r early-morning placarding of the
bookies' stands.

Vivie however had been turning her thoughts to horse-racing as a
field of activity. She was amused and interested at the effect that
had been produced in ministerial circles by her interference with
the game of golf. If now something was done by the militants
seriously to impede the greatest of the sports, the national form of
gambling, the protected form of swindling, the main interest in life
of the working-class, of half the peerage, all the beerage, the
chief lure of the newspapers between October and July, and the
preoccupation of princes, she might awaken the male mind in a very
effectual way to the need for settling the Suffrage question.

So she determined also to see the running of the Derby, as a
preliminary to deciding on a plan of campaign. She had become
hardened to pushing and scrouging, so that the struggle to get a
seat in one of the fifty or sixty race trains leaving Waterloo or
Victoria left her comparatively calm. She was dressed as a young man
and had no clothing impediments, and as a young man she was better
able to travel down with racing rascality. In that guise she did
not attract too much attention. Rough play may have been in the mind
of the card-playing, spirit-drinking scoundrels that occupied the
other seats in the compartment, but Vivie in her man's dress created
a certain amount of suspicion and caution. "Look's like a 'tec,'"
one man whispered to another. So the card-playing was not thrust on
her as a round-about form of plunder, and the stories told were more
those derived from the spicy columns of the sporting papers, in
words of double meaning, than the outspoken, stable obscenity
characteristic of the race-course rabble.

Vivie arriving early managed to secure a fairly good seat on the
Grand Stand, to which she could have recourse when the crowd on the
race course became too repulsive or too dangerous. She wished as
much as possible to see all aspects of the premier race meeting.
Indeed, meeting a friend of Lady Feenix's, a good-natured young peer
who halted irresolute between four worlds--the philosophic, the
political, the philanthropic, and the sporting, she introduced
herself as "David Williams"--hoping no Bencher was within
hearing--said "Dare say you remember me? Lady Feenix's? Been much
abroad lately--really feel quite strange on an English race course,"
and persuaded him to take her round before the great people of the
d