V2nd - a couple three questions

[Michael Bailey]

Victoria Wren is certainly not a passive victim.

She's the seducer, in Stencil's version, of Goodfellow and several
other fellows, good bad or indifferent, and turns a profit thereby.

Putting by, for the moment, her religious musings, and the
implications of the quintuple-crucifix comb, at this point she is a
sex-worker in the Baedeker world, about to invest her earnings in a
dressmaking shop in Florence.  And although the shop is on the left
bank, her political convictions have turned rightist,
"...detest[ing]...even the Earl of Rosebery" (who often voted with the
Conservatives, and was an imperialist during the Boer War, but was a
Liberal Party leader, and, briefly, Prime Minister)

So, with this political outlook, it's reasonable that she seems
genuinely moved by patriotism at the memory of Godolphin's exploits.
Not so much by Godolphin personally as by the triumph for the Empire
- at least, rather than sympathize with him or offer aid and comfort
on an individual basis, she locks him in and goes off to seek advice
from the British Foreign Office.

I don't really want to smoosh the story down into a moral at this point -
"budding Ayn Rand/Sarah Palin prototype fails to grasp the implicit
rejection of Empire in Godolphin's tale"

but is her locking-up of Godolphin and her invocation of the
institutions of Empire viewable in some abstract semblance as a
permutation of the same impulse that led Fina to try and lock Benny
into a definable role as "her first"?

ie, Fina's a nice girl but stepping outside that role (as V. much more
vigorously stepped outside her role as "nice girl") to make her offer;
Benny might be right to turn her down, in that her intentions vis a
vis him might not be all that honorable -- outcomes may not be
desirable:

just as Victoria Wren is trying to press-gang a no-longer-patriotic
Godolphin back into the service of queen and country,
Fina's proffering not love exactly but the opportunity to deflower...
like the teen queen on the pool table, "teeth all white, sharp, ready
to sink into whatever soft part of him got that close, oh she would
surely haunt him"