All else was wrapt in mystery ... at any rate it was a mystery I have no wish to lay bare.  The death and the inquest verdict, “Suicide while of unsound mind, due to overstudy,” broke his father’s heart and his mother’s:  in the metaphorical meaning of course, because the heart is an unemotional pump and it is the brain and the nerve centres that suffer from our emotions.  Sir Meldrum Fraser died a year after his son.  He left a fortune of eighty thousand pounds.  Half of this went at once to Honoria and the other half to the life-use of Lady Fraser with a reversion to her daughter.

Honoria after her father’s death left Cambridge and moved her mother from Harley Street to Queen Anne’s Mansions so that with her shattered nerves and loss of interest in life she might have no household worries, or at any rate nothing worse than remonstrating with the still-room maids on the twice-boiled water brought in for the making of tea; or with the culinary department over the monotonous character of the savouries or the tepid ice creams which dissolved so rapidly into fruit-juice when they were served after a house-dinner.[1] Honoria herself, mistress of a clear two thousand pounds a year, and more in prospect, carried out plans formed while still at Newnham after her brother’s death.  She, like Vivien Warren, her three-years-younger friend and college-mate, was a great mathematician—­a thing I never could be and a status I am incapable of understanding; consequently one I view at first with the deepest respect.  I am quite astonished when I meet a male or female mathematician and find they require food as I do, are less quick at adding up bridge scores, lose rather than win at Goodwood, and write down the “down” train instead of the “up” in their memorabilia.  But there it is.  They have only to apply sines and co-sines, tangents and logarithms to a stock exchange quotation for me to grovel before their superior wisdom and consult them at every turn in life.

  [Footnote 1:  This, of course, was twenty, years ago.—­H.H.J.]

Honoria had resolved to turn her great acquirements in Algebra and the Higher Mathematics to practical purposes.  Being the ignoramus that I am—­in this direction—­I cannot say how it was to be done; but both she and Vivie had grasped the possibilities which lay before exceptionally well-educated women on the Stock Exchange, in the Provision markets, in the Law, in Insurance calculations, and generally in steering other and weaker women through the difficulties and pitfalls of our age; when in nine cases out of thirteen (Honoria worked out the ratio) women of large or moderate means have only dishonest male proficients to guide them.

Moreover Honoria’s purpose was two-fold.  She wished to help women in their business affairs, but she also wanted to find careers for women.  She, like Vivien Warren, was a nascent suffragist—­perhaps a born suffragist, a reasoned one; because the ferment had been in her mother, and her grandmother was a friend of Lydia Becker and a cousin of Mrs. Belloc.  John’s death had been a horrible numbing shock to Honoria, and she felt hardly in her right mind for three months afterwards.  Then on reflection it left some tarnish on her family, even if the memory of the dear dead boy, the too brilliant boy, softened from the poignancy of utter disappointment into a tender sorrow and an infinite pity and forgiveness.