It gave David much to think about, and he found Honoria Fraser and several of his men and women friends had joined the Woman Suffrage movement and were determined that the new Liberal Government should not shirk the issue; an issue on which many members of Parliament had been returned as acquiescent in the principle.

On that account they had received the whole-hearted support of many, women owing allegiance to the Liberal Party.
At first of course the new Government was too busy in allotting the loaves and fishes of Office and in handing out the peerages, baronetcies, knighthoods, Governorships, private secretaryships, and promotions among the civil servants which had--not to put too fine a point on it--been purchased by large and small contributions to the Party Chest.
[Such a procedure seems to be inseparable from our present Party system.

In this respect the Conservatives are no better than the Liberals; and it is always possible that in a different way the Labour Party when It comes into power will be similarly inclined to reward those who have furnished the sinews of war.

The House of Commons in the last Act which revised the conditions of elections of members of Parliament was careful to leave open many avenues along which Money might attain to the heart of things.] But at length all such matters were settled, and the Cabinet was free to face the steady demand of the women leaders of the Suffrage movement; a demand that at any rate _some_ measure of enfranchisement should be granted to the women of the British Isles without delay.
We all know how this demand was received by the leading men of the Liberal Party and by the more prominent Liberals among their supporters in the House; with evasions, silences, sneers, angry refusals, hasty promises given to-day (when Ministers were frightened) and broken to-morrow; with a whole series of discreditable tongue-in-the-cheek tricks of Parliamentary procedure; till at last the onlooker must have wondered at and felt grateful for our British phlegm; surprised that so little actual harm was done (except to the bodies of the Suffragists), that no Home Secretary or Police Inspector or magistrate, no flippant talker-out of would-be-serious Franchise Bills was assassinated, trounced, tarred and feathered, kidnapped, nose-tweaked, or even mud-bespattered.

(I am reproducing here the growing comprehension of the problem as it shaped in Vivie's mind, under the hat and waistcoat of David Williams.) Honoria, faithful to her old resolve, continued to devote the greater part of the Two Thousand a year she had set aside for the Woman's Cause to financing the new Suffrage movement; and incidentally she brought grist to David's mill by recommending him as Counsel to many women in distress, arrested Suffragists.