's Mansions so that with her
shattered nerves and loss of interest in life she might have no
household worries, or at any rate nothing worse than remonstrating
with the still-room maids on the twice-boiled water brought in for
the making of tea; or with the culinary department over the
monotonous character of the savouries or the tepid ice creams which
dissolved so rapidly into fruit-juice when they were served after a
house-dinner.[1] Honoria herself, mistress of a clear two thousand
pounds a year, and more in prospect, carried out plans formed while
still at Newnham after her brother's death. She, like Vivien Warren,
her three-years-younger friend and college-mate, was a great
mathematician--a thing I never could be and a status I am incapable
of understanding; consequently one I view at first with the deepest
respect. I am quite astonished when I meet a male or female
mathematician and find they require food as I do, are less quick at
adding up bridge scores, lose rather than win at Goodwood, and write
down the "down" train instead of the "up" in their memorabilia. But
there it is. They have only to apply sines and co-sines, tangents
and logarithms to a stock exchange quotation for me to grovel before
their superior wisdom and consult them at every turn in life.

[Footnote 1: This, of course, was twenty, years ago.--H.H.J.]

Honoria had resolved to turn her great acquirements in Algebra and
the Higher Mathematics to practical purposes. Being the ignoramus
that I am--in this direction--I cannot say how it was to be done;
but both she and Vivie had grasped the possibilities which lay
before exceptionally well-educated women on the Stock Exchange, in
the Provision markets, in the Law, in Insurance calculations, and
generally in steering other and weaker women through the
difficulties and pitfalls of our age; when in nine cases out of
thirteen (Honoria worked out the ratio) women of large or moderate
means have only dishonest male proficients to guide them.

Moreover Honoria's purpose was two-fold. She wished to help women in
their business affairs, but she also wanted to find careers for
women. She, like Vivien Warren, was a nascent suffragist--perhaps a
born suffragist, a reasoned one; because the ferment had been in her
mother, and her grandmother was a friend of Lydia Becker and a
cousin of Mrs. Belloc. John's death had been a horrible numbing
shock to Honoria, and she felt hardly in her right mind for three
mo