Vivie generally heckled ministers on the stump and parliamentary candidates dressed as a woman of the lower middle class.  It would have been unwise to do so in man’s guise, in case there should be a rough-and-tumble afterwards and her sex be discovered.  Although in order to avoid premature arrest she did not herself take part in those most ingenious—­and from the view of endurance, heroic—­stow-aways of women interrupters in the roofs, attics, inaccessible organ lofts or music galleries of public halls, she organized many of these surprises beforehand.  It was Vivie to whom the brilliant idea came of once baffling the police in the rearrest of either Mrs. Pankhurst or Annie Kenney.  Knowing when the police would come to the building where one or other of these ladies was to make her sensational re-appearance, she had previously secreted there forty other women who were dressed and veiled precisely similarly to the fugitive from justice.  Thus, when the force of constables claimed admittance, forty-one women, virtually indistinguishable one from the other, ran out into the street, and the bewildered minions of the law were left lifting their helmets to scratch puzzled heads and admitting “the wimmen were a bit too much for us, this time, they were.”

In her bedroom at 88-90 she kept an equipment of theatrical disguises; very natural-looking moustaches which could be easily applied and which remained firmly adhering save under the application of the right solvent; pairs of tinted spectacles; wigs of credible appearance; different styles of suiting, different types of women’s dress.  She sometimes sat in trains as a handsome, impressive matron of fifty-five, with a Pompadour confection and a tortoiseshell face-a-main, conversing with ministers of state or permanent officials on their way to their country seats, and saying “Horrid creatures!” if any one referred to the activities of the Suffragettes.  Thus disguised she elicited considerable information sometimes, though she might really be on her way to organize the break-up of the statesman’s public meeting, the enquiry into discreditable circumstances which might compel his withdrawal from public life, or merely the burning down of his shooting box.

This life had its risks and perils, but it agreed with her health.  It was exciting and took her mind off Rossiter.

Rossiter for his part experienced a slackening in the tension of his mind during the same year 1912.  He was touched by his wife’s faint suspicion of his alienated affection and by her dogged determination to be sufficient to him as a companion and a helper; and a little ashamed at his middle-aged—­he was forty-seven—­infatuation for a woman who was herself well on in the thirties.  There were times when a rift came in the cloud of his passion for Vivie, when he looked out dispassionately on the prospect of the rest of his life—­he could hope at most for twenty more years of mental and bodily