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Here she was destined to lie up for several weeks till the feet and the chest were healed and sound again. Hither by the normal entrance came a woman suffragette surgeon to heal, and Vivie's woman clerk to act as secretary; whilst Adams typed away in the outer office on Mr. Michaelis's business or went on long and mysterious errands.
Returning with a blanched face to the seething crowd, and presently to the Grand Stand, Vivie's mood altered from awe to anger. The "bookies" were beside themselves with fury.
If in rare instances, out of sheer pity, she took up a case and von Giesselin granted the petition or had it done in a higher quarter, his action was clearly a personal favour to her; and the very petitioners went away, with the ingratitude common in such cases, and spread the news of Vivie's privileged position at the Hotel Impérial.
Warren it was going for her to be the last hour of fully conscious life fully conscious and yet a curious mingling in it of the past and present. She had sat here in the middle of the 'seventies with Vivie's father, the young Irish seminarist, her lover for six months.
The next morning they were haled before the magistrate. Michael Rossiter was in court as a spectator, feverishly anxious to pay Vivie's fine or to find bail, or in all and every way to come to her relief. He seemed rather mystified at the sight of Frank Gardner arraigned with her.
"But the papers say you can't get near the door." "Father's given me a card to the judge he knows him. Come on Vivie's waiting at the corner." In such heady excitement the three girls raced to the criminal court building and were smuggled by a fat bailiff through the judge's private chambers into the crowded scene.
But she had survived into a skeptical age and she had conceived an immense respect for her clever daughter. Vivie should be her spiritual director; and Vivie's idea put before her at their reconciliation three years previously had seemed the most practical way of making amends to Woman for having made money in the past out of the economic and physiological weakness of women.
This might have been purely "laïc"; not on account of any harsh dislike to the religious ceremony on Vivie's part; only due to the fact that she knew no priest or pastor. But there appeared at the grave-side to make a very suitable and touching discourse and to utter one or two heartfelt prayers, a Belgian Baptist minister, a relation of Mme. Trouessart.
She simply said "she would see about it" and met the difficulty by giving up her suffrage parties for a bit and attending Lady Maud's instead; where you met not only poor Vivie, but had she been in London and guaranteed reformed and rangée you might have met Vivie's mother; as well as the Duchess of Dulborough American, and intensely Suffrage the charwoman from Little Francis Street, the bookseller's wife, the "mother of the maids" from Derry and Toms; and that very clever chemist who had mended Juliet Duff's nose when she fell on the ice at Princes' they would both be there.
On Vivie's return to London, after her Easter holiday, she threw herself with added zest into the Suffrage struggle. The fortnight of good feeding, of quiet nights and lazy days under her mother's roof had done her much good.
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