But the tragedy turned her thoughts from marriage to some mission of well-doing.  She determined to devote that proportion of her inheritance which would have been John’s share to this end:  the liberation and redemption of women.

She was no “anti-man,” like Vivie.  She liked men, if truth were told, a tiny wee bit more than women.  But she wished in the moods that followed her brother’s death in 1894 to be a mother by adoption, a refuge for the fallen, the bewildered, the unstrung.  She helped young men back into the path of respectability and wage-earning as well as young women.  She was even, when opportunity offered, a matchmaker.

Being heiress eventually to L4,000 a year (a large income in pre-war days) and of attractive appearance, she had no lack of suitors, even though she thought modern dancing inane, and had little skill at ball-games.  I have indicated her appearance by some few phrases already; but to enable you to visualize her more definitely I might be more precise.  She was a tall woman rather than large built, like the young Juno when first wooed by Jove.  Where she departed from the Junonian type she turned towards Venus rather than Minerva; in spite of being a mathematician.  You meet with her sisters in physical beauty among the Americans of Pennsylvania, where, to a stock mainly Anglo-Saxon, is added a delicious strain of Gallic race; or you see her again among the Cape Dutch women who have had French Huguenot great grandparents.  It is perhaps rather impertinent continuing this analysis of her charm, seeing that she lives and flourishes more than ever, twenty years after the opening of my story; not very different in outward appearance at 48, as Lady Armstrong—­for of course, as you guess already, she married Major—­afterwards Sir Petworth—­Armstrong—­than she was at twenty-eight, the partner, friend and helper of Vivien Warren.

Being in comfortable circumstances, highly educated, handsome, attractive, with a mezzo-soprano voice of rare beauty and great skill as a piano-forte accompanyist, she had not only suitors who took her rejection without bitterness, but hosts of friends.  She knew all the nice London people of her day:  Lady Feenix, who in some ways resembled her, Diana Dombey, who did not quite approve of her, being a little uncertain yet about welcoming the New Woman, all the Ritchies, married and unmarried, Lady Brownlow, the Duchess of Bedford (Adeline), the Michael Fosters, most of the Stracheys (she liked the ones I liked), the Hubert Parrys, the Ripons (how she admired Lady Ripon, as who did not!), Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Miss Lena Ashwell, the Bernard Shaws, the Wilfred Meynells, the H.G.  Wellses, the Sidney Webbs; and—­leaving uninstanced a number of other delightful, warm-blooded, pleasant-voiced, natural-mannered people—­the Rossiters.