about his best girl and tell him he'd got jolly good teeth, a good
biceps and quite a nice beginning of a moustache.

But she was a worker: no doubt of that! Of course, in the dead
season there were not many clients to shock or to win over by her
nonchalant manners, only a few women who required advice as to
houses, stocks, and shares, law, or private enquiries as to the
good faith of husbands or fiancés. Such as found their way up in the
lift were a little disappointed at seeing Beryl in Vivie's chair or
at not being received by their old friend Honoria Fraser. But Beryl
was too good a business woman to put them off with any license of
speech or manners. For the rest she spent August and early September
in "mugging up" the firm's business. Although deep down in her
curious little heart, under all her affectation of hardness and
insolent disdain of public or family opinion she firmly loved her
architect and the children she had borne him, she desired quite as
passionately to be self-supporting, to earn a sufficient income of
her own, to be dependent on no one. She might have her passing
caprices and her loose and flippant mode of talking, but she wasn't
going to be a failure, a cadger, a parasite, a "fallen" woman. She
fully realized that in England no woman _has_ fallen who is
self-supporting, whose income meets her expenses and who pays her
way. Given those guarantees, 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