She sometimes sat in trains as a handsome, impressive matron of fifty-five, with a Pompadour confection and a tortoiseshell _face-a-main_, conversing with ministers of state or permanent officials on their way to their country seats, and saying "_Horrid_ creatures!" if any one referred to the activities of the Suffragettes.

Thus disguised she elicited considerable information sometimes, though she might really be on her way to organize the break-up of the statesman's public meeting, the enquiry into discreditable circumstances which might compel his withdrawal from public life, or merely the burning down of his shooting box.
This life had its risks and perils, but it agreed with her health.
It was exciting and took her mind off Rossiter.
Rossiter for his part experienced a slackening in the tension of his mind during the same year 1912.

He was touched by his wife's faint suspicion of his alienated affection and by her dogged determination to be sufficient to him as a companion and a helper; and a little ashamed at his middle-aged--he was forty-seven--infatuation for a woman who was herself well on in the thirties.

There were times when a rift came in the cloud of his passion for Vivie, when he looked out dispassionately on the prospect of the rest of his life--he could hope at most for twenty more years of mental and bodily activity and energy.

Was this all too brief period to be filled up with a senile renewal of sexual longing! He felt ashamed of the thoughts that had occupied so much of his mind since he had laid David Williams on the couch of his library, to find it was Vivie Warren whose arms were round his neck.