So Honoria’s offer and Honoria’s business provided her with a most welcome opening.  She realized the opportunities that lay before this Woman’s Office for General Inquiries, established in the closing years of the nineteenth century—­this business that before Woman’s enfranchisement nibbled discreetly at the careers and the openings for profit-making hitherto rigidly reserved for Man.  She wasn’t going to let Honoria down.  Honoria, she realized, was in herself equivalent to many thousands of pounds in capital.  Her reputation was flawless.  She was known to and esteemed by a host of women of the upper middle class.  Her Cambridge reputation for learning, her eventual inheritance of eighty thousand pounds were unexpressed reasons for many a woman of good standing preferring to confide her affairs to the judgment of Fraser and Warren, in preference to dealing with male legal advisers, male land agents, men on the Stock Exchange, men in house property business.

So Beryl became in most respects a source of strength to Honoria Fraser, deprived for a time of the overt co-operation of her junior partner.

Beryl in the first few weeks of her stay evinced small interest in the departure of Vivien Warren and her reasons for going abroad.  She had a scheme of her own in which her architect would take a prominent part, for providing women—­authoresses, actresses, or the wives of the newly enriched—­with week-end cottages; the desire for which was born with the Twentieth century and fostered by the invention of motors and bicycles.  Cases before the firm for opinions on intricate legal problems Beryl was advised to place before the consideration of one of Honoria’s friends, a law student, Mr. D.V.  Williams, who would shortly be back from his holiday and who had agreed to look in at the office from time to time and go through such papers as were set aside for him to read.  Beryl had remarked—­without any intention behind it—­on seeing some of his notes initialled V.W. that it was rum he should have the same initials as that Vivie girl whom she remembered at Newnham ... who was “so silent and standoffish and easily shocked.”  But she noticed later that when Mr. Williams got to work his initials were really three and not two—­D.V.W.  One thing with the other:  her departure from the office at the regular closing hour—­five—­so that she might see her babies before they were put to bed; Williams’s habit of coming to work after six; kept them from meeting till the October of 1901.  When they did meet after Honoria’s return from Switzerland, Beryl scanned the law student critically; decided he was rather nice-looking but very pre-occupied; perhaps engaged to some girl whose parents objected; rather mysterious, quand meme; she had heard some one say this Mr. David Williams was a cousin or something of Vivie Warren ... what if he were in love with Vivie and she had gone away because she had some fad or other about not wanting to marry?  Well!