Two months after this conversation Vivie decided to pay a call on an old friend of her mother’s, Lewis Maitland Praed, if you want his full name, a well-known architect, and one of the few male friends of Catherine Warren who had not also been her lover.  Why, he never quite knew himself.  When he first met her she was the boon companion, the mistress—­more or less, and unattached—­of a young barrister, a college friend of Praed’s.  Kate Warren at that time called herself Kitty Vavasour; and on the strength of having done a turn or two on the music halls considered herself an actress with a right to a professional name.  It was in this guise that the “Revd.”  Samuel Gardner met her and had that six months’ infatuation for her which afterwards caused him so much disquietude; though it preceded the taking of his ordination vows by quite a year, and his marriage to his wife—­much too good for him—­in 1874. [The Revd.  Sam, you may remember, was the father of the scapegrace Frank who nearly captured Vivie’s young affections and had written from South Africa proposing marriage at the opening of this story.]

Kate Vavasour in 1872 was an exceedingly pretty girl of nineteen or twenty; showily dressed, and quick with her tongue.  She was good-natured and jolly, and though Praed himself was the essence of refinement there was something about her reckless mirth and joy in life—­the immense relief of having passed from the sordid life of a barmaid to this quasi-ladyhood—­that enlisted his sympathies.  Though she was always somebody else’s mistress until she developed her special talent as a manageress of high-class houses of accommodation, “private hotels” on the Continent, chiefly frequented by English and American roues—­Praed kept an eye on her career, and occasionally rendered her, with some cynicism, unobtrusive friendly services in disentangling her affairs when complications threatened.  He was an art student in those days of the ’seventies, possessed of about four hundred a year, beginning to go through the aesthetic phase, and not decided whether he would emerge a painter of pictures or an architect of grandiose or fantastic buildings.  To his studio Miss Kitty Vavasour or Miss Kate Warren would often come and pose for the head and shoulders, or for some draped caryatid wanted for an ambitious porch in an imaginary millionaire’s house in Kensington Palace Gardens.  When in 1897, Vivie had learnt about her mother’s “profession,” she had flung off violently from all her mother’s “friends,” except “Praddy.”  She even continued to call him by this nickname, long ago bestowed on him by her mother.  At distant intervals she would pay him a visit at his house and studio near Hans Place; when Honoria’s advice and assistance did not meet the case of some grave perplexity.

So one afternoon in June, 1901, she came to his little dwelling with its large studio, and asked to have a long talk to him, whilst his parlour-maid—­he was still a bachelor—­denied him to other callers.  They had tea together and Vivie plunged as quickly as possible into her problem.