“Don’t be perverse.  You know exactly how I feel.  I’m wasting the prime of my life.  I see no clear course marked out before me.  Sometimes I think I would like to explore Central Africa or get up a Woman’s Expedition to the South Pole.  Life has seemed so flat since I gave up being David Williams.  Then I lived in a perpetual thrill, always on my guard.  I tire every now and then of my monkey tricks, and the praise of all these women leaves me cold.  I wish I were as simple minded as most of them are.  To them the Vote seems the beginning of the millennium.  They seem to forget that after we’ve got the Vote we shall have another fight to be admitted as members to the House.  You may be sure the men will stand out another fifty years over that surrender.  I alternate in my moods between the reckless fury of an Anarchist and the lassitude of Lord Rosebery.  To think that I was once so elated and conceited about being a Third Wrangler...!”

With the closing months of 1912, however, there was a greater tenseness, a sharpening of the struggle which once more roused Vivie to keen interest.  When she returned from an autumn visit to Villa Beau-sejour she found there had been a split between the “Peths” and the “Panks.”  The Girondist section of the women suffragists had separated from those who could see no practical policy to win the Vote but a regime of Terrorism—­mild terrorism, it is true—­somewhat that of the Curate in The Private Secretary who at last told his persecutors he should really have to give them a good hard knock.  The Peths drew back before the Pankish programme (mild as this would seem, to us of Bolshevik days and of Irish insurrection). Votes for Women returned to the control of the Pethick Lawrences, and the Pankhurst party to which Vivie belonged were to start a new press organ, The Suffragette.

The Panks, it seemed, had a more acute fore-knowledge than the Peths.  The latter had felt they were forcing an open door; that the Liberal Ministry would eventually squeeze a measure of Female Suffrage into the long-discussed Franchise Bill; and that too much militancy was disgusting the general public with the Woman’s cause.  The former declared all along that Women were going to be done in the eye, because all the militancy hitherto had got very little in man’s way, had only excited smiles, and shoulder-shrugs.  Ministers of the Crown in 1912 had compared the hoydenish booby-traps and bloodless skirmishes of the Suffragettes with the grim fighting, the murders, burnings, mob-rule of the 1830’s, when MEN were agitating for Reform; or the mutilation of cattle, the assassinations, dynamite outrages, gun-powder plots, bombs and boycotting of the long drawn-out Irish agitation for Home Rule.  An agitation which was now resulting in the placing on the Statute Book of a Home Rule Bill, while another equally deadly agitation—­in promise—­was being worked up by Sir Edward Carson, the Duke of This and the Marquis of That, and a very rising politician, Mr. F.E.  Smith, to defeat the operation of Home Rule for Ireland.  In short, if one might believe the second-rate ministers who were not repudiated by their superiors in rank, the Vote for Women could only be wrung from the reluctance of the tyrant man, if the women made life unbearable for the male section of the community.