Perhaps, also, he felt that he had of late been a little
lukewarm over the Suffrage agitation. His motor-brougham,
containing with himself the very unwilling Mrs. Rossiter, followed
in the procession of six thousand persons which escorted the coffin
across London from Victoria station to King's Cross. A halt was made
outside a church in Bloomsbury where a funeral service was read.
Mrs. Rossiter thought the whole thing profoundly improper. In the
first place the young woman had committed suicide, which of itself
was a crime and disentitled you to Christian burial; in the second
she had died in a way greatly to inconvenience persons in the
highest society; in the third she had always understood that racing
was a perfectly proper pastime for gentlemen; and in the fourth this
incident, touching Michael through his relationship with the
deceased, would bring him again in contact with that Vivie
Warren--_there_ she was and there was _he_, in close converse--and
make a knighthood from a nearly relenting Government well-nigh
impossible. Rossiter, after the service, had begged Vivie to come
back to tea with them in Park Crescent and give Mrs. Rossiter and
himself a full account of what took place at Epsom. Vivie had
declined. She had not even spoken to the angry little woman, who had
refused to attend the service and had sat fuming all through the
half hour in her electric brougham, wishing she had the courage and
determination to order the chauffeur to turn round and run her home,
leaving the Professor to follow in a taxi.
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