your time for public testimony hasn't come yet ... we'll let you know fast enough when it has and _you_ won't flinch, _I'm_ quite sure..." As a matter of fact, though Vivie's intelligence and inventiveness, her knowledge of criminal law, of lawyers and of city business, her wide education, her command of French (improved by the frequent trips to Brussels--where indeed she deposited securely in her mother's keeping some of the funds and the more remarkable documents of the Suffrage cause) and her possession of monetary supplies were not to be despised: as a figure-head, she was of doubtful value. There was always that mother in the background. If Vivie was in court for a suffrage offence of a grave character the prosecuting Counsel would be sure to rake up the "notorious Mrs. Warren" and drag in the White Slave Traffic, to bewilder a jury and throw discredit on the militant side of the Suffrage cause. Of course if the true story of Vivie were fully known, she would rise triumphant from such a recital.... Still ... throw plenty of mud and some of it will stick.... And what _was_ her full, true story? Even in the pure passion of the fight for liberty among these young and middle-aged women, the tongue of scandal occasionally wagged in moments of lassitude, discouragement, undeception. At such times some weaker sister with a vulgar mind, or a mind with vulgar streaks in it, might hint at the great interest taken in Vivie by a distinguished man of science who had become an M.P. and a raging suffragist. Or indecorum would be hinted in the relations between this enigmatic woman, so prone seemingly to don male costume, and the burly clerk who attended her so faithfully and had brought her home on the night of Mrs. Pethick Lawrence's spirited raid. So much so, that Vivie with a sigh, as soon as she attained convalescence was fain to send for Bertie and tell him with unanswerable decision that he must return to his work with Rossiter and thither she would send from time to time special instructions if he could help her business in any way. This was done in January, 1912. Vivie's feet were now healed and the woman surgeon was satisfied that she could walk on them without displacing the reset bones. The slight fracture in the breastbone had repaired itself by one of Nature's magic processes. So one day our battered heroine doffed the invalid garments of Michaelis and donned those of any well-dressed woman of 1912, including a thick veil. Thus attired she passed from the parapet to the fire-escape (recalling the agony these gymnastics had caused her the previous November), and from the fire-escape to the roof of No. 92 (continuous with the roof of 94), and past the chimney stacks, into the top storey of 94, and so on down to the street, where a taxi was waiting to convey her to the Lilacs.