ed suffragists were hunger-striking to secure her
better treatment and were endangering if not their lives at any rate
their future health and validity. So she conveyed them an earnest
message--and was granted facilities to do so--imploring them to do
nothing more on her account; adding that she was resolved to go
through with her imprisonment; it might teach her valuable lessons.

The Governor of the prison fortunately was a humane and reasonable
man--unlike some of the Home Office or Scotland Yard officials. He
read the newspapers and reviews of the day and was aware who Vivie
Warren was. He probably made no unfair difference in her case from
any other, but so far as he could mould and bend the prison
discipline and rules it was his practice not to use a razor for
stone-chipping or a cold-chisel for shaving. He therefore put Vivie
to tasks co-ordinated with her ability and the deftness of her
hands--such as book-binding. She had of course to wear prison
dress--a thing of no importance in her eyes--and her cell was like
all the cells in that and other British prisons previous to the
newest reforms--dark, rather damp, cruelly cold in winter, and
disagreeable in smell; badly ventilated and oppressively ugly. But
it was at any rate clean. She had not the cockroaches, bugs, fleas
and lice that the earliest Suffragists of 1908 had to complain of.
Five years of outspoken protests on the part of educated,
delicate-minded women had wrought great reforms in our prisons--the
need for which till then was not apparent to the perceptions of
Visiting Magistrates.

The food was better, the wardresses were less harsh, the chaplains a
little more endurable, though still the worst feature in the prison
personnel, with their unreasoning Bibliolatry, their contemptuous
patronage, their lack of Christian pity--Christ had never spoken to
_them_, Vivie often thought--their snobbishness. The chaplain of her
imprisonment became quite chummy when he learnt that she had been a
Third Wrangler at Cambridge, knew Lady Feenix, and had lived in
Kensington prior to committing the offences for which she was
imprisoned. However this helped to alleviate her dreary seclusion
from the world as he occasionally dropped fragments of news as to
what was going on outside, and he got her books through the prison
library that were not evangelical pap.

One day when she had been in prison two months she had a great
surprise--a visit from her mother. Strictly s