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Whatever the frustrations of not being able to marry the man she loved, Violet had her children—her son George now had a younger sister. They lived only a short carriage ride from the Kiplings, which meant that George often played with John Kipling. And when "Uncle Alfred" Milner came to visit Great Wigsell, or they drove to his house, the talk would often be of the farther reaches of empire. Perhaps Violet felt badly about having left George behind for so long when she went to South Africa; in any event she was now closely attached to him, and when he went off to boarding school at age 14, she wrote to him as often as twice a day. Her time in South Africa remained so vivid to her that on the anniversaries of Boer War battles, she headed her letters with their names.

Growing up on the stories of that victorious war, George decided early on an army career, entering the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, the British West Point, where "gentleman cadets" whose families could pay their tuition were trained to become infantry or cavalry officers. After visiting Sandhurst and taking George out to dinner, Kipling reported to Violet, as one parent to another, that her son "looks well, a bit thinner, but more in possession of his body.... Of course one must always trouble about them but as far as one can see he is happy and all is well." Many of the army's top generals—Douglas Haig among them—had graduated from Sandhurst, and it would be a fine item for a new army officer to have on his résumé as he awaited the next war.

The war at home was the one Charlotte Despard saw herself fighting, and when she emerged in 1907 from her 21 days in Holloway Prison, an imposing stone structure with turrets and crenelated ramparts, there was no doubt in the public's mind that this venerable figure, now in her sixties, was on the front line of the struggle for women's suffrage. Her alliance with the Pankhurst family, however, would prove short-lived.

Suffragettes had already begun to disagree vociferously over how much they should consider themselves part of a larger left-wing movement. Despard was a supporter of the Independent Labour Party, or ILP, the leading party on the British left and an ancestor of today's Labour Party, which she saw as socialism's best hope. Sylvia Pankhurst privately agreed, but in public remained loyal to her mother and older sister—who no longer had any use for a party that did not put votes for women at the top of its agenda in the manner they demanded. Emmeline Pankhurst and Despard clashed in public at an ILP meeting, after which Emmeline and her daughter Christabel resigned from the party, and declared that the Women's Social and Political Union would not support parliamentary candidates—all male, of course—of any party.

Despard was not about to let someone else decide such matters for her, and she and other WSPU members angrily protested that the Pankhursts' sudden change of policy violated the WSPU constitution. To this Emmeline replied, "I shall tear up the constitution." A revolutionary movement, she added, had no time for formal niceties; decisions had to be made on the spot.

The WSPU promptly split, Sylvia staying, however uneasily, with her mother and sister, while Despard in September 1907 gathered dissidents at her house to form a rival group, the Women's Freedom League. By the following year, it would have 53 branches across the country. Although somewhat more democratically run, the organization's telegraph address was simply "Despard, London."

Meanwhile, the Pankhursts went their own way. The same boldness and intransigence that made them willing to endure arrest and prison also meant that Emmeline and Christabel brooked no opposition. Charlotte Despard would be only the first of the people they would leave scattered behind them in what they saw as a life and death struggle for the vote. Of their allies in this first rift, they would lose many in the years ahead. And eventually, under the pressure of war, the