The wrath of the oft-deluded women flamed out with immediate resentment when the purport of this trick was discerned. Led by Mrs. Pethick Lawrence a band of more than a thousand women and men (and some of the presumed men were, like Vivie, women in men's clothes, as it enabled them to move about with more agility and also to escape identification) entered Whitehall and Parliament Street armed with hammers and stones. They broke all the windows they could in the fronts of the Government offices and at the residences of Ministers of State. Vivie found herself shadowed everywhere by Bertie Adams though she had given him no orders to join the crowd, indeed had begged him to mind his own business and go home. "This _is_ my business," he had said curtly, and for once masterfully, and she gave way. Though Vivie for her own reasons carried no hammer or stone and as one of the principal organizers of the militant movement had been requested by the inner Council of the W.S.P.U. to keep out of prison as long as possible, she could not help cheering on the boldest and bravest in the mild violence of their protest. To the angry police she seemed merely an impertinent young man, hardly worth arresting when they could barely master the two hundred and twenty-three arch offenders with glass-breaking weapons in their hands. So a constable contented himself with marching on her feet with all his weight and thrusting his elbows violently into her breast. She well-nigh fainted with the pain; in fact would have fallen in the crowd but for the interposition of Adams who carried her out of it to the corner of Parliament Street, where he pounced on one of the many taxis that crawled about the outskirts of the shouting, swaying crowd, sure of a fare from either police or escaping Suffragists. Feeling certain that some policeman had not left the disguised Vivie entirely unobserved--indeed Bertie had half thought he caught the words above the din: "That's David Williams, that is," he told the taxi man to drive along the Embankment to the Temple. By the time they had reached the nearest access on that side of Fountain Court, Vivie was sufficiently recovered from her semi-swoon to get out, and leaning heavily on Bertie's arm, limp slowly through the intricacies of the Temple and out into Fleet Street by Sergeant's Inn. Then with fresh efforts and further halts they made their way to 94, Chancery Lane.