So in 1905 David with Three Thousand pounds purchased an annuity of L210 a year for Vivien Warren. That investment would save Vivie from becoming at any time penniless and dependent, and consequently would subserve the same purpose for her cousin and agent, David V. Williams. Going to the C. and C. Bank, Temple Bar branch, to take stock of Vivie's affairs, he found a Thousand pounds had been paid in to her current account. Ascertaining the name of the payee to be L.M. Praed, he hurried off at the first opportunity to Praed's studio. Praed was entertaining a large party of young men and women to tea and the exhibition of some wild futurist drawings and a few rather striking designs for stage scenery and book covers. David had perforce to keep his questions bottled up and take part in the rather vapid conversation that was going on between young men with _glabre_ faces and high-pitched voices and women with rather wild eyes. [It struck David about this time that women were getting a little out of hand, strained, over-inclined to laugh mirthless laughter, greedy for sensuality, sensation, sincerity, sweetmeats. Something. Even if they satisfied some fleeting passion or jealousy by marrying, they soon wanted to be de-married, separated, divorced, to don male costume, to go on the amateur stage and act Salome parts on Sunday afternoons that most ladies of the real Stage had refused; while the men that went about with them in these troops from restaurant to restaurant, studio to studio, music hall to cafe chantant, Brighton to Monte Carlo, Sandown to Goodwood, were shifty, too well-dressed, too near neutrality in sex, without defined professions, known by nicknames only, spend-thrifts, spongers, bankrupts, and collectors of needless bric-a-brac.] However this mob at last quitted Praddy's premises and he and David were left alone. Praed yawned, and almost intentionally knocked over an easel with a semi-obscene drawing on it of a Sphynx with swelling breasts embracing a lean young man against his will. _David_: "Praddy! why do you tolerate such people and why prostitute your studio to such unwholesome art?" _Praed_: "My dear David! This is _indeed_ Satan rebuking sin. Why there are three designs here--one I've just knocked over--beastly, wasn't it?--that _you _ left with me when you went off at a tangent to South Africa.... Really, we ought to have _some_ continuity you know.... "But I agree with you.... I'm sick of the whole business of this Nouvel Art and L'Art Nouveau, about Aubrey Beardsley and the disgusting 'nineties generally--But what _will_ you? If Miss Vivie Warren had condescended to accept me as a husband she might have brought a wholesome atmosphere into my life and swept away all this ... inspired me perhaps with some final ambition for the little that remains of my stock of energy.... Heigh-ho! Well: what is the quarrel now? The life I lead, the people who come here?"