rantees, all else that she does which is not
actually criminal is eventually put down to mere eccentricity.

So Honoria's offer and Honoria's business provided her with a most
welcome opening. She realized the opportunities that lay before this
Woman's Office for General Inquiries, established in the closing
years of the nineteenth century--this business that before Woman's
enfranchisement nibbled discreetly at the careers and the openings
for profit-making hitherto rigidly reserved for Man. She wasn't
going to let Honoria down. Honoria, she realized, was in herself
equivalent to many thousands of pounds in capital. Her reputation
was flawless. She was known to and esteemed by a host of women of
the upper middle class. Her Cambridge reputation for learning, her
eventual inheritance of eighty thousand pounds were unexpressed
reasons for many a woman of good standing preferring to confide her
affairs to the judgment of _Fraser and Warren_, in preference to
dealing with male legal advisers, male land agents, men on the Stock
Exchange, men in house property business.

So Beryl became in most respects a source of strength to Honoria
Fraser, deprived for a time of the overt co-operation of her junior
partner.

Beryl in the first few weeks of her stay evinced small interest in
the departure of Vivien Warren and her reasons for going abroad. She
had a scheme of her own in which her architect would take a
prominent part, for providing women--authoresses, actresses, or the
wives of the newly enriched--with week-end cottages; the desire for
which was born with the Twentieth century and fostered by the
invention of motors and bicycles. Cases before the firm for opinions
on intricate legal problems Beryl was advised to place before the
consideration of one of Honoria's friends, a law student, Mr. D.V.
Williams, who would shortly be back from his holiday and who had
agreed to look in at the office from time to time and go through
such papers as were set aside for him to read. Beryl had
remarked--without any intention behind it--on seeing some of his
notes initialled V.W. that it was rum he should have the same
initials as that Vivie girl whom she remembered at Newnham ... who
was "so silent and standoffish and easily shocked." But she noticed
later that when Mr. Williams got to work his initials were really
three and not two--D.V.W. One thing with the other: her departure
from the office at the regular closing hour--five--so that