria kept the keys and now them over to me.
W.S.P.U. has taken--also unde