University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II
HONORIA AND HER FRIENDS

The story of Honoria Fraser was something like this: partly guesswork, I admit. Although I know her well I can only put her past together by deductions based on a few admitted facts, one or two letters and occasional unfinished sentences, interrupted by people coming in. Is it not always thus with our friends and acquaintances? I long to know all about them from their birth (including date and place of birth and parentage) onwards; what the father's profession was and why on earth he married the mother (after I saw the daguerreotype portrait), and how they became possessed of so much money, and why she went back to live with her mother between the birth of her second child and the near advent of her third. But in how very few cases do we know their whole story, do we even care to know more than is sufficient for our purpose in issuing or accepting invitations? There are the Dombeys--the Gorings as they're now called, who live near us. I've seen the tombstone of Lucilla Smith in Goring churchyard, but I don't know for a fact that Lord Goring was the father of Lucilla's son (who was killed in the war). I guess he was, from this and that, from what Mrs. Legg told me, and what I overheard at the Sterns'. If he wasn't, then he has only himself to thank for the wrong assumption: I mean, from his goings-on.

Then again, the Clementses, who live at the Grange. I feel instinctively they are nice people, but I haven't the least idea who she was and how he made his money,

though from his acreage and his motors I am entitled to assume he has a large income. She seems to know a lot about Spain; but I don't feel encouraged to ask her: "Was your father in the wine trade? Is that why you know Xeres so well?" Clements himself has in his study an enlarged photograph of a handsome woman with a kind of mourning wreath round the frame--beautifully carved. Is it the portrait of a former wife? Or of a sister who committed suicide? Or was it merely bought in Venice for the sake of the carving? Perhaps I shall know some day--if it matters. In a moment of expansion during the Railway Strike, Mrs. Clements will say: "That was poor Walter's first. She died of acute dyspepsia, poor thing, on their marriage tour, and was buried at Venice. Don't ever allude to it because he feels it so dreadfully." And my curiosity will have been rewarded for its long and patient restraint. Clements' little finger on his left hand is mutilated. I have never asked why--a lawn-mowing machine? Or a bite from some passionate mistress in a buried past? I note silently that he disapproves of palmistry--

But about Honoria Fraser, to whom I was introduced by Mr. George Bernard Shaw twenty years ago: She was born in 1872, as Who's Who will tell you; also that she was the daughter and eldest child of a famous physician (Sir Meldrum Fraser) who wrought some marvellous cures in the 'sixties, 'seventies and 'eighties, chiefly by dieting and psycho-therapy. (He got his knighthood in the first jubilee year for reducing to reasonable proportions the figure of good-hearted, thoroughly kindly, and much loved Princess Mary of Oxford.) He--Honoria's father--was married to a beautiful woman, a relation of Bessie Rayner Parkes, with inherited advanced views on the Rights and Position of Woman. Lady Fraser was, indeed, an early type of Suffragist and also wrote some poetry which was far from bad. They had two children:

Honoria, born, as I say, in 1872; and John (John Stuart Mill Fraser was his full name--too great a burden to be borne) four years later than Honoria, who was devoted to him, idolized him, as did his mother and father. Honoria went to Bedford College and Newnham; John to one of the two most famous of our public schools (I need not be more precise), with Cambridge in view afterwards.

But in the case of John a tragedy occurred. He had risen to be head of the school; statesmen with little affectation applauded him on speech days. He had been brilliant as a batsman, was a champion swimmer, and facile princeps in the ineptitudes of the classics; and showed a dazzling originality in other studies scarcely within the school curriculum. Further he was growing out of boy gawkiness into a handsome youth of an Apolline mould, when, on the morning of his eighteenth birthday, he was found dead in his bed, with a bottle of cyanide of potassium on the bed-table to explain why.

All else was wrapt in mystery ... at any rate it was a mystery I have no wish to lay bare. The death and the inquest verdict, "Suicide while of unsound mind, due to overstudy," broke his father's heart and his mother's: in the metaphorical meaning of course, because the heart is an unemotional pump and it is the brain and the nerve centres that suffer from our emotions. Sir Meldrum Fraser died a year after his son. He left a fortune of eighty thousand pounds. Half of this went at once to Honoria and the other half to the life-use of Lady Fraser with a reversion to her daughter.

Honoria after her father's death left Cambridge and moved her mother from Harley Street to Queen Anne'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.

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 months afterwards. Then on reflection it left some tarnish on her family, even if the memory of the dear dead boy, the too brilliant boy, softened from the poignancy of utter disappointment into a tender sorrow and an infinite pity and forgiveness.

But the tragedy turned her thoughts from marriage to some mission of well-doing. She determined to devote that proportion of her inheritance which would have been John's share to this end: the liberation and redemption of women.

She was no "anti-man," like Vivie. She liked men, if truth were told, a tiny wee bit more than women. But she wished in the moods that followed her brother's death in 1894 to be a mother by adoption, a refuge for the fallen, the bewildered, the unstrung. She helped young men back into the path of respectability and wage-earning as well as young women. She was even, when opportunity offered, a matchmaker.

Being heiress eventually to £4,000 a year (a large income in pre-war days) and of attractive appearance, she had no lack of suitors, even though she thought modern dancing inane, and had little skill at ball-games. I have indicated her appearance by some few phrases already; but to enable you to visualize her more definitely I might be more precise. She was a tall woman rather than large built, like the young Juno when first wooed by Jove. Where she departed from the Junonian type she turned towards Venus rather than Minerva; in spite of being a mathematician. You meet with her sisters in physical beauty among the Americans of Pennsylvania, where, to a stock mainly Anglo-Saxon, is added a delicious strain of Gallic race; or you see her again among the Cape Dutch women who have had French Huguenot great grandparents.

It is perhaps rather impertinent continuing this analysis of her charm, seeing that she lives and flourishes more than ever, twenty years after the opening of my story; not very different in outward appearance at 48, as Lady Armstrong--for of course, as you guess already, she married Major--afterwards Sir Petworth--Armstrong--than she was at twenty-eight, the partner, friend and helper of Vivien Warren.

Being in comfortable circumstances, highly educated, handsome, attractive, with a mezzo-soprano voice of rare beauty and great skill as a piano-forte accompanyist, she had not only suitors who took her rejection without bitterness, but hosts of friends. She knew all the nice London people of her day: Lady Feenix, who in some ways resembled her, Diana Dombey, who did not quite approve of her, being a little uncertain yet about welcoming the New Woman, all the Ritchies, married and unmarried, Lady Brownlow, the Duchess of Bedford (Adeline), the Michael Fosters, most of the Stracheys (she liked the ones I liked), the Hubert Parrys, the Ripons (how she admired Lady Ripon, as who did not!), Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Miss Lena Ashwell, the Bernard Shaws, the Wilfred Meynells, the H.G. Wellses, the Sidney Webbs; and--leaving uninstanced a number of other delightful, warm-blooded, pleasant-voiced, natural-mannered people--the Rossiters.

Or at least, Michael Rossiter. For although you could tolerate for his sake Mrs. Rossiter, and even find her a source of quiet amusement, you could hardly say you liked her--not in the way you could say it of most of the men and women I have specified. Michael Rossiter, who comes into this story, ought really if there were a discriminating wide-awake, up-to-date Providence--which there is not--to have met Honoria when she was twenty. (At nineteen such a woman is still immature; and moreover until she was twenty, Honoria had not mastered the

Binomial Theorem.) Had he married her at that period he would himself have been about twenty-seven which is quite soon enough for a great man of science to marry and procreate geniuses. But as a matter of fact, when he came down to Cambridge in--? 1892--to deliver a course of Vacation lectures on embryology, he was already two years married to Linda Bennet, an heiress, the daughter and niece (her parents died when she was young and she lived with an uncle and aunt) of very rich manufacturers at Leeds.

So, though his eye, quick to discern beauty, and his brain tentacles ready to detect intelligence combined with a lovely nature, soon singled out Honoria Fraser, amongst a host of less attractive girl-graduates, he had no more thought of falling in love with her than with a princess of the blood-royal. He might, long since, within a month of his marriage have found out his Linda to be a pretty little simpleton with a brain incapable of taking in any more than it had learnt at a Scarborough finishing school; but he was too instinctive a gentleman to indulge in any flirtation, any deviation whatever from mental or physical monogamy. For he remembered always that it was his wife's money which had enabled him to pursue his great researches without the heart-breaking delays, limitations and insufficiencies involved in Government or Royal Society grants; and that Linda had not only endowed him with all her worldly goods--all but those he had insisted in putting into settlement--but that she had given him all her heart and confidence as well.

Still, he liked Honoria. She was eager to learn much else beyond the hard-grained muses of the square and cube; she was the daughter of a prosperous and boldly experimental physician, whose wife was a champion of women's rights. So he pressed Honoria to come with her mother and make the acquaintance of himself and Linda in Portland Place.

Why was Michael Rossiter wedded to Linda Bennet when he was no more than twenty-five, and she just past her coming of age? Because fresh from Edinburgh and Cambridge and with a reputation for unusual intuition in Biology and Chemistry he had come to be Science master at a great College in the North, and thus meeting Linda at the Philosophical Institute of Leeds had caused her to fall in love with him whilst he lectured on the Cainozoic fauna of Yorkshire. He was himself a Northumbrian of borderland stock: something of the Dane and Angle, the Pict and Briton with a dash of the Gypsy folk: a blend which makes the Northumbrian people so much more productive of manly beauty, intellectual vivacity, bold originality than the slow-witted, bulky, crafty Saxons of Yorkshire or the under-sized, rugged-featured Britons of Lancashire.

Linda fell in love all in one evening with his fiery eyes, black beard, the Northumbrian burr of his pronunciation, and the daring of his utterances, though she could scarcely grasp one of his hypotheses. Her uncle and aunt being narrowly pietistic she was bored to death with the Old Testament, and Rossiter's scarcely concealed contempt for the Mosaic story of creation captured her intellect; while the physical attraction she felt was that which the tall, handsome, resolute brunet has for the blue-eyed fluffy little blonde. She openly made love to him over the tea and coffee served at the "soirée" which followed the lecture. Her slow-witted guardian had no objection to offer; and there were not wanting go-betweens to urge on Rossiter with stories of her wealth and the expanding value of her financial interests. He wanted to marry; he was touched by her ill-concealed passion, found her pretty and appealingly childlike. So, after a short wooing, he married her and her five thousand pounds a year, and settled down in Park Crescent, Portland Place, so as to be near the Zoo and Tudell's dissecting rooms, to have the

Royal Botanic gardens within three minutes' walk, and the opportunity of turning a large studio in the rear of his house into a well-equipped chemical and dissecting laboratory. One of his close pursuits at that time was the analysis of the Thyroid gland and its functions, its over or under development in British statesmen, dramatic authors and East End immigrants.