...
Here Honoria to avoid hearing something she could not forgive put
her plump hand over his bristly mouth. He kissed it and somehow she
couldn't take the high tone she had at first intended. 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 _rangee_--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. Honoria said nothing
to Vivie and Vivie said nothing to Honoria about the inhibition, but
together with her irrational jealousy of _Eoanthropos dawsoni_ and
irritation at the growing contentedness with things as they were on
the part of Rossiter, it made her a trifle more reckless in her
militancy.
And Praddy? How did he fare in these times? Praed felt himself
increasingly out of the picture. He was not far gone in the sixties,
sixty-one, perhaps at most. But out of the movement. In his prime
the people of his set--the cultivated upper middle class, with a few
recruits from the peerage--cared only about Art in some shape or
form--recondite music, the themes of which were never obvious enough
to be hummed, the androgyne poetry of the 'nineties, morbidities
from the Yellow Book, and Scarlet Sins that you disclaimed for
yourself, to avoid unpleasantness with the Criminal Investigation
Department, but freely attributed to people who were not in the
room; the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley and successors in audacity
and ugly indecency who left Beardsley a mere disciple of Raphael
Tuck; also architecture which ignored the housemaid's sink, the
box-room and the fire-escape.
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