So much so, that Vivie with a sigh, as soon as she attained convalescence was fain to send for Bertie and tell him with unanswerable decision that he must return to his work with Rossiter and thither she would send from time to time special instructions if he could help her business in any way.

This was done in January, 1912.  Vivie’s feet were now healed and the woman surgeon was satisfied that she could walk on them without displacing the reset bones.  The slight fracture in the breastbone had repaired itself by one of Nature’s magic processes.  So one day our battered heroine doffed the invalid garments of Michaelis and donned those of any well-dressed woman of 1912, including a thick veil.  Thus attired she passed from the parapet to the fire-escape (recalling the agony these gymnastics had caused her the previous November), and from the fire-escape to the roof of No. 92 (continuous with the roof of 94), and past the chimney stacks, into the top storey of 94, and so on down to the street, where a taxi was waiting to convey her to the Lilacs.

(The W.S.P.U., by the bye, to bluff Scotland Yard had added to the name of “Algernon Mainwaring, 5th Floor,” the qualification of “Hygienic Corset-maker,” as an explanation—­possibly—­of why so many women found their way to the top storey of No. 94.)

Arrived at the Lilacs, Vivie took up for a brief spell the life of an ordinary young woman of the well-to-do middle class, seriously interested in the suffrage question but non-militant.  She attended several of Honoria’s or Mrs. Fawcett’s suffrage parties or public meetings and occasionally spoke and spoke well.  She also went over to Brussels twice in 1912 to keep in touch with her mother.  Mrs. Warren had had one or two slight warnings that a life of pleasure saps the strongest constitution.[1] She lived now mainly at her farm, the Villa Beau-sejour, and only occasionally occupied her appartement in the Rue Royale.  She must have been about fifty-nine in the spring of 1912, and was beginning to “soigner son salut,” that is to say to take stock of her past life, apologize for it to herself and see how she could atone reasonably for what she had done wrong.  A decade or two earlier she would have turned to religion, inevitably to that most attractive and logical form, the religion expounded by the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.  She would have confessed her past, slightly or very considerably gazee, to some indulgent confessor, have been pardoned, and have presented a handsome sum to an ecclesiastical charity or work of piety.  But she had survived into a skeptical age and she had conceived an immense respect for her clever daughter.  Vivie should be her spiritual director; and Vivie’s idea put before her at their reconciliation three years previously had seemed the most practical way of making amends to Woman for having made money in the past out of the economic and physiological weakness of women.  She had fined herself Ten Thousand pounds then; and out of her remaining capital of Fifty or Sixty thousand (all willed with what else she possessed to her daughter) she would pay over more if Vivie demanded it as further reparation.  Still, she found the frequentation of churches soothing and gave much and often to the mildly beseeching Little Sisters of the Poor when they made their rounds in town or suburbs.