her cell.  The Visiting Committee had driven her from this position by directing the warders to turn a hose pipe on her and knock her senseless with a douche of cold water; for which irregularity they were afterwards fined and mulcted in costs.  Two years later, for another Suffragist offence (setting fire to a pillar box after giving warning of her intention) she went to prison for six months.  Here the tortures of forcible feeding so overcame her reason—­it was alleged—­that she flung herself from an upper gallery, believing she would be smashed on the pavement below and that her death under such circumstances might call attention to the agony of forcible feeding and the reckless disregard of consequences which now inspired educated women who were resolved to obtain the enfranchisement of their sex.  But an iron wire grating eight feet below broke her fall and only cut her face and hands.  The accident or attempted suicide, however, procured the shortening of her sentence.

Vivie and she often met in the early months of 1913, and on the first day of June she confided to a few of the W.S.P.U. her intention of making at Epsom a public protest against public indifference to the cause of the Woman’s Franchise.  This protest was to be made in the most striking manner possible at the supreme moment of the Derby race on the 4th of June.  Probably no one to whom she mentioned the matter thought she contemplated offering up her own life; at most they must have imagined some speech from the Grand Stand, some address to Royalty thrown into the Royal pavilion, some waving of a Suffrage Flag or early-morning placarding of the bookies’ stands.

Vivie however had been turning her thoughts to horse-racing as a field of activity.  She was amused and interested at the effect that had been produced in ministerial circles by her interference with the game of golf.  If now something was done by the militants seriously to impede the greatest of the sports, the national form of gambling, the protected form of swindling, the main interest in life of the working-class, of half the peerage, all the beerage, the chief lure of the newspapers between October and July, and the preoccupation of princes, she might awaken the male mind in a very effectual way to the need for settling the Suffrage question.

So she determined also to see the running of the Derby, as a preliminary to deciding on a plan of campaign.  She had become hardened to pushing and scrouging, so that the struggle to get a seat in one of the fifty or sixty race trains leaving Waterloo or Victoria left her comparatively calm.  She was dressed as a young man and had no clothing impediments, and as a young man she was better able to travel down with racing rascality.  In that guise she did not attract too much attention.  Rough play may have been in the mind of the card-playing, spirit-drinking scoundrels that occupied the other seats in the compartment, but Vivie in her man’s dress created a certain amount of suspicion and caution.  “Look’s like a ‘tec,’” one man whispered to another.  So the card-playing was not thrust on her as a round-about form of plunder, and the stories told were more those derived from the spicy columns of the sporting papers, in words of double meaning, than the outspoken, stable obscenity characteristic of the race-course rabble.