thinking it morally a superior calling to architecture
and scene painting. In short, I shall be from this day forth
Vavasour Williams, law-student! Would it be safe, d'you think, in
that capacity to go down and see his old father?"

_Praed_: "_Vivie_! I _did_ think you were a sober-minded young
woman who would steer clear of--of--crime: for this impersonation
would be a punishable offence..."

_Vivie_: "_Crime_? _What_ nonsense! I should consider I was
justified in a Court of Equity if I burnt down or blew up the Law
Courts or one of the Inns or broke the windows of the Chartered
Institute of Actuaries or the Incorporated Law Society. All these
institutions and many others bar the way to honourable and lucrative
careers for educated women, and a male parliament gives us no
redress, and a male press laughs at us for our feeble attempts to
claim common rights with men. Instead of proceeding to such violence
I am merely resorting to a very harmless guile in getting round the
absurd restrictions imposed by the benchers of the Inns of Court,
namely that all who claim a call to the Bar should not be
_accountants_, _actuaries_, _clergymen_ or _women_. I am going to
give up the accountancy business--or rather, the law has never
allowed either Honoria or me to become chartered accountants, so
there is nothing to give up. To avoid any misapprehension she is
going to change the title on our note paper and brass plate to
'General Inquiry Agents.' That will be sufficiently non-committal.
Well then, as to sex disqualification, a few weeks hence I shall
become David Vavasour Williams, and I presume he was a male? You
don't have to pass a medical examination for the Bar, do you?"

_Praed_: "Really, Vivie, you are _unnecessarily_ coarse..."

_Vivie_: "I don't care if I am, poor outlaw that I am! Every avenue
to an honest and ambitious career seems closed to me, either because
I am a woman or--in women's careers--the few that there are--because
I am Kate Warren's daughter. _I_ am not to blame for my mother's
misdeeds, yet I am being punished for them. That beast of a friend
of yours--that filthy swine, George Crofts--set it about after I
refused to marry him that I was 'Mrs. Warren's Daughter,' and the
few nice people I knew from Cambridge days dropped me, all except
Honoria and her mother."

_Praed_: "Well, _I_ haven't dropped you. _I'll_ always stick by
you" (observes that Vivie is trying to keep back her tears).
"Vivie--_darli