their business affairs, but she also wanted to find careers for
women. She, like Vivien Warren, was a nascent suffragist--perhaps a
born suffragist, a reasoned one; because the ferment had been in her
mother, and her grandmother was a friend of Lydia Becker and a
cousin of Mrs. Belloc. John's death had been a horrible numbing
shock to Honoria, and she felt hardly in her right mind for three
months afterwards. Then on reflection it left some tarnish on her
family, even if the memory of the dear dead boy, the too brilliant
boy, softened from the poignancy of utter disappointment into a
tender sorrow and an infinite pity and forgiveness.

But the tragedy turned her thoughts from marriage to some mission of
well-doing. She determined to devote that proportion of her
inheritance which would have been John's share to this end: the
liberation and redemption of women.

She was no "anti-man," like Vivie. She liked men, if truth were
told, a tiny wee bit more than women. But she wished in the moods
that followed her brother's death in 1894 to be a mother by
adoption, a refuge for the fallen, the bewildered, the unstrung. She
helped young men back into the path of respectability and
wage-earning as well as young women. She was even, when opportunity
offered, a matchmaker.

Being heiress eventually to £4,000 a year (a large income in pre-war
days) and of attractive appearance, she had no lack of suitors, even
though she thought modern dancing inane, and had little skill at
ball-games. I have indicated her appearance by some few phrases
already; but to enable you to visualize her more definitely I might
be more precise. She was a tall woman rather than large built, like