“You know, Viv, old girl,” said Mrs. Warren one day, “if you played your cards all right, this pretty place might be yours after I’d gone.  Why don’t yer pick up a decent husband somewhere and drop all this foolishness about the Suffragettes?  He needn’t know too much about me, d’yer see?  And if you looked at things sensible-like, you’d come in for a pot of money some day; and whilst I lived I’d make you a good allowance—­”

“It’s no use, dear mother”—­involuntarily she said “dear”:  her heart was hungry for affection, Wales was rapidly passing out of her sphere, David’s business must soon be wound up in that quarter and where else had she to go?  “So long as you keep on with those Hotels I can’t touch a penny.  I oughtn’t to have kept that thousand, only Praddy assured me it was ‘clean’ money.”

Mrs. W.:  “So it was.  I won it at Monte.  I don’t often gamble now, I hate losing money.  But we’d had a splendid season at Roquebrune and I sat down one day at the tables, a bit reckless-like.  Seemed as if I couldn’t lose.  When I got up and left I had won Thirty thousand francs.  So I says to myself:  ’This shall go to my little girl:  I’ll send it through Praddy and he’ll pay it into her bank.  Then I shan’t feel anxious about her.’”

“Mother! what a strange creature you are!  Such a mixture of good and bad—­for I suppose it is bad, I feel somehow it is bad, trafficking in women’s bodies, as they put it sensationally.  Towards me you have always been compact of kindness; you took every precaution to have me brought up well, out of knowledge of any impurity; and well and modernly educated.  You left me quite free to marry whom I liked ... but ... but ... you stuck to this horrible career...”

“Well, Vivie.  I did.  But did you make any great effort to turn me from it?  Besides, is it horrible?  I won’t promise much for Berlin and Buda-Pest or even Vienna, because I haven’t been in those directions for ever so long, and the Germans are reg’lar getting out of hand, they are, working up for something.  I dessay if you looked in at the Warren Hotels in those places you might find lots to say against ’em.  But you couldn’t say the places I supervise here and at Roquebrune are so bad? I won’t stop your looking into ’em.  The girls are treated right down well.  Looked after if they fall sick and given every encouragement to marry well.  I even call those two places—­I’ve giv’ up me Paris house this ten years—­I even call them my ‘marriage markets.’  Ah! an’ I’ve given in my time not a few dots to decent girls that had found a good husband dans la clientele.  Why they’re no more than what you might call hotels a bit larkier than what other Hotels are.  I’ve never in all my twenty years of Brussels management had a row with the police....  And as to all this rot about the White Slave Traffic that you seem so excited about ... well I’m not saying there’s nothin’ in it....  Antwerp, Hamburg, Rotterdam—­you’d