We all know how this demand was received by the leading men of the Liberal Party and by the more prominent Liberals among their supporters in the House; with evasions, silences, sneers, angry refusals, hasty promises given to-day (when Ministers were frightened) and broken to-morrow; with a whole series of discreditable tongue-in-the-cheek tricks of Parliamentary procedure; till at last the onlooker must have wondered at and felt grateful for our British phlegm; surprised that so little actual harm was done (except to the bodies of the Suffragists), that no Home Secretary or Police Inspector or magistrate, no flippant talker-out of would-be-serious Franchise Bills was assassinated, trounced, tarred and feathered, kidnapped, nose-tweaked, or even mud-bespattered. (I am reproducing here the growing comprehension of the problem as it shaped in Vivie’s mind, under the hat and waistcoat of David Williams.)

Honoria, faithful to her old resolve, continued to devote the greater part of the Two Thousand a year she had set aside for the Woman’s Cause to financing the new Suffrage movement; and incidentally she brought grist to David’s mill by recommending him as Counsel to many women in distress, arrested Suffragists.  In 1906, 1907 and 1908 he made himself increasingly famous by his pleadings in court on behalf of women who with dauntless courage and at the cost of much bodily pain and even at the risk of death had forcibly called attention to this grave defect in the British polity, the withholding of the ordinary rights of tax-paying citizens from adult women.

Where the Suffragist was poor he asked no fee, or a small fee was paid by some Suffragist Association.  But he gained much renown over his advocacy; he became quite a well-known personality outside as well as inside the Law Courts and Police-stations by 1908.  His pleadings were sometimes so moving, so passionate that—­teste Mrs. Pankhurst—­“burly policemen in court had tears trickling down their faces” as he described the courage, the flawless private lives, the selfless devotion to a noble cause of these women agitating for the rights of their sex—­rich and poor, old and young.  Juries flinched from the verdict which some bitter-faced judge enjoined; magistrates swerved from executing the secret orders of the Home Office; policemen—­again—­for they are most of them decent fellows—­resigned their positions in the Force, sooner than carry out the draconian policy of the Home Secretary.

But of course concurrently he lost many a friend and friendship in the Inns of Court.  There were even growls that he should be disbarred—­after this espousal of the Suffrage cause had been made manifest for three years.  He might have been, but that he had other compeers, below and above his abilities and position; advocates like Lord Robert Brinsley, the famous son of the Marquis of Wiltshire.  If Williams was to be disbarred, why they would have to take the same course with a Brinsley who also defended