and that it wouldn’t be very long before you in comfort-loving middle age sighed for the well-ordered life of No. 1, Park Crescent, Portland Place!

On the whole, I think the most rational line I can take is to continue resolutely this struggle for the Vote.  With the Vote must come the opening of Parliament to women.  I’m not too old to aspire to be some day Secretary of State for Home Affairs.  Because the General Post Office has already become interested in my correspondence, and because this is really a “pivotal” letter I am not trusting it to the post but am calling with it at No. 1 and handing it personally to your butler.  I look to you to destroy it when you have read its contents—­if you go to that length.

                                           Yours,
          
                                        VIVIE.

Rossiter read this letter an hour or so after it had been delivered, frowned a good deal, made notes in one of his memorandum books; then tore the sheets of typewriting into four and placed them on the fire.  Having satisfied himself that the flames had caught them, he went up with a sullen face to dress for dinner:  Linda was giving a New Year’s Eve dinner to friends and relations and he had to play the part of host with assumed heartiness.

In the perversity of fate, one piece of the typewritten letter escaped the burning except along the edge.  A puff of air from the chimney or the opened door, as Linda entered the room, lifted it off the cinders and deposited it on the hearth.  Linda had dressed early for the party, had felt a little hurt at the locked door of Michael’s dressing-room, and had come with some vague intention into his study, to see perhaps if the fire was burning brightly:  because to avoid unnecessary journies upstairs they would receive their guests to-night in the study and thence pass to the dining-room.  But the fire had gone sulky, as fires do sometimes even with well-behaved chimneys and first-class coal.  She noted the charred portion of paper lying untidily on the hearth, with typewriting on its upper surface.  Picking it up she read inside the scorched margin: 

ria kept the keys and now them over to me. 
W.S.P.U. has taken—­also under an alias—­other of
same side of the way, at No. 94, top storey.  We
using the fire-escape, pass over the intervening r
reach the parapet outside the “partners’ room” at the
ding.  I shall once again make use of the little room
tners’ office as a bedroom or rather “tiring” room, w
if necessary effect changes of costume.  I have tak
ces in the name of Mr. Michaelis for a special reas
ome modifications of David’s costume I have appeared in p
ssume possession of them.  I generally enter No. 94 dressed a
Warren.  All this may sound very silly to you, like pla