At this juncture Vivie, whose obsession leads her more and more to address every one as a public meeting—­is interrupted by the smiling bonne a tout faire who announces that le dejeuner de Madame est servi, and the two women gathering up books and shawls go in to the gay little saile-a-manger of the Villa Beau-sejour.

On Vivie’s return to London, after her Easter holiday, she threw herself with added zest into the Suffrage struggle.  The fortnight of good feeding, of quiet nights and lazy days under her mother’s roof had done her much good.  She was not quite so thin, the dark circles under her grey eyes had vanished, and she found not only in herself but even in the most middle-aged of her associates a delightful spirit of tomboyishness in their swelling revolt against the Liberal leaders.  It was specially during the remainder of 1912 that Vivie noted the enormous good which the Suffrage movement had done and was doing to British women.  It was producing a splendid camaraderie between high and low.  Heroines like Lady Constance Lytton mingled as sister with equally heroic charwomen, factory girls, typewriteresses, waitresses and hospital nurses.  Women doctors of Science, Music, and Medicine came down into the streets and did the bravest actions to present their rights before a public that now began to take them seriously.  Debutantes, no longer quivering with fright at entering the Royal Presence, modestly but audibly called their Sovereign’s attention to the injustice of Mr. Asquith’s attitude towards women, while princesses of the Blood Royal had difficulty in not applauding.  Many a tame cat had left the fire-side and the skirts of an inane old mother (who had plenty of people to look after her selfish wants) and emerged, dazed at first, into a world that was unknown to her.  Such had thrown away their crochet hooks, their tatting-shuttles and fashion articles, their Church almanacs, and Girl’s Own Library books, and read and talked of social, sexual, and industrial problems that have got to be faced and solved.  Colour came into their cheeks, assurance into their faded manners, sense and sensibility into their talk; and whatever happened afterwards they were never crammed back again into the prison of Victorian spinsterhood.  They learnt rough cooking, skilled confectionery, typewriting, bicycling, jiu-jitsu perhaps.  “The maidens came, they talked, they sang, they read; till she not fair began to gather light, and she that was became her former beauty treble” sang in prophecy, sixty years before, the greatest of poets and the poet-prophet of Woman’s Emancipation.  Many a woman has directly owed the lengthened, happier, usefuller life that became hers from 1910-1911-1912 onwards to the Suffrage movement for the Liberation of Women.