“Michael! why are we tortured like this?  Why mayn’t we love where we please?  Is this discipline necessary to the improvement of the race?  I only know that if we sinned against these human laws and conventions, your great career in Science—­and again, why in Science?  Lightness in love does not seem to affect the career of orchestral conductors, actors, singers, play-wrights and house painters—­why weren’t you one of these, and not a High Priest of the only real religion?  I only know also that if I fell, so many people would have the satisfaction of saying:  ’There! what did I say?  What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh. That’s how the Woman’s Movement’s goin’ to end, you take my word for it!  They’ll get a man somewhere, somehow, and then they’ll clear out of it.’

“I think I said before—­I meant to say, at any rate, so as to ease your mind:  I’m all right as regards financial matters.  I have a life annuity and some useful savings.  I shall give Bertie Adams a year’s salary; and if you feel, dear friend, you must put forth your hand to help me, help him instead to get another position.  He has a wife and a young family, and for his class is just about as good a chap as I have ever met—­this is ‘David’ speaking!  If you can do nothing you may be sure Vivie will, even if she has to borrow unclean money from her wicked old mother to keep Bertie Adams from financial anxiety and his pretty young wife and the child they are so proud of....

“I must finish this gigantic letter somewhere, though I’m not going to stop writing to you.  I couldn’t—­I should lose all hold on life if I did.  For the purpose of correspondence and finishing up things, I shall be ‘David Williams’ for some time longer.  You know his address in Wales?  Pontystrad Vicarage, Pontyffynon, Glamorgan, if you’ve forgotten it.  He’ll be there till April, and then begin his foreign tour and write to you at intervals from the Continent.  As to Vivie, I think she won’t return to life and activity till the autumn and then she’ll make things hum.  She’ll throw all the energy of frustrated love into the Woman’s Cause, and get ’em the Vote somehow...!”

Early in the genesis of the book.  I appointed a jury of matrons to judge each chapter before it went to the Press, and to decide whether it was suited to the restrictions of the circulating library, and whether it would cause real distress or perturbation to three persons whom we chose as representative readers of decent fiction:  Admiral Broadbent, Lady Percy Mountjoye, and old Mrs. Bridges (Mrs. Bridges was said to have had a heart attack after reading THE GAY-DOMBEYS—­I did not wish her to have another).  This jury of broad-minded women of the world decided that Rossiter’s reply to Vivie’s very long epistle should not see the light.  He himself would probably—­had he known we were discussing his affairs—­have been thankful for this decision; because twelve hours after he had written