Praed:  “Couldn’t tell you, I’m sure.  I never took any further interest in him, and until you mentioned it—­I don’t know on whose authority—­I didn’t know he was dead.  On the whole a good riddance for his people, I should say, especially if he died on the field of honour.  But what lunatic idea has entered your mind with regard to this poor waster?”

Vivie:  “Why my idea, as I say, is that D.V.W. got cured of his necrosis of the jaw—­I suppose it is not invariably deadly?—­came home with a much improved morale, studied hard, and became a barrister, thinking it morally a superior calling to architecture and scene painting.  In short, I shall be from this day forth Vavasour Williams, law-student!  Would it be safe, d’you think, in that capacity to go down and see his old father?”

Praed:  “Vivie!  I did think you were a sober-minded young woman who would steer clear of—­of—­crime:  for this impersonation would be a punishable offence...”

Vivie:  “Crime? What nonsense!  I should consider I was justified in a Court of Equity if I burnt down or blew up the Law Courts or one of the Inns or broke the windows of the Chartered Institute of Actuaries or the Incorporated Law Society.  All these institutions and many others bar the way to honourable and lucrative careers for educated women, and a male parliament gives us no redress, and a male press laughs at us for our feeble attempts to claim common rights with men.  Instead of proceeding to such violence I am merely resorting to a very harmless guile in getting round the absurd restrictions imposed by the benchers of the Inns of Court, namely that all who claim a call to the Bar should not be accountants, actuaries, clergymen or women.  I am going to give up the accountancy business—­or rather, the law has never allowed either Honoria or me to become chartered accountants, so there is nothing to give up.  To avoid any misapprehension she is going to change the title on our note paper and brass plate to ‘General Inquiry Agents.’  That will be sufficiently non-committal.  Well then, as to sex disqualification, a few weeks hence I shall become David Vavasour Williams, and I presume he was a male?  You don’t have to pass a medical examination for the Bar, do you?”

Praed:  “Really, Vivie, you are unnecessarily coarse...”

Vivie:  “I don’t care if I am, poor outlaw that I am!  Every avenue to an honest and ambitious career seems closed to me, either because I am a woman or—­in women’s careers—­the few that there are—­because I am Kate Warren’s daughter. I am not to blame for my mother’s misdeeds, yet I am being punished for them.  That beast of a friend of yours—­that filthy swine, George Crofts—­set it about after I refused to marry him that I was ‘Mrs. Warren’s Daughter,’ and the few nice people I knew from Cambridge days dropped me, all except Honoria and her mother.”