He enjoyed pulverizing the Ministry over their suffrage insincerities and displaying his contempt of the politician elected only for his money influence in borough, county, or in the subscription lists of the Chief Whip.

Though his pulses still beat a little quicker when he held Vivie's hand in his at some reception of Lady Feenix's or a dinner party at the Gorings--Vivie as the child of a "fallen" woman had a prescriptive right of entrance to Diana's circle--he had not the slightest intention of running away with her, of nipping his career in two, just as he might be scaling the last heights to the citadel of fame: either as a politician of the new type, the type of high education, or as one of the giants of inductive science.

Besides in 1912, if I mistake not, Dr.
Smith-Woodward and Mr.Charles Dawson made that discovery of the remains of an ape-like man in the gravels of mid-Sussex; and the hounds of Anthropology went off on a new scent at full cry, Rossiter foremost in the pack.
Mrs.Rossiter in the same year allowed herself more and more to be tempted into anti-suffrage discussions at the houses of peers or of strong-minded, influential ladies who were on the easiest terms with peers and potentates.

She still resented the line her husband had taken in politics and believed it to be chiefly due to an inexplicable interest in Vivien Warren who she began to feel was the same person as "David Williams." If she could only master the "Anti" arguments--they sounded so convincing from the lips of Miss Violet Markham or Mrs.Humphry Ward or some suave King's Counsel with the remnants of mutton-chop whiskers--if she could wean Michael away from that disturbing nonsense--he could assign "militancy" as the justification of his change of mind...! All that was asked by Authority, so far as she could interpret hints from great ladies, was neutrality, the return of Professor Rossiter to the paths of pure science in which area no one disputed his eminence.

_Then_ he might receive that knighthood that was long overdue; better still his next lot of discoveries in anatomy might bring him the peerage he richly deserved and which her wealth would support.