uffrage parties or public
meetings and occasionally spoke and spoke well. She also went over
to Brussels twice in 1912 to keep in touch with her mother. Mrs.
Warren had had one or two slight warnings that a life of pleasure
saps the strongest constitution.[1] She lived now mainly at her
farm, the Villa Beau-sejour, and only occasionally occupied her
_appartement_ in the Rue Royale. She must have been about fifty-nine
in the spring of 1912, and was beginning to "soigner son salut,"
that is to say to take stock of her past life, apologize for it to
herself and see how she could atone reasonably for what she had done
wrong. A decade or two earlier she would have turned to religion,
inevitably to that most attractive and logical form, the religion
expounded by the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. She would
have confessed her past, slightly or very considerably _gazee_, to
some indulgent confessor, have been pardoned, and have presented a
handsome sum to an ecclesiastical charity or work of piety. But she
had survived into a skeptical age and she had conceived an immense
respect for her clever daughter. Vivie should be her spiritual
director; and Vivie's idea put before her at their reconciliation
three years previously had seemed the most practical way of making
amends to Woman for having made money in the past out of the
economic and physiological weakness of women. She had fined herself
Ten Thousand pounds then; and out of her remaining capital of Fifty
or Sixty thousand (all willed with what else she possessed to her
daughter) she would pay over more if Vivie demanded it as further
reparation. Still, she found the frequentation of churches soothing
and gave much and often to the mildly beseeching Little Sisters of
the Poor when they made their rounds in town or suburbs.

[Footnote 1: Or so the observers say who haven't had a life of
pleasure.]

"What do you think about Religion, Viv old girl?" she said one day
in the Eastertide of 1912, when Vivie was spending a delicious
fortnight at Villa Beau-sejour.

"Personally," said Vivie, "I hate all religions, so far as I have
had time to study them. They bind up with undisputed ethics more or
less preposterous theories concerning life and death, the properties
of matter, man, God, the universe, the laws of nature, the food we
should eat, the relations of the sexes, the quality of the weekly
day of rest. Gradually they push indisputable ethics on one side and
a