Here she was destined to lie up for several weeks till the feet and the chest were healed and sound again.  Hither by the normal entrance came a woman suffragette surgeon to heal, and Vivie’s woman clerk to act as secretary; whilst Adams typed away in the outer office on Mr. Michaelis’s business or went on long and mysterious errands.  Hither also came the little maid from the Lilacs, bringing needed changes of clothes, letters, and messages from Honoria.  A stout young man with a fresh colour went up in the lift at No. 94 to the flat or office of “Algernon Mainwaring,” and then skipped along the winding way between the chimney stacks and up and down short iron ladders till he too reached the parapet, entered through the opened casement, and revealed himself as a great W.S.P.U. leader, costumed like Vivie as a male, but in reality a buxom young woman only waiting for the Vote to be won to espouse her young man—­shop steward—­and begin a large family of children.  From this leader, Vivie received humbly the strictest injunctions to engage in no more disabling work for the present, to keep out of police clutches and the risk of going to prison or of attracting too much police attention at 88-90 Chancery Lane.  “You are our brain-centre at present.  Our offices for show and for raiding by the police have been at Clifford’s Inn and are now in Lincoln’s Inn.  But the really precious information we possess is ... well, you know where it is:  walls may have ears ... your time for public testimony hasn’t come yet ... we’ll let you know fast enough when it has and you won’t flinch, I’m quite sure...”

As a matter of fact, though Vivie’s intelligence and inventiveness, her knowledge of criminal law, of lawyers and of city business, her wide education, her command of French (improved by the frequent trips to Brussels—­where indeed she deposited securely in her mother’s keeping some of the funds and the more remarkable documents of the Suffrage cause) and her possession of monetary supplies were not to be despised:  as a figure-head, she was of doubtful value.  There was always that mother in the background.  If Vivie was in court for a suffrage offence of a grave character the prosecuting Counsel would be sure to rake up the “notorious Mrs. Warren” and drag in the White Slave Traffic, to bewilder a jury and throw discredit on the militant side of the Suffrage cause.  Of course if the true story of Vivie were fully known, she would rise triumphant from such a recital....  Still ... throw plenty of mud and some of it will stick....  And what was her full, true story?  Even in the pure passion of the fight for liberty among these young and middle-aged women, the tongue of scandal occasionally wagged in moments of lassitude, discouragement, undeception.  At such times some weaker sister with a vulgar mind, or a mind with vulgar streaks in it, might hint at the great interest taken in Vivie by a distinguished man of science who had become an M.P. and a raging suffragist.  Or indecorum would be hinted in the relations between this enigmatic woman, so prone seemingly to don male costume, and the burly clerk who attended her so faithfully and had brought her home on the night of Mrs. Pethick Lawrence’s spirited raid.