edit on the militant side of the Suffrage cause. Of course if
the true story of Vivie were fully known, she would rise triumphant
from such a recital.... Still ... throw plenty of mud and some of
it will stick.... And what _was_ her full, true story? Even in the
pure passion of the fight for liberty among these young and
middle-aged women, the tongue of scandal occasionally wagged in
moments of lassitude, discouragement, undeception. At such times
some weaker sister with a vulgar mind, or a mind with vulgar streaks
in it, might hint at the great interest taken in Vivie by a
distinguished man of science who had become an M.P. and a raging
suffragist. Or indecorum would be hinted in the relations between
this enigmatic woman, so prone seemingly to don male costume, and
the burly clerk who attended her so faithfully and had brought her
home on the night of Mrs. Pethick Lawrence's spirited raid.

So much so, that Vivie with a sigh, as soon as she attained
convalescence was fain to send for Bertie and tell him with
unanswerable decision that he must return to his work with Rossiter
and thither she would send from time to time special instructions if
he could help her business in any way.

This was done in January, 1912. Vivie's feet were now healed and the
woman surgeon was satisfied that she could walk on them without
displacing the reset bones. The slight fracture in the breastbone
had repaired itself by one of Nature's magic processes. So one day
our battered heroine doffed the invalid garments of Michaelis and
donned those of any well-dressed woman of 1912, including a thick
veil. Thus attired she passed from the parapet to the fire-escape
(recalling the agony these gymnastics had caused her the previous
November), and from the fire-escape to the roof of No. 92
(continuous with the roof of 94), and past the chimney stacks, into
the top storey of 94, and so on down to the street, where a taxi was
waiting to convey her to the Lilacs.

(The W.S.P.U., by the bye, to bluff Scotland Yard had added to the
name of "Algernon Mainwaring, 5th Floor," the qualification of
"Hygienic Corset-maker," as an explanation--possibly--of why so many
women found their way to the top storey of No. 94.)

Arrived at the Lilacs, Vivie took up for a brief spell the life of
an ordinary young woman of the well-to-do middle class, seriously
interested in the suffrage question but non-militant. She attended
several of Honoria's or Mrs. Fawcett's s