Ann Veronica, a modern love story, by H. G. Wells

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Title: Ann Veronica

Author: H. G. Wells

Release Date: March 18, 2006 [EBook #524]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANN VERONICA ***




Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger





ANN VERONICA

A MODERN LOVE STORY

By H. G. Wells





     CONTENTSCHAP.
     I.        ANN VERONICA TALKS TO HER FATHER
     II.       ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW
     III.      THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS
     IV.       THE CRISIS
     V.        THE FLIGHT TO LONDON
     VI.       EXPOSTULATIONS
     VII.      IDEALS AND A REALITY
     VIII.     BIOLOGY
     IX.       DISCORDS
     X.        THE SUFFRAGETTES
     XI.       THOUGHTS IN PRISON
     XII.      ANN VERONICA PUTS THINGS IN ORDER
     XIII.     THE SAPPHIRE RING
     XIV.      THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT
     XV.       THE LAST DAYS AT HOME
     XVI.      IN THE MOUNTAINS
     XVII.     IN PERSPECTIVE



     "The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every
     well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even
     ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge."




ANN VERONICA




CHAPTER THE FIRST

ANN VERONICA TALKS TO HER FATHER


Part 1


One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley came
down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to
have things out with her father that very evening. She had trembled on
the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely
she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had
been reached. She made up her mind in the train home that it should be
a decisive crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins with
her there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of this
crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.

She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to Morningside
Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in an attitude that
would certainly have distressed her mother to see, and horrified her
grandmother beyond measure; she sat with her knees up to her chin and
her hands clasped before them, and she was so lost in thought that
she discovered with a start, from a lettered lamp, that she was at
Morningside Park, and thought she was moving out of the station, whereas
she was only moving in. "Lord!" she said. She jumped up at once,
caught up a leather clutch containing notebooks, a fat text-book, and
a chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the
carriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and that she
had to traverse the full length of the platform past it again as the
result of her precipitation. "Sold again," she remarked. "Idiot!" She
raged inwardly while she walked along with that air of self-contained
serenity that is proper to a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty under
the eye of the world.

She walked down the station approach, past the neat, obtrusive offices
of the coal merchant and the house agent, and so to the wicket-gate by
the butcher's shop that led to the field path to her home. Outside the
post-office stood a no-hatted, blond young man in gray flannels, who was
elaborately affixing a stamp to a letter. At the sight of her he became
rigid and a singularly bright shade of pink. She made herself serenely
unaware of his existence, though it may be it was his presence that sent
her by the field detour instead of by the direct path up the Avenue.

"Umph!" he said, and regarded his letter doubtfully before consigning it
to the pillar-box. "Here goes," he said. Then he hovered undecidedly for
some seconds with his hands in his pockets and his mouth puckered to a
whistle before he turned to go home by the Avenue.

Ann Veronica forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and her
face resumed its expression of stern preoccupation. "It's either now or
never," she said to herself....

Morningside Park was a suburb that had not altogether, as people say,
come off. It consisted, like pre-Roman Gaul, of three parts. There was
first the Avenue, which ran in a consciously elegant curve from the
railway station into an undeveloped wilderness of agriculture, with big,
yellow brick villas on either side, and then there was the pavement, the
little clump of shops about the post-office, and under the railway arch
was a congestion of workmen's dwellings. The road from Surbiton and
Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in the
ditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of little
red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables and very
brassy window-blinds. Behind the Avenue was a little hill, and an
iron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a stile under an
elm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going back into the Avenue
again.

"It's either now or never," said Ann Veronica, again ascending this
stile. "Much as I hate rows, I've either got to make a stand or give in
altogether."

She seated herself in a loose and easy attitude and surveyed the
backs of the Avenue houses; then her eyes wandered to where the new
red-and-white villas peeped among the trees. She seemed to be making
some sort of inventory. "Ye Gods!" she said at last. "WHAT a place!

"Stuffy isn't the word for it.

"I wonder what he takes me for?"

When presently she got down from the stile a certain note of internal
conflict, a touch of doubt, had gone from her warm-tinted face. She had
now the clear and tranquil expression of one whose mind is made up. Her
back had stiffened, and her hazel eyes looked steadfastly ahead.

As she approached the corner of the Avenue the blond, no-hatted man in
gray flannels appeared. There was a certain air of forced fortuity in
his manner. He saluted awkwardly. "Hello, Vee!" he said.

"Hello, Teddy!" she answered.

He hung vaguely for a moment as she passed.

But it was clear she was in no mood for Teddys. He realized that he was
committed to the path across the fields, an uninteresting walk at the
best of times.

"Oh, dammit!" he remarked, "dammit!" with great bitterness as he faced
it.



Part 2


Ann Veronica Stanley was twenty-one and a half years old. She had black
hair, fine eyebrows, and a clear complexion; and the forces that had
modelled her features had loved and lingered at their work and made them
subtle and fine. She was slender, and sometimes she seemed tall, and
walked and carried herself lightly and joyfully as one who commonly
and habitually feels well, and sometimes she stooped a little and
was preoccupied. Her lips came together with an expression between
contentment and the faintest shadow of a smile, her manner was one of
quiet reserve, and behind this mask she was wildly discontented and
eager for freedom and life.

She wanted to live. She was vehemently impatient--she did not clearly
know for what--to do, to be, to experience. And experience was slow in
coming. All the world about her seemed to be--how can one put it?--in
wrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer. The blinds
were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what
colors these gray swathings hid. She wanted to know. And there was no
intimation whatever that the blinds would ever go up or the windows or
doors be opened, or the chandeliers, that seemed to promise such a blaze
of fire, unveiled and furnished and lit. Dim souls flitted about her,
not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in undertones....

During her school days, especially her earlier school days, the world
had been very explicit with her, telling her what to do, what not to do,
giving her lessons to learn and games to play and interests of the most
suitable and various kinds. Presently she woke up to the fact that there
was a considerable group of interests called being in love and getting
married, with certain attractive and amusing subsidiary developments,
such as flirtation and "being interested" in people of the opposite sex.
She approached this field with her usual liveliness of apprehension. But
here she met with a check. These interests her world promptly, through
the agency of schoolmistresses, older school-mates, her aunt, and a
number of other responsible and authoritative people, assured her she
must on no account think about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moral
instruction mistress, was particularly explicit upon this score, and
they all agreed in indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds
ran on such matters, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dress
or bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike any
other group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly ashamed of.
Nevertheless, Ann Veronica found it a difficult matter not to think of
these things. However having a considerable amount of pride, she decided
she would disavow these undesirable topics and keep her mind away from
them just as far as she could, but it left her at the end of her school
days with that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at loose
ends.

The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no particular
place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a functionless
existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels, walks, and dusting
in her father's house. She thought study would be better. She was a
clever girl, the best of her year in the High School, and she made
a valiant fight for Somerville or Newnham but her father had met and
argued with a Somerville girl at a friend's dinner-table and he thought
that sort of thing unsexed a woman. He said simply that he wanted her to
live at home. There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhile
she went on at school. They compromised at length on the science course
at the Tredgold Women's College--she had already matriculated into
London University from school--she came of age, and she bickered with
her aunt for latch-key privileges on the strength of that and her season
ticket. Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind, thinly
disguised as literature and art. She read voraciously, and presently,
because of her aunt's censorship, she took to smuggling any books she
thought might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, and
she went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable friend
to accompany her. She passed her general science examination with double
honors and specialized in science. She happened to have an acute sense
of form and unusual mental lucidity, and she found in biology, and
particularly in comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest,
albeit the illumination it cast upon her personal life was not
altogether direct. She dissected well, and in a year she found herself
chafing at the limitations of the lady B. Sc. who retailed a store of
faded learning in the Tredgold laboratory. She had already realized that
this instructress was hopelessly wrong and foggy--it is the test of the
good comparative anatomist--upon the skull. She discovered a desire to
enter as a student in the Imperial College at Westminster, where Russell
taught, and go on with her work at the fountain-head.

She had asked about that already, and her father had replied, evasively:
"We'll have to see about that, little Vee; we'll have to see about
that." In that posture of being seen about the matter hung until she
seemed committed to another session at the Tredgold College, and in the
mean time a small conflict arose and brought the latch-key question, and
in fact the question of Ann Veronica's position generally, to an acute
issue.

In addition to the various business men, solicitors, civil servants,
and widow ladies who lived in the Morningside Park Avenue, there was a
certain family of alien sympathies and artistic quality, the Widgetts,
with which Ann Veronica had become very friendly. Mr. Widgett was a
journalist and art critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suit
and "art" brown ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday
morning, travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly
despised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the station.
He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three daughters with
peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found adorable. Two of these
had been her particular intimates at the High School, and had done much
to send her mind exploring beyond the limits of the available literature
at home. It was a cheerful, irresponsible, shamelessly hard-up family in
the key of faded green and flattened purple, and the girls went on from
the High School to the Fadden Art School and a bright, eventful life of
art student dances, Socialist meetings, theatre galleries, talking about
work, and even, at intervals, work; and ever and again they drew Ann
Veronica from her sound persistent industry into the circle of these
experiences. They had asked her to come to the first of the two great
annual Fadden Dances, the October one, and Ann Veronica had accepted
with enthusiasm. And now her father said she must not go.

He had "put his foot down," and said she must not go.

Going involved two things that all Ann Veronica's tact had been
ineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father. Her usual dignified
reserve had availed her nothing. One point was that she was to wear
fancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair's bride, and the other was that
she was to spend whatever vestiges of the night remained after the dance
was over in London with the Widgett girls and a select party in "quite a
decent little hotel" near Fitzroy Square.

"But, my dear!" said Ann Veronica's aunt.

"You see," said Ann Veronica, with the air of one who shares a
difficulty, "I've promised to go. I didn't realize--I don't see how I
can get out of it now."

Then it was her father issued his ultimatum. He had conveyed it to her,
not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to her a singularly
ignoble method of prohibition. "He couldn't look me in the face and say
it," said Ann Veronica.

"But of course it's aunt's doing really."

And thus it was that as Ann Veronica neared the gates of home, she said
to herself: "I'll have it out with him somehow. I'll have it out with
him. And if he won't--"

But she did not give even unspoken words to the alternative at that
time.



Part 3


Ann Veronica's father was a solicitor with a good deal of company
business: a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic, clean-shaven
man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose, iron-gray hair,
gray eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small, circular baldness at the
crown of his head. His name was Peter. He had had five children at
irregular intervals, of whom Ann Veronica was the youngest, so that as
a parent he came to her perhaps a little practised and jaded and
inattentive; and he called her his "little Vee," and patted her
unexpectedly and disconcertingly, and treated her promiscuously as of
any age between eleven and eight-and-twenty. The City worried him a good
deal, and what energy he had left over he spent partly in golf, a game
he treated very seriously, and partly in the practices of microscopic
petrography.

He "went in" for microscopy in the unphilosophical Victorian manner as
his "hobby." A birthday present of a microscope had turned his mind to
technical microscopy when he was eighteen, and a chance friendship with
a Holborn microscope dealer had confirmed that bent. He had remarkably
skilful fingers and a love of detailed processes, and he had become one
of the most dexterous amateur makers of rock sections in the world.
He spent a good deal more money and time than he could afford upon the
little room at the top of the house, in producing new lapidary apparatus
and new microscopic accessories and in rubbing down slices of rock to
a transparent thinness and mounting them in a beautiful and dignified
manner. He did it, he said, "to distract his mind." His chief successes
he exhibited to the Lowndean Microscopical Society, where their high
technical merit never failed to excite admiration. Their scientific
value was less considerable, since he chose rocks entirely with a
view to their difficulty of handling or their attractiveness at
conversaziones when done. He had a great contempt for the sections the
"theorizers" produced. They proved all sorts of things perhaps, but they
were thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work. Yet an indiscriminating,
wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts of distinctions....

He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fiction with
chromatic titles, The Red Sword, The Black Helmet, The Purple Robe, also
in order "to distract his mind." He read it in winter in the evening
after dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with a tendency to
monopolize the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair of dappled fawn-skin
slippers across the fender. She wondered occasionally why his mind
needed so much distraction. His favorite newspaper was the Times, which
he began at breakfast in the morning often with manifest irritation, and
carried off to finish in the train, leaving no other paper at home.

It occurred to Ann Veronica once that she had known him when he was
younger, but day had followed day, and each had largely obliterated the
impression of its predecessor. But she certainly remembered that when
she was a little girl he sometimes wore tennis flannels, and also rode a
bicycle very dexterously in through the gates to the front door. And
in those days, too, he used to help her mother with her gardening, and
hover about her while she stood on the ladder and hammered creepers to
the scullery wall.

It had been Ann Veronica's lot as the youngest child to live in a home
that became less animated and various as she grew up. Her mother had
died when she was thirteen, her two much older sisters had married
off--one submissively, one insubordinately; her two brothers had gone
out into the world well ahead of her, and so she had made what she could
of her father. But he was not a father one could make much of.

His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest
quality; they were creatures, he thought, either too bad for a modern
vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably desirable, or too pure
and good for life. He made this simple classification of a large and
various sex to the exclusion of all intermediate kinds; he held that
the two classes had to be kept apart even in thought and remote from one
another. Women are made like the potter's vessels--either for worship
or contumely, and are withal fragile vessels. He had never wanted
daughters. Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealed
his chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and had
sworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom. He was
a manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he had loved his
dark-eyed, dainty bright-colored, and active little wife with a real
vein of passion in his sentiment. But he had always felt (he had never
allowed himself to think of it) that the promptitude of their family
was a little indelicate of her, and in a sense an intrusion. He had,
however, planned brilliant careers for his two sons, and, with a certain
human amount of warping and delay, they were pursuing these. One was
in the Indian Civil Service and one in the rapidly developing motor
business. The daughters, he had hoped, would be their mother's care.

He had no ideas about daughters. They happen to a man.

Of course a little daughter is a delightful thing enough. It runs about
gayly, it romps, it is bright and pretty, it has enormous quantities of
soft hair and more power of expressing affection than its brothers. It
is a lovely little appendage to the mother who smiles over it, and it
does things quaintly like her, gestures with her very gestures. It makes
wonderful sentences that you can repeat in the City and are good
enough for Punch. You call it a lot of nicknames--"Babs" and "Bibs" and
"Viddles" and "Vee"; you whack at it playfully, and it whacks you back.
It loves to sit on your knee. All that is jolly and as it should be.

But a little daughter is one thing and a daughter quite another. There
one comes to a relationship that Mr. Stanley had never thought out.
When he found himself thinking about it, it upset him so that he at once
resorted to distraction. The chromatic fiction with which he relieved
his mind glanced but slightly at this aspect of life, and never with any
quality of guidance. Its heroes never had daughters, they borrowed other
people's. The one fault, indeed, of this school of fiction for him was
that it had rather a light way with parental rights. His instinct was in
the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property, bound
to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a comfort in his
declining years just as he thought fit. About this conception of
ownership he perceived and desired a certain sentimental glamour, he
liked everything properly dressed, but it remained ownership. Ownership
seemed only a reasonable return for the cares and expenses of a
daughter's upbringing. Daughters were not like sons. He perceived,
however, that both the novels he read and the world he lived in
discountenanced these assumptions. Nothing else was put in their place,
and they remained sotto voce, as it were, in his mind. The new and
the old cancelled out; his daughters became quasi-independent
dependents--which is absurd. One married as he wished and one against
his wishes, and now here was Ann Veronica, his little Vee, discontented
with her beautiful, safe, and sheltering home, going about with hatless
friends to Socialist meetings and art-class dances, and displaying a
disposition to carry her scientific ambitions to unwomanly lengths. She
seemed to think he was merely the paymaster, handing over the means
of her freedom. And now she insisted that she MUST leave the chastened
security of the Tredgold Women's College for Russell's unbridled
classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in pirate costume and
spend the residue of the night with Widgett's ramshackle girls in some
indescribable hotel in Soho!

He had done his best not to think about her at all, but the situation
and his sister had become altogether too urgent. He had finally put
aside The Lilac Sunbonnet, gone into his study, lit the gas fire, and
written the letter that had brought these unsatisfactory relations to a
head.


Part 4

MY DEAR VEE, he wrote.

These daughters! He gnawed his pen and reflected, tore the sheet up, and
began again.

"MY DEAR VERONICA,--Your aunt tells me you have involved yourself in
some arrangement with the Widgett girls about a Fancy Dress Ball in
London. I gather you wish to go up in some fantastic get-up, wrapped
about in your opera cloak, and that after the festivities you propose to
stay with these friends of yours, and without any older people in your
party, at an hotel. Now I am sorry to cross you in anything you have set
your heart upon, but I regret to say--"

"H'm," he reflected, and crossed out the last four words.

"--but this cannot be."

"No," he said, and tried again: "but I must tell you quite definitely
that I feel it to be my duty to forbid any such exploit."

"Damn!" he remarked at the defaced letter; and, taking a fresh sheet, he
recopied what he had written. A certain irritation crept into his manner
as he did so.

"I regret that you should ever have proposed it," he went on.

He meditated, and began a new paragraph.

"The fact of it is, and this absurd project of yours only brings it to
a head, you have begun to get hold of some very queer ideas about what a
young lady in your position may or may not venture to do. I do not think
you quite understand my ideals or what is becoming as between father and
daughter. Your attitude to me--"

He fell into a brown study. It was so difficult to put precisely.

"--and your aunt--"

For a time he searched for the mot juste. Then he went on:

"--and, indeed, to most of the established things in life is, frankly,
unsatisfactory. You are restless, aggressive, critical with all
the crude unthinking criticism of youth. You have no grasp upon the
essential facts of life (I pray God you never may), and in your rash
ignorance you are prepared to dash into positions that may end in
lifelong regret. The life of a young girl is set about with prowling
pitfalls."

He was arrested for a moment by an indistinct picture of Veronica
reading this last sentence. But he was now too deeply moved to trace
a certain unsatisfactoriness to its source in a mixture of metaphors.
"Well," he said, argumentatively, "it IS. That's all about it. It's time
she knew."

"The life of a young girl is set about with prowling pitfalls, from
which she must be shielded at all costs."

His lips tightened, and he frowned with solemn resolution.

"So long as I am your father, so long as your life is entrusted to my
care, I feel bound by every obligation to use my authority to check this
odd disposition of yours toward extravagant enterprises. A day will come
when you will thank me. It is not, my dear Veronica, that I think there
is any harm in you; there is not. But a girl is soiled not only by evil
but by the proximity of evil, and a reputation for rashness may do
her as serious an injury as really reprehensible conduct. So do please
believe that in this matter I am acting for the best."

He signed his name and reflected. Then he opened the study door and
called "Mollie!" and returned to assume an attitude of authority on the
hearthrug, before the blue flames and orange glow of the gas fire.

His sister appeared.

She was dressed in one of those complicated dresses that are all lace
and work and confused patternings of black and purple and cream about
the body, and she was in many ways a younger feminine version of the
same theme as himself. She had the same sharp nose--which, indeed, only
Ann Veronica, of all the family, had escaped. She carried herself well,
whereas her brother slouched, and there was a certain aristocratic
dignity about her that she had acquired through her long engagement to
a curate of family, a scion of the Wiltshire Edmondshaws. He had died
before they married, and when her brother became a widower she had
come to his assistance and taken over much of the care of his youngest
daughter. But from the first her rather old-fashioned conception of life
had jarred with the suburban atmosphere, the High School spirit and the
memories of the light and little Mrs. Stanley, whose family had been by
any reckoning inconsiderable--to use the kindliest term. Miss Stanley
had determined from the outset to have the warmest affection for her
youngest niece and to be a second mother in her life--a second and a
better one; but she had found much to battle with, and there was much in
herself that Ann Veronica failed to understand. She came in now with an
air of reserved solicitude.

Mr. Stanley pointed to the letter with a pipe he had drawn from his
jacket pocket. "What do you think of that?" he asked.

She took it up in her many-ringed hands and read it judicially. He
filled his pipe slowly.

"Yes," she said at last, "it is firm and affectionate."

"I could have said more."

"You seem to have said just what had to be said. It seems to me exactly
what is wanted. She really must not go to that affair."

She paused, and he waited for her to speak.

"I don't think she quite sees the harm of those people or the sort of
life to which they would draw her," she said. "They would spoil every
chance."

"She has chances?" he said, helping her out.

"She is an extremely attractive girl," she said; and added, "to some
people. Of course, one doesn't like to talk about things until there are
things to talk about."

"All the more reason why she shouldn't get herself talked about."

"That is exactly what I feel."

Mr. Stanley took the letter and stood with it in his hand thoughtfully
for a time. "I'd give anything," he remarked, "to see our little Vee
happily and comfortably married."

He gave the note to the parlormaid the next morning in an inadvertent,
casual manner just as he was leaving the house to catch his London
train. When Ann Veronica got it she had at first a wild, fantastic idea
that it contained a tip.


Part 5


Ann Veronica's resolve to have things out with her father was not
accomplished without difficulty.

He was not due from the City until about six, and so she went and played
Badminton with the Widgett girls until dinner-time. The atmosphere at
dinner was not propitious. Her aunt was blandly amiable above a certain
tremulous undertow, and talked as if to a caller about the alarming
spread of marigolds that summer at the end of the garden, a sort of
Yellow Peril to all the smaller hardy annuals, while her father brought
some papers to table and presented himself as preoccupied with them. "It
really seems as if we shall have to put down marigolds altogether next
year," Aunt Molly repeated three times, "and do away with marguerites.
They seed beyond all reason." Elizabeth, the parlormaid, kept coming in
to hand vegetables whenever there seemed a chance of Ann Veronica asking
for an interview. Directly dinner was over Mr. Stanley, having pretended
to linger to smoke, fled suddenly up-stairs to petrography, and when
Veronica tapped he answered through the locked door, "Go away, Vee! I'm
busy," and made a lapidary's wheel buzz loudly.

Breakfast, too, was an impossible occasion. He read the Times with an
unusually passionate intentness, and then declared suddenly for the
earlier of the two trains he used.

"I'll come to the station," said Ann Veronica. "I may as well come up by
this train."

"I may have to run," said her father, with an appeal to his watch.

"I'll run, too," she volunteered.

Instead of which they walked sharply....

"I say, daddy," she began, and was suddenly short of breath.

"If it's about that dance project," he said, "it's no good, Veronica.
I've made up my mind."

"You'll make me look a fool before all my friends."

"You shouldn't have made an engagement until you'd consulted your aunt."

"I thought I was old enough," she gasped, between laughter and crying.

Her father's step quickened to a trot. "I won't have you quarrelling and
crying in the Avenue," he said. "Stop it!... If you've got anything
to say, you must say it to your aunt--"

"But look here, daddy!"

He flapped the Times at her with an imperious gesture.

"It's settled. You're not to go. You're NOT to go."

"But it's about other things."

"I don't care. This isn't the place."

"Then may I come to the study to-night--after dinner?"

"I'm--BUSY!"

"It's important. If I can't talk anywhere else--I DO want an
understanding."

Ahead of them walked a gentleman whom it was evident they must at their
present pace very speedily overtake. It was Ramage, the occupant of the
big house at the end of the Avenue. He had recently made Mr. Stanley's
acquaintance in the train and shown him one or two trifling civilities.
He was an outside broker and the proprietor of a financial newspaper; he
had come up very rapidly in the last few years, and Mr. Stanley admired
and detested him in almost equal measure. It was intolerable to think
that he might overhear words and phrases. Mr. Stanley's pace slackened.

"You've no right to badger me like this, Veronica," he said. "I can't
see what possible benefit can come of discussing things that are
settled. If you want advice, your aunt is the person. However, if you
must air your opinions--"

"To-night, then, daddy!"

He made an angry but conceivably an assenting noise, and then Ramage
glanced back and stopped, saluted elaborately, and waited for them to
come up. He was a square-faced man of nearly fifty, with iron-gray hair
a mobile, clean-shaven mouth and rather protuberant black eyes that now
scrutinized Ann Veronica. He dressed rather after the fashion of the
West End than the City, and affected a cultured urbanity that somehow
disconcerted and always annoyed Ann Veronica's father extremely. He
did not play golf, but took his exercise on horseback, which was also
unsympathetic.

"Stuffy these trees make the Avenue," said Mr. Stanley as they drew
alongside, to account for his own ruffled and heated expression. "They
ought to have been lopped in the spring."

"There's plenty of time," said Ramage. "Is Miss Stanley coming up with
us?"

"I go second," she said, "and change at Wimbledon."

"We'll all go second," said Ramage, "if we may?"

Mr. Stanley wanted to object strongly, but as he could not immediately
think how to put it, he contented himself with a grunt, and the motion
was carried. "How's Mrs. Ramage?" he asked.

"Very much as usual," said Ramage. "She finds lying up so much very
irksome. But, you see, she HAS to lie up."

The topic of his invalid wife bored him, and he turned at once to Ann
Veronica. "And where are YOU going?" he said. "Are you going on again
this winter with that scientific work of yours? It's an instance of
heredity, I suppose." For a moment Mr. Stanley almost liked Ramage.
"You're a biologist, aren't you?"

He began to talk of his own impressions of biology as a commonplace
magazine reader who had to get what he could from the monthly reviews,
and was glad to meet with any information from nearer the fountainhead.
In a little while he and she were talking quite easily and agreeably.
They went on talking in the train--it seemed to her father a slight want
of deference to him--and he listened and pretended to read the Times. He
was struck disagreeably by Ramage's air of gallant consideration and Ann
Veronica's self-possessed answers. These things did not harmonize with
his conception of the forthcoming (if unavoidable) interview. After
all, it came to him suddenly as a harsh discovery that she might be in
a sense regarded as grownup. He was a man who in all things classified
without nuance, and for him there were in the matter of age just two
feminine classes and no more--girls and women. The distinction lay
chiefly in the right to pat their heads. But here was a girl--she must
be a girl, since she was his daughter and pat-able--imitating the
woman quite remarkably and cleverly. He resumed his listening. She was
discussing one of those modern advanced plays with a remarkable, with an
extraordinary, confidence.

"His love-making," she remarked, "struck me as unconvincing. He seemed
too noisy."

The full significance of her words did not instantly appear to him. Then
it dawned. Good heavens! She was discussing love-making. For a time he
heard no more, and stared with stony eyes at a Book-War proclamation in
leaded type that filled half a column of the Times that day. Could she
understand what she was talking about? Luckily it was a second-class
carriage and the ordinary fellow-travellers were not there. Everybody,
he felt, must be listening behind their papers.

Of course, girls repeat phrases and opinions of which they cannot
possibly understand the meaning. But a middle-aged man like Ramage ought
to know better than to draw out a girl, the daughter of a friend and
neighbor....

Well, after all, he seemed to be turning the subject. "Broddick is a
heavy man," he was saying, "and the main interest of the play was the
embezzlement." Thank Heaven! Mr. Stanley allowed his paper to drop
a little, and scrutinized the hats and brows of their three
fellow-travellers.

They reached Wimbledon, and Ramage whipped out to hand Miss Stanley
to the platform as though she had been a duchess, and she descended as
though such attentions from middle-aged, but still gallant, merchants
were a matter of course. Then, as Ramage readjusted himself in a corner,
he remarked: "These young people shoot up, Stanley. It seems only
yesterday that she was running down the Avenue, all hair and legs."

Mr. Stanley regarded him through his glasses with something approaching
animosity.

"Now she's all hat and ideas," he said, with an air of humor.

"She seems an unusually clever girl," said Ramage.

Mr. Stanley regarded his neighbor's clean-shaven face almost warily.
"I'm not sure whether we don't rather overdo all this higher education,"
he said, with an effect of conveying profound meanings.


Part 6


He became quite sure, by a sort of accumulation of reflection, as the
day wore on. He found his youngest daughter intrusive in his thoughts
all through the morning, and still more so in the afternoon. He saw her
young and graceful back as she descended from the carriage, severely
ignoring him, and recalled a glimpse he had of her face, bright and
serene, as his train ran out of Wimbledon. He recalled with exasperating
perplexity her clear, matter-of-fact tone as she talked about
love-making being unconvincing. He was really very proud of her, and
extraordinarily angry and resentful at the innocent and audacious
self-reliance that seemed to intimate her sense of absolute independence
of him, her absolute security without him. After all, she only LOOKED a
woman. She was rash and ignorant, absolutely inexperienced. Absolutely.
He began to think of speeches, very firm, explicit speeches, he would
make.

He lunched in the Legal Club in Chancery Lane, and met Ogilvy. Daughters
were in the air that day. Ogilvy was full of a client's trouble in
that matter, a grave and even tragic trouble. He told some of the
particulars.

"Curious case," said Ogilvy, buttering his bread and cutting it up in a
way he had. "Curious case--and sets one thinking."

He resumed, after a mouthful: "Here is a girl of sixteen or seventeen,
seventeen and a half to be exact, running about, as one might say, in
London. Schoolgirl. Her family are solid West End people, Kensington
people. Father--dead. She goes out and comes home. Afterward goes on to
Oxford. Twenty-one, twenty-two. Why doesn't she marry? Plenty of money
under her father's will. Charming girl."

He consumed Irish stew for some moments.

"Married already," he said, with his mouth full. "Shopman."

"Good God!" said Mr. Stanley.

"Good-looking rascal she met at Worthing. Very romantic and all that. He
fixed it."

"But--"

"He left her alone. Pure romantic nonsense on her part. Sheer
calculation on his. Went up to Somerset House to examine the will before
he did it. Yes. Nice position."

"She doesn't care for him now?"

"Not a bit. What a girl of sixteen cares for is hair and a high color
and moonlight and a tenor voice. I suppose most of our daughters would
marry organ-grinders if they had a chance--at that age. My son wanted
to marry a woman of thirty in a tobacconist's shop. Only a son's another
story. We fixed that. Well, that's the situation. My people don't know
what to do. Can't face a scandal. Can't ask the gent to go abroad and
condone a bigamy. He misstated her age and address; but you can't get
home on him for a thing like that.... There you are! Girl spoilt for
life. Makes one want to go back to the Oriental system!"

Mr. Stanley poured wine. "Damned Rascal!" he said. "Isn't there a
brother to kick him?"

"Mere satisfaction," reflected Ogilvy. "Mere sensuality. I rather think
they have kicked him, from the tone of some of the letters. Nice, of
course. But it doesn't alter the situation."

"It's these Rascals," said Mr. Stanley, and paused.

"Always has been," said Ogilvy. "Our interest lies in heading them off."

"There was a time when girls didn't get these extravagant ideas."

"Lydia Languish, for example. Anyhow, they didn't run about so much."

"Yes. That's about the beginning. It's these damned novels. All this
torrent of misleading, spurious stuff that pours from the press. These
sham ideals and advanced notions. Women who Dids, and all that kind of
thing...."

Ogilvy reflected. "This girl--she's really a very charming, frank
person--had had her imagination fired, so she told me, by a school
performance of Romeo and Juliet."

Mr. Stanley decided to treat that as irrelevant. "There ought to be a
Censorship of Books. We want it badly at the present time. Even WITH
the Censorship of Plays there's hardly a decent thing to which a man can
take his wife and daughters, a creeping taint of suggestion everywhere.
What would it be without that safeguard?"

Ogilvy pursued his own topic. "I'm inclined to think, Stanley, myself
that as a matter of fact it was the expurgated Romeo and Juliet did the
mischief. If our young person hadn't had the nurse part cut out, eh? She
might have known more and done less. I was curious about that. All they
left it was the moon and stars. And the balcony and 'My Romeo!'"

"Shakespeare is altogether different from the modern stuff. Altogether
different. I'm not discussing Shakespeare. I don't want to Bowdlerize
Shakespeare. I'm not that sort I quite agree. But this modern miasma--"

Mr. Stanley took mustard savagely.

"Well, we won't go into Shakespeare," said Ogilvy "What interests me
is that our young women nowadays are running about as free as air
practically, with registry offices and all sorts of accommodation round
the corner. Nothing to check their proceedings but a declining habit of
telling the truth and the limitations of their imaginations. And in that
respect they stir up one another. Not my affair, of course, but I think
we ought to teach them more or restrain them more. One or the other.
They're too free for their innocence or too innocent for their freedom.
That's my point. Are you going to have any apple-tart, Stanley? The
apple-tart's been very good lately--very good!"



Part 7


At the end of dinner that evening Ann Veronica began: "Father!"

Her father looked at her over his glasses and spoke with grave
deliberation; "If there is anything you want to say to me," he said,
"you must say it in the study. I am going to smoke a little here, and
then I shall go to the study. I don't see what you can have to say. I
should have thought my note cleared up everything. There are some papers
I have to look through to-night--important papers."

"I won't keep you very long, daddy," said Ann Veronica.

"I don't see, Mollie," he remarked, taking a cigar from the box on
the table as his sister and daughter rose, "why you and Vee shouldn't
discuss this little affair--whatever it is--without bothering me."

It was the first time this controversy had become triangular, for all
three of them were shy by habit.

He stopped in mid-sentence, and Ann Veronica opened the door for her
aunt. The air was thick with feelings. Her aunt went out of the room
with dignity and a rustle, and up-stairs to the fastness of her own
room. She agreed entirely with her brother. It distressed and confused
her that the girl should not come to her.

It seemed to show a want of affection, to be a deliberate and unmerited
disregard, to justify the reprisal of being hurt.

When Ann Veronica came into the study she found every evidence of a
carefully foreseen grouping about the gas fire. Both arm-chairs had been
moved a little so as to face each other on either side of the
fender, and in the circular glow of the green-shaded lamp there lay,
conspicuously waiting, a thick bundle of blue and white papers tied
with pink tape. Her father held some printed document in his hand,
and appeared not to observe her entry. "Sit down," he said, and
perused--"perused" is the word for it--for some moments. Then he put
the paper by. "And what is it all about, Veronica?" he asked, with a
deliberate note of irony, looking at her a little quizzically over his
glasses.

Ann Veronica looked bright and a little elated, and she disregarded
her father's invitation to be seated. She stood on the mat instead, and
looked down on him. "Look here, daddy," she said, in a tone of great
reasonableness, "I MUST go to that dance, you know."

Her father's irony deepened. "Why?" he asked, suavely.

Her answer was not quite ready. "Well, because I don't see any reason
why I shouldn't."

"You see I do."

"Why shouldn't I go?"

"It isn't a suitable place; it isn't a suitable gathering."

"But, daddy, what do you know of the place and the gathering?"

"And it's entirely out of order; it isn't right, it isn't correct;
it's impossible for you to stay in an hotel in London--the idea is
preposterous. I can't imagine what possessed you, Veronica."

He put his head on one side, pulled down the corners of his mouth, and
looked at her over his glasses.

"But why is it preposterous?" asked Ann Veronica, and fiddled with a
pipe on the mantel.

"Surely!" he remarked, with an expression of worried appeal.

"You see, daddy, I don't think it IS preposterous. That's really what
I want to discuss. It comes to this--am I to be trusted to take care of
myself, or am I not?"

"To judge from this proposal of yours, I should say not."

"I think I am."

"As long as you remain under my roof--" he began, and paused.

"You are going to treat me as though I wasn't. Well, I don't think
that's fair."

"Your ideas of fairness--" he remarked, and discontinued that sentence.
"My dear girl," he said, in a tone of patient reasonableness, "you are a
mere child. You know nothing of life, nothing of its dangers, nothing of
its possibilities. You think everything is harmless and simple, and so
forth. It isn't. It isn't. That's where you go wrong. In some things,
in many things, you must trust to your elders, to those who know more of
life than you do. Your aunt and I have discussed all this matter. There
it is. You can't go."

The conversation hung for a moment. Ann Veronica tried to keep hold of
a complicated situation and not lose her head. She had turned round
sideways, so as to look down into the fire.

"You see, father," she said, "it isn't only this affair of the dance.
I want to go to that because it's a new experience, because I think
it will be interesting and give me a view of things. You say I know
nothing. That's probably true. But how am I to know of things?"

"Some things I hope you may never know," he said.

"I'm not so sure. I want to know--just as much as I can."

"Tut!" he said, fuming, and put out his hand to the papers in the pink
tape.

"Well, I do. It's just that I want to say. I want to be a human being;
I want to learn about things and know about things, and not to be
protected as something too precious for life, cooped up in one narrow
little corner."

"Cooped up!" he cried. "Did I stand in the way of your going to college?
Have I ever prevented you going about at any reasonable hour? You've got
a bicycle!"

"H'm!" said Ann Veronica, and then went on "I want to be taken
seriously. A girl--at my age--is grown-up. I want to go on with
my University work under proper conditions, now that I've done the
Intermediate. It isn't as though I haven't done well. I've never muffed
an exam yet. Roddy muffed two...."

Her father interrupted. "Now look here, Veronica, let us be plain with
each other. You are not going to that infidel Russell's classes. You are
not going anywhere but to the Tredgold College. I've thought that out,
and you must make up your mind to it. All sorts of considerations come
in. While you live in my house you must follow my ideas. You are wrong
even about that man's scientific position and his standard of work.
There are men in the Lowndean who laugh at him--simply laugh at him.
And I have seen work by his pupils myself that struck me as being--well,
next door to shameful. There's stories, too, about his demonstrator,
Capes Something or other. The kind of man who isn't content with his
science, and writes articles in the monthly reviews. Anyhow, there it
is: YOU ARE NOT GOING THERE."

The girl received this intimation in silence, but the face that looked
down upon the gas fire took an expression of obstinacy that brought out
a hitherto latent resemblance between parent and child. When she spoke,
her lips twitched.

"Then I suppose when I have graduated I am to come home?"

"It seems the natural course--"

"And do nothing?"

"There are plenty of things a girl can find to do at home."

"Until some one takes pity on me and marries me?"

He raised his eyebrows in mild appeal. His foot tapped impatiently, and
he took up the papers.

"Look here, father," she said, with a change in her voice, "suppose I
won't stand it?"

He regarded her as though this was a new idea.

"Suppose, for example, I go to this dance?"

"You won't."

"Well"--her breath failed her for a moment. "How would you prevent it?"
she asked.

"But I have forbidden it!" he said, raising his voice.

"Yes, I know. But suppose I go?"

"Now, Veronica! No, no. This won't do. Understand me! I forbid it. I
do not want to hear from you even the threat of disobedience." He spoke
loudly. "The thing is forbidden!"

"I am ready to give up anything that you show to be wrong."

"You will give up anything I wish you to give up."

They stared at each other through a pause, and both faces were flushed
and obstinate.

She was trying by some wonderful, secret, and motionless gymnastics to
restrain her tears. But when she spoke her lips quivered, and they
came. "I mean to go to that dance!" she blubbered. "I mean to go to
that dance! I meant to reason with you, but you won't reason. You're
dogmatic."

At the sight of her tears his expression changed to a mingling of
triumph and concern. He stood up, apparently intending to put an
arm about her, but she stepped back from him quickly. She produced a
handkerchief, and with one sweep of this and a simultaneous gulp had
abolished her fit of weeping. His voice now had lost its ironies.

"Now, Veronica," he pleaded, "Veronica, this is most unreasonable. All
we do is for your good. Neither your aunt nor I have any other thought
but what is best for you."

"Only you won't let me live. Only you won't let me exist!"

Mr. Stanley lost patience. He bullied frankly.

"What nonsense is this? What raving! My dear child, you DO live, you
DO exist! You have this home. You have friends, acquaintances, social
standing, brothers and sisters, every advantage! Instead of which, you
want to go to some mixed classes or other and cut up rabbits and dance
about at nights in wild costumes with casual art student friends and God
knows who. That--that isn't living! You are beside yourself. You don't
know what you ask nor what you say. You have neither reason nor logic.
I am sorry to seem to hurt you, but all I say is for your good. You
MUST not, you SHALL not go. On this I am resolved. I put my foot down
like--like adamant. And a time will come, Veronica, mark my words, a
time will come when you will bless me for my firmness to-night. It goes
to my heart to disappoint you, but this thing must not be."

He sidled toward her, but she recoiled from him, leaving him in
possession of the hearth-rug.

"Well," she said, "good-night, father."

"What!" he asked; "not a kiss?"

She affected not to hear.

The door closed softly upon her. For a long time he remained standing
before the fire, staring at the situation. Then he sat down and filled
his pipe slowly and thoughtfully....

"I don't see what else I could have said," he remarked.



CHAPTER THE SECOND

ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW

Part 1


"Are you coming to the Fadden Dance, Ann Veronica?" asked Constance
Widgett.

Ann Veronica considered her answer. "I mean to," she replied.

"You are making your dress?"

"Such as it is."

They were in the elder Widgett girl's bedroom; Hetty was laid up, she
said, with a sprained ankle, and a miscellaneous party was gossiping
away her tedium. It was a large, littered, self-forgetful apartment,
decorated with unframed charcoal sketches by various incipient masters;
and an open bookcase, surmounted by plaster casts and the half of a
human skull, displayed an odd miscellany of books--Shaw and Swinburne,
Tom Jones, Fabian Essays, Pope and Dumas, cheek by jowl. Constance
Widgett's abundant copper-red hair was bent down over some dimly
remunerative work--stencilling in colors upon rough, white material--at
a kitchen table she had dragged up-stairs for the purpose, while on her
bed there was seated a slender lady of thirty or so in a dingy green
dress, whom Constance had introduced with a wave of her hand as Miss
Miniver. Miss Miniver looked out on the world through large emotional
blue eyes that were further magnified by the glasses she wore, and her
nose was pinched and pink, and her mouth was whimsically petulant. Her
glasses moved quickly as her glance travelled from face to face.
She seemed bursting with the desire to talk, and watching for her
opportunity. On her lapel was an ivory button, bearing the words "Votes
for Women." Ann Veronica sat at the foot of the sufferer's bed, while
Teddy Widgett, being something of an athlete, occupied the only
bed-room chair--a decadent piece, essentially a tripod and largely a
formality--and smoked cigarettes, and tried to conceal the fact that
he was looking all the time at Ann Veronica's eyebrows. Teddy was the
hatless young man who had turned Ann Veronica aside from the Avenue two
days before. He was the junior of both his sisters, co-educated and
much broken in to feminine society. A bowl of roses, just brought by
Ann Veronica, adorned the communal dressing-table, and Ann Veronica was
particularly trim in preparation for a call she was to make with her
aunt later in the afternoon.

Ann Veronica decided to be more explicit. "I've been," she said,
"forbidden to come."

"Hul-LO!" said Hetty, turning her head on the pillow; and Teddy remarked
with profound emotion, "My God!"

"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "and that complicates the situation."

"Auntie?" asked Constance, who was conversant with Ann Veronica's
affairs.

"No! My father. It's--it's a serious prohibition."

"Why?" asked Hetty.

"That's the point. I asked him why, and he hadn't a reason."

"YOU ASKED YOUR FATHER FOR A REASON!" said Miss Miniver, with great
intensity.

"Yes. I tried to have it out with him, but he wouldn't have it out." Ann
Veronica reflected for an instant "That's why I think I ought to come."

"You asked your father for a reason!" Miss Miniver repeated.

"We always have things out with OUR father, poor dear!" said Hetty.
"He's got almost to like it."

"Men," said Miss Miniver, "NEVER have a reason. Never! And they don't
know it! They have no idea of it. It's one of their worst traits, one of
their very worst."

"But I say, Vee," said Constance, "if you come and you are forbidden to
come there'll be the deuce of a row."

Ann Veronica was deciding for further confidences. Her situation
was perplexing her very much, and the Widgett atmosphere was lax and
sympathetic, and provocative of discussion. "It isn't only the dance,"
she said.

"There's the classes," said Constance, the well-informed.

"There's the whole situation. Apparently I'm not to exist yet. I'm not
to study, I'm not to grow. I've got to stay at home and remain in a
state of suspended animation."

"DUSTING!" said Miss Miniver, in a sepulchral voice.

"Until you marry, Vee," said Hetty.

"Well, I don't feel like standing it."

"Thousands of women have married merely for freedom," said Miss Miniver.
"Thousands! Ugh! And found it a worse slavery."

"I suppose," said Constance, stencilling away at bright pink petals,
"it's our lot. But it's very beastly."

"What's our lot?" asked her sister.

"Slavery! Downtroddenness! When I think of it I feel all over boot
marks--men's boots. We hide it bravely, but so it is. Damn! I've
splashed."

Miss Miniver's manner became impressive. She addressed Ann Veronica
with an air of conveying great open secrets to her. "As things are at
present," she said, "it is true. We live under man-made institutions,
and that is what they amount to. Every girl in the world practically,
except a few of us who teach or type-write, and then we're underpaid and
sweated--it's dreadful to think how we are sweated!" She had lost her
generalization, whatever it was. She hung for a moment, and then went
on, conclusively, "Until we have the vote that is how things WILL be."

"I'm all for the vote," said Teddy.

"I suppose a girl MUST be underpaid and sweated," said Ann Veronica. "I
suppose there's no way of getting a decent income--independently."

"Women have practically NO economic freedom," said Miss Miniver,
"because they have no political freedom. Men have seen to that. The one
profession, the one decent profession, I mean, for a woman--except the
stage--is teaching, and there we trample on one another. Everywhere
else--the law, medicine, the Stock Exchange--prejudice bars us."

"There's art," said Ann Veronica, "and writing."

"Every one hasn't the Gift. Even there a woman never gets a fair chance.
Men are against her. Whatever she does is minimized. All the best
novels have been written by women, and yet see how men sneer at the lady
novelist still! There's only one way to get on for a woman, and that is
to please men. That is what they think we are for!"

"We're beasts," said Teddy. "Beasts!"

But Miss Miniver took no notice of his admission.

"Of course," said Miss Miniver--she went on in a regularly undulating
voice--"we DO please men. We have that gift. We can see round them and
behind them and through them, and most of us use that knowledge, in the
silent way we have, for our great ends. Not all of us, but some of us.
Too many. I wonder what men would say if we threw the mask aside--if
we really told them what WE thought of them, really showed them what WE
were." A flush of excitement crept into her cheeks.

"Maternity," she said, "has been our undoing."

From that she opened out into a long, confused emphatic discourse on the
position of women, full of wonderful statements, while Constance worked
at her stencilling and Ann Veronica and Hetty listened, and Teddy
contributed sympathetic noises and consumed cheap cigarettes. As she
talked she made weak little gestures with her hands, and she thrust her
face forward from her bent shoulders; and she peered sometimes at Ann
Veronica and sometimes at a photograph of the Axenstrasse, near
Fluelen, that hung upon the wall. Ann Veronica watched her face, vaguely
sympathizing with her, vaguely disliking her physical insufficiency and
her convulsive movements, and the fine eyebrows were knit with a faint
perplexity. Essentially the talk was a mixture of fragments of sentences
heard, of passages read, or arguments indicated rather than stated, and
all of it was served in a sauce of strange enthusiasm, thin yet
intense. Ann Veronica had had some training at the Tredgold College in
disentangling threads from confused statements, and she had a curious
persuasion that in all this fluent muddle there was something--something
real, something that signified. But it was very hard to follow. She did
not understand the note of hostility to men that ran through it all, the
bitter vindictiveness that lit Miss Miniver's cheeks and eyes, the
sense of some at last insupportable wrong slowly accumulated. She had no
inkling of that insupportable wrong.

"We are the species," said Miss Miniver, "men are only incidents.
They give themselves airs, but so it is. In all the species of animals
the females are more important than the males; the males have to please
them. Look at the cock's feathers, look at the competition there is
everywhere, except among humans. The stags and oxen and things all
have to fight for us, everywhere. Only in man is the male made the
most important. And that happens through our maternity; it's our very
importance that degrades us.

"While we were minding the children they stole our rights and liberties.
The children made us slaves, and the men took advantage of it.
It's--Mrs. Shalford says--the accidental conquering the essential.
Originally in the first animals there were no males, none at all. It
has been proved. Then they appear among the lower things"--she made
meticulous gestures to figure the scale of life; she seemed to be
holding up specimens, and peering through her glasses at them--"among
crustaceans and things, just as little creatures, ever so inferior to
the females. Mere hangers on. Things you would laugh at. And among human
beings, too, women to begin with were the rulers and leaders; they owned
all the property, they invented all the arts.

"The primitive government was the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate! The
Lords of Creation just ran about and did what they were told."

"But is that really so?" said Ann Veronica.

"It has been proved," said Miss Miniver, and added, "by American
professors."

"But how did they prove it?"

"By science," said Miss Miniver, and hurried on, putting out a
rhetorical hand that showed a slash of finger through its glove. "And
now, look at us! See what we have become. Toys! Delicate trifles! A sex
of invalids. It is we who have become the parasites and toys."

It was, Ann Veronica felt, at once absurd and extraordinarily right.
Hetty, who had periods of lucid expression, put the thing for her
from her pillow. She charged boldly into the space of Miss Miniver's
rhetorical pause.

"It isn't quite that we're toys. Nobody toys with me. Nobody regards
Constance or Vee as a delicate trifle."

Teddy made some confused noise, a thoracic street row; some remark was
assassinated by a rival in his throat and buried hastily under a cough.

"They'd better not," said Hetty. "The point is we're not toys, toys
isn't the word; we're litter. We're handfuls. We're regarded as
inflammable litter that mustn't be left about. We are the species, and
maternity is our game; that's all right, but nobody wants that admitted
for fear we should all catch fire, and set about fulfilling the purpose
of our beings without waiting for further explanations. As if we didn't
know! The practical trouble is our ages. They used to marry us off at
seventeen, rush us into things before we had time to protest. They don't
now. Heaven knows why! They don't marry most of us off now until high up
in the twenties. And the age gets higher. We have to hang about in the
interval. There's a great gulf opened, and nobody's got any plans what
to do with us. So the world is choked with waste and waiting daughters.
Hanging about! And they start thinking and asking questions, and begin
to be neither one thing nor the other. We're partly human beings and
partly females in suspense."

Miss Miniver followed with an expression of perplexity, her mouth shaped
to futile expositions. The Widgett method of thought puzzled her weakly
rhetorical mind. "There is no remedy, girls," she began, breathlessly,
"except the Vote. Give us that--"

Ann Veronica came in with a certain disregard of Miss Miniver. "That's
it," she said. "They have no plans for us. They have no ideas what to do
with us."

"Except," said Constance, surveying her work with her head on one side,
"to keep the matches from the litter."

"And they won't let us make plans for ourselves."

"We will," said Miss Miniver, refusing to be suppressed, "if some of us
have to be killed to get it." And she pressed her lips together in white
resolution and nodded, and she was manifestly full of that same passion
for conflict and self-sacrifice that has given the world martyrs since
the beginning of things. "I wish I could make every woman, every girl,
see this as clearly as I see it--just what the Vote means to us. Just
what it means...."



Part 2


As Ann Veronica went back along the Avenue to her aunt she became aware
of a light-footed pursuer running. Teddy overtook her, a little out of
breath, his innocent face flushed, his straw-colored hair disordered. He
was out of breath, and spoke in broken sentences.

"I say, Vee. Half a minute, Vee. It's like this: You want freedom. Look
here. You know--if you want freedom. Just an idea of mine. You know
how those Russian students do? In Russia. Just a formal marriage. Mere
formality. Liberates the girl from parental control. See? You marry me.
Simply. No further responsibility whatever. Without hindrance--present
occupation. Why not? Quite willing. Get a license--just an idea of mine.
Doesn't matter a bit to me. Do anything to please you, Vee. Anything.
Not fit to be dust on your boots. Still--there you are!"

He paused.

Ann Veronica's desire to laugh unrestrainedly was checked by the
tremendous earnestness of his expression. "Awfully good of you, Teddy."
she said.

He nodded silently, too full for words.

"But I don't see," said Ann Veronica, "just how it fits the present
situation."

"No! Well, I just suggested it. Threw it out. Of course, if at any
time--see reason--alter your opinion. Always at your service. No
offence, I hope. All right! I'm off. Due to play hockey. Jackson's.
Horrid snorters! So long, Vee! Just suggested it. See? Nothing really.
Passing thought."

"Teddy," said Ann Veronica, "you're a dear!"

"Oh, quite!" said Teddy, convulsively, and lifted an imaginary hat and
left her.



Part 3


The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that afternoon had at first
much the same relation to the Widgett conversation that a plaster statue
of Mr. Gladstone would have to a carelessly displayed interior on a
dissecting-room table. The Widgetts talked with a remarkable absence of
external coverings; the Palsworthys found all the meanings of life on
its surfaces. They seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica's
wrappered world. The Widgett mental furniture was perhaps worn and
shabby, but there it was before you, undisguised, fading visibly in an
almost pitiless sunlight. Lady Palsworthy was the widow of a knight
who had won his spurs in the wholesale coal trade, she was of good
seventeenth-century attorney blood, a county family, and distantly
related to Aunt Mollie's deceased curate. She was the social leader of
Morningside Park, and in her superficial and euphuistic way an extremely
kind and pleasant woman. With her lived a Mrs. Pramlay, a sister of
the Morningside Park doctor, and a very active and useful member of the
Committee of the Impoverished Gentlewomen's Aid Society. Both ladies
were on easy and friendly terms with all that was best in Morningside
Park society; they had an afternoon once a month that was quite well
attended, they sometimes gave musical evenings, they dined out and gave
a finish to people's dinners, they had a full-sized croquet lawn and
tennis beyond, and understood the art of bringing people together.
And they never talked of anything at all, never discussed, never even
encouraged gossip. They were just nice.

Ann Veronica found herself walking back down the Avenue that had just
been the scene of her first proposal beside her aunt, and speculating
for the first time in her life about that lady's mental attitudes. Her
prevailing effect was one of quiet and complete assurance, as though she
knew all about everything, and was only restrained by her instinctive
delicacy from telling what she knew. But the restraint exercised by her
instinctive delicacy was very great; over and above coarse or sexual
matters it covered religion and politics and any mention of money
matters or crime, and Ann Veronica found herself wondering whether these
exclusions represented, after all, anything more than suppressions. Was
there anything at all in those locked rooms of her aunt's mind? Were
they fully furnished and only a little dusty and cobwebby and in need of
an airing, or were they stark vacancy except, perhaps, for a cockroach
or so or the gnawing of a rat? What was the mental equivalent of a rat's
gnawing? The image was going astray. But what would her aunt think of
Teddy's recent off-hand suggestion of marriage? What would she think of
the Widgett conversation? Suppose she was to tell her aunt quietly
but firmly about the parasitic males of degraded crustacea. The girl
suppressed a chuckle that would have been inexplicable.

There came a wild rush of anthropological lore into her brain, a flare
of indecorous humor. It was one of the secret troubles of her mind, this
grotesque twist her ideas would sometimes take, as though they rebelled
and rioted. After all, she found herself reflecting, behind her aunt's
complacent visage there was a past as lurid as any one's--not, of
course, her aunt's own personal past, which was apparently just that
curate and almost incredibly jejune, but an ancestral past with all
sorts of scandalous things in it: fire and slaughterings, exogamy,
marriage by capture, corroborees, cannibalism! Ancestresses with perhaps
dim anticipatory likenesses to her aunt, their hair less neatly done,
no doubt, their manners and gestures as yet undisciplined, but still
ancestresses in the direct line, must have danced through a brief and
stirring life in the woady buff. Was there no echo anywhere in Miss
Stanley's pacified brain? Those empty rooms, if they were empty, were
the equivalents of astoundingly decorated predecessors. Perhaps it was
just as well there was no inherited memory.

Ann Veronica was by this time quite shocked at her own thoughts, and yet
they would go on with their freaks. Great vistas of history opened, and
she and her aunt were near reverting to the primitive and passionate and
entirely indecorous arboreal--were swinging from branches by the
arms, and really going on quite dread-fully--when their arrival at
the Palsworthys' happily checked this play of fancy, and brought Ann
Veronica back to the exigencies of the wrappered life again.

Lady Palsworthy liked Ann Veronica because she was never awkward,
had steady eyes, and an almost invariable neatness and dignity in her
clothes. She seemed just as stiff and shy as a girl ought to be, Lady
Palsworthy thought, neither garrulous nor unready, and free from nearly
all the heavy aggressiveness, the overgrown, overblown quality, the
egotism and want of consideration of the typical modern girl. But then
Lady Palsworthy had never seen Ann Veronica running like the wind
at hockey. She had never seen her sitting on tables nor heard her
discussing theology, and had failed to observe that the graceful figure
was a natural one and not due to ably chosen stays. She took it for
granted Ann Veronica wore stays--mild stays, perhaps, but stays, and
thought no more of the matter. She had seen her really only at teas,
with the Stanley strain in her uppermost. There are so many girls
nowadays who are quite unpresentable at tea, with their untrimmed
laughs, their awful dispositions of their legs when they sit down, their
slangy disrespect; they no longer smoke, it is true, like the girls of
the eighties and nineties, nevertheless to a fine intelligence they have
the flavor of tobacco. They have no amenities, they scratch the
mellow surface of things almost as if they did it on purpose; and
Lady Palsworthy and Mrs. Pramlay lived for amenities and the mellowed
surfaces of things. Ann Veronica was one of the few young people--and
one must have young people just as one must have flowers--one could ask
to a little gathering without the risk of a painful discord. Then the
distant relationship to Miss Stanley gave them a slight but pleasant
sense of proprietorship in the girl. They had their little dreams about
her.

Mrs. Pramlay received them in the pretty chintz drawing-room, which
opened by French windows on the trim garden, with its croquet lawn, its
tennis-net in the middle distance, and its remote rose alley lined
with smart dahlias and flaming sunflowers. Her eye met Miss Stanley's
understandingly, and she was if anything a trifle more affectionate in
her greeting to Ann Veronica. Then Ann Veronica passed on toward the
tea in the garden, which was dotted with the elite of Morningside Park
society, and there she was pounced upon by Lady Palsworthy and given tea
and led about. Across the lawn and hovering indecisively, Ann Veronica
saw and immediately affected not to see Mr. Manning, Lady Palsworthy's
nephew, a tall young man of seven-and-thirty with a handsome,
thoughtful, impassive face, a full black mustache, and a certain heavy
luxuriousness of gesture. The party resolved itself for Ann Veronica
into a game in which she manoeuvred unostentatiously and finally
unsuccessfully to avoid talking alone with this gentleman.

Mr. Manning had shown on previous occasions that he found Ann Veronica
interesting and that he wished to interest her. He was a civil servant
of some standing, and after a previous conversation upon aesthetics of
a sententious, nebulous, and sympathetic character, he had sent her a
small volume, which he described as the fruits of his leisure and which
was as a matter of fact rather carefully finished verse. It dealt with
fine aspects of Mr. Manning's feelings, and as Ann Veronica's mind
was still largely engaged with fundamentals and found no pleasure in
metrical forms, she had not as yet cut its pages. So that as she saw him
she remarked to herself very faintly but definitely, "Oh, golly!" and
set up a campaign of avoidance that Mr. Manning at last broke down by
coming directly at her as she talked with the vicar's aunt about some of
the details of the alleged smell of the new church lamps. He did not so
much cut into this conversation as loom over it, for he was a tall, if
rather studiously stooping, man.

The face that looked down upon Ann Veronica was full of amiable
intention. "Splendid you are looking to-day, Miss Stanley," he said.
"How well and jolly you must be feeling."

He beamed over the effect of this and shook hands with effusion, and
Lady Palsworthy suddenly appeared as his confederate and disentangled
the vicar's aunt.

"I love this warm end of summer more than words can tell," he said.
"I've tried to make words tell it. It's no good. Mild, you know, and
boon. You want music."

Ann Veronica agreed, and tried to make the manner of her assent cover a
possible knowledge of a probable poem.

"Splendid it must be to be a composer. Glorious! The Pastoral.
Beethoven; he's the best of them. Don't you think? Tum, tay, tum, tay."

Ann Veronica did.

"What have you been doing since our last talk? Still cutting up
rabbits and probing into things? I've often thought of that talk of
ours--often."

He did not appear to require any answer to his question.

"Often," he repeated, a little heavily.

"Beautiful these autumn flowers are," said Ann Veronica, in a wide,
uncomfortable pause.

"Do come and see the Michaelmas daisies at the end of the garden," said
Mr. Manning, "they're a dream." And Ann Veronica found herself being
carried off to an isolation even remoter and more conspicuous than the
corner of the lawn, with the whole of the party aiding and abetting and
glancing at them. "Damn!" said Ann Veronica to herself, rousing herself
for a conflict.

Mr. Manning told her he loved beauty, and extorted a similar admission
from her; he then expatiated upon his own love of beauty. He said that
for him beauty justified life, that he could not imagine a good action
that was not a beautiful one nor any beautiful thing that could be
altogether bad. Ann Veronica hazarded an opinion that as a matter of
history some very beautiful people had, to a quite considerable extent,
been bad, but Mr. Manning questioned whether when they were bad they
were really beautiful or when they were beautiful bad. Ann Veronica
found her attention wandering a little as he told her that he was not
ashamed to feel almost slavish in the presence of really beautiful
people, and then they came to the Michaelmas daisies. They were really
very fine and abundant, with a blaze of perennial sunflowers behind
them.

"They make me want to shout," said Mr. Manning, with a sweep of the arm.

"They're very good this year," said Ann Veronica, avoiding controversial
matter.

"Either I want to shout," said Mr. Manning, "when I see beautiful
things, or else I want to weep." He paused and looked at her, and said,
with a sudden drop into a confidential undertone, "Or else I want to
pray."

"When is Michaelmas Day?" said Ann Veronica, a little abruptly.

"Heaven knows!" said Mr. Manning; and added, "the twenty-ninth."

"I thought it was earlier," said Ann Veronica. "Wasn't Parliament to
reassemble?"

He put out his hand and leaned against a tree and crossed his legs.
"You're not interested in politics?" he asked, almost with a note of
protest.

"Well, rather," said Ann Veronica. "It seems--It's interesting."

"Do you think so? I find my interest in that sort of thing decline and
decline."

"I'm curious. Perhaps because I don't know. I suppose an intelligent
person OUGHT to be interested in political affairs. They concern us
all."

"I wonder," said Mr. Manning, with a baffling smile.

"I think they do. After all, they're history in the making."

"A sort of history," said Mr. Manning; and repeated, "a sort of history.
But look at these glorious daisies!"

"But don't you think political questions ARE important?"

"I don't think they are this afternoon, and I don't think they are to
you."

Ann Veronica turned her back on the Michaelmas daisies, and faced toward
the house with an air of a duty completed.

"Just come to that seat now you are here, Miss Stanley, and look down
the other path; there's a vista of just the common sort. Better even
than these."

Ann Veronica walked as he indicated.

"You know I'm old-fashioned, Miss Stanley. I don't think women need to
trouble about political questions."

"I want a vote," said Ann Veronica.

"Really!" said Mr. Manning, in an earnest voice, and waved his hand to
the alley of mauve and purple. "I wish you didn't."

"Why not?" She turned on him.

"It jars. It jars with all my ideas. Women to me are something so
serene, so fine, so feminine, and politics are so dusty, so sordid,
so wearisome and quarrelsome. It seems to me a woman's duty to be
beautiful, to BE beautiful and to behave beautifully, and politics
are by their very nature ugly. You see, I--I am a woman worshipper.
I worshipped women long before I found any woman I might ever hope
to worship. Long ago. And--the idea of committees, of hustings, of
agenda-papers!"

"I don't see why the responsibility of beauty should all be shifted on
to the women," said Ann Veronica, suddenly remembering a part of Miss
Miniver's discourse.

"It rests with them by the nature of things. Why should you who are
queens come down from your thrones? If you can afford it, WE can't. We
can't afford to turn our women, our Madonnas, our Saint Catherines, our
Mona Lisas, our goddesses and angels and fairy princesses, into a sort
of man. Womanhood is sacred to me. My politics in that matter wouldn't
be to give women votes. I'm a Socialist, Miss Stanley."

"WHAT?" said Ann Veronica, startled.

"A Socialist of the order of John Ruskin. Indeed I am! I would make this
country a collective monarchy, and all the girls and women in it should
be the Queen. They should never come into contact with politics or
economics--or any of those things. And we men would work for them and
serve them in loyal fealty."

"That's rather the theory now," said Ann Veronica. "Only so many men
neglect their duties."

"Yes," said Mr. Manning, with an air of emerging from an elaborate
demonstration, "and so each of us must, under existing conditions, being
chivalrous indeed to all women, choose for himself his own particular
and worshipful queen."

"So far as one can judge from the system in practice," said Ann
Veronica, speaking in a loud, common-sense, detached tone, and beginning
to walk slowly but resolutely toward the lawn, "it doesn't work."

"Every one must be experimental," said Mr. Manning, and glanced round
hastily for further horticultural points of interest in secluded
corners. None presented themselves to save him from that return.

"That's all very well when one isn't the material experimented upon,"
Ann Veronica had remarked.

"Women would--they DO have far more power than they think, as
influences, as inspirations."

Ann Veronica said nothing in answer to that.

"You say you want a vote," said Mr. Manning, abruptly.

"I think I ought to have one."

"Well, I have two," said Mr. Manning--"one in Oxford University and one
in Kensington." He caught up and went on with a sort of clumsiness: "Let
me present you with them and be your voter."

There followed an instant's pause, and then Ann Veronica had decided to
misunderstand.

"I want a vote for myself," she said. "I don't see why I should take it
second-hand. Though it's very kind of you. And rather unscrupulous. Have
you ever voted, Mr. Manning? I suppose there's a sort of place like a
ticket-office. And a ballot-box--" Her face assumed an expression of
intellectual conflict. "What is a ballot-box like, exactly?" she asked,
as though it was very important to her.

Mr. Manning regarded her thoughtfully for a moment and stroked his
mustache. "A ballot-box, you know," he said, "is very largely just a
box." He made quite a long pause, and went on, with a sigh: "You have a
voting paper given you--"

They emerged into the publicity of the lawn.

"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "yes," to his explanation, and saw across
the lawn Lady Palsworthy talking to her aunt, and both of them staring
frankly across at her and Mr. Manning as they talked.



CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

Part 1

Two days after came the day of the Crisis, the day of the Fadden Dance.
It would have been a crisis anyhow, but it was complicated in Ann
Veronica's mind by the fact that a letter lay on the breakfast-table
from Mr. Manning, and that her aunt focussed a brightly tactful
disregard upon this throughout the meal. Ann Veronica had come down
thinking of nothing in the world but her inflexible resolution to go to
the dance in the teeth of all opposition. She did not know Mr. Manning's
handwriting, and opened his letter and read some lines before its import
appeared. Then for a time she forgot the Fadden affair altogether.
With a well-simulated unconcern and a heightened color she finished her
breakfast.

She was not obliged to go to the Tredgold College, because as yet the
College had not settled down for the session. She was supposed to be
reading at home, and after breakfast she strolled into the vegetable
garden, and having taken up a position upon the staging of a disused
greenhouse that had the double advantage of being hidden from the
windows of the house and secure from the sudden appearance of any one,
she resumed the reading of Mr. Manning's letter.

Mr. Manning's handwriting had an air of being clear without being easily
legible; it was large and rather roundish, with a lack of definition
about the letters and a disposition to treat the large ones as
liberal-minded people nowadays treat opinions, as all amounting to the
same thing really--a years-smoothed boyish rather than an adult hand.
And it filled seven sheets of notepaper, each written only on one side.


"MY DEAR MISS STANLEY," it began,--"I hope you will forgive my
bothering you with a letter, but I have been thinking very much over our
conversation at Lady Palsworthy's, and I feel there are things I want
to say to you so much that I cannot wait until we meet again. It is the
worst of talk under such social circumstances that it is always getting
cut off so soon as it is beginning; and I went home that afternoon
feeling I had said nothing--literally nothing--of the things I had meant
to say to you and that were coursing through my head. They were things I
had meant very much to talk to you about, so that I went home vexed and
disappointed, and only relieved myself a little by writing a few verses.
I wonder if you will mind very much when I tell you they were suggested
by you. You must forgive the poet's license I take. Here is one verse.
The metrical irregularity is intentional, because I want, as it were, to
put you apart: to change the lilt and the mood altogether when I speak
of you.

     "'A SONG OF LADIES AND MY LADY

     "'Saintly white and a lily is Mary,
     Margaret's violets, sweet and shy;
     Green and dewy is Nellie-bud fairy,
     Forget-me-nots live in Gwendolen's eye.
     Annabel shines like a star in the darkness,
     Rosamund queens it a rose, deep rose;
     But the lady I love is like sunshine in April weather,
     She gleams and gladdens, she warms--and goes.'

"Crude, I admit. But let that verse tell my secret. All bad
verse--originally the epigram was Lang's, I believe--is written in a
state of emotion.

"My dear Miss Stanley, when I talked to you the other afternoon of work
and politics and such-like things, my mind was all the time resenting it
beyond measure. There we were discussing whether you should have a vote,
and I remembered the last occasion we met it was about your prospects of
success in the medical profession or as a Government official such as a
number of women now are, and all the time my heart was crying out within
me, 'Here is the Queen of your career.' I wanted, as I have never wanted
before, to take you up, to make you mine, to carry you off and set you
apart from all the strain and turmoil of life. For nothing will ever
convince me that it is not the man's share in life to shield, to
protect, to lead and toil and watch and battle with the world at large.
I want to be your knight, your servant, your protector, your--I dare
scarcely write the word--your husband. So I come suppliant. I am
five-and-thirty, and I have knocked about in the world and tasted the
quality of life. I had a hard fight to begin with to win my way into the
Upper Division--I was third on a list of forty-seven--and since then I
have found myself promoted almost yearly in a widening sphere of social
service. Before I met you I never met any one whom I felt I could
love, but you have discovered depths in my own nature I had scarcely
suspected. Except for a few early ebullitions of passion, natural to
a warm and romantic disposition, and leaving no harmful
after-effects--ebullitions that by the standards of the higher truth I
feel no one can justly cast a stone at, and of which I for one am by no
means ashamed--I come to you a pure and unencumbered man. I love you.
In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property and
further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you a life
of wide and generous refinement, travel, books, discussion, and easy
relations with a circle of clever and brilliant and thoughtful people
with whom my literary work has brought me into contact, and of which,
seeing me only as you have done alone in Morningside Park, you can have
no idea. I have a certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic,
and I belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of
the day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of affairs,
artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally, mingle together
in the easiest and most delightful intercourse. That is my real milieu,
and one that I am convinced you would not only adorn but delight in.

"I find it very hard to write this letter. There are so many things
I want to tell you, and they stand on such different levels, that
the effect is necessarily confusing and discordant, and I find myself
doubting if I am really giving you the thread of emotion that should run
through all this letter. For although I must confess it reads very much
like an application or a testimonial or some such thing as that, I can
assure you I am writing this in fear and trembling with a sinking heart.
My mind is full of ideas and images that I have been cherishing and
accumulating--dreams of travelling side by side, of lunching quietly
together in some jolly restaurant, of moonlight and music and all that
side of life, of seeing you dressed like a queen and shining in some
brilliant throng--mine; of your looking at flowers in some old-world
garden, our garden--there are splendid places to be got down in Surrey,
and a little runabout motor is quite within my means. You know they say,
as, indeed, I have just quoted already, that all bad poetry is written
in a state of emotion, but I have no doubt that this is true of bad
offers of marriage. I have often felt before that it is only when one
has nothing to say that one can write easy poetry. Witness Browning. And
how can I get into one brief letter the complex accumulated desires of
what is now, I find on reference to my diary, nearly sixteen months of
letting my mind run on you--ever since that jolly party at Surbiton,
where we raced and beat the other boat. You steered and I rowed stroke.
My very sentences stumble and give way. But I do not even care if I am
absurd. I am a resolute man, and hitherto when I have wanted a thing I
have got it; but I have never yet wanted anything in my life as I have
wanted you. It isn't the same thing. I am afraid because I love you, so
that the mere thought of failure hurts. If I did not love you so much I
believe I could win you by sheer force of character, for people tell me
I am naturally of the dominating type. Most of my successes in life have
been made with a sort of reckless vigor.

"Well, I have said what I had to say, stumblingly and badly, and baldly.
But I am sick of tearing up letters and hopeless of getting what I have
to say better said. It would be easy enough for me to write an eloquent
letter about something else. Only I do not care to write about anything
else. Let me put the main question to you now that I could not put the
other afternoon. Will you marry me, Ann Veronica?

"Very sincerely yours,

"HUBERT MANNING."


Ann Veronica read this letter through with grave, attentive eyes.

Her interest grew as she read, a certain distaste disappeared. Twice she
smiled, but not unkindly. Then she went back and mixed up the sheets in
a search for particular passages. Finally she fell into reflection.

"Odd!" she said. "I suppose I shall have to write an answer. It's so
different from what one has been led to expect."

She became aware of her aunt, through the panes of the greenhouse,
advancing with an air of serene unconsciousness from among the raspberry
canes.

"No you don't!" said Ann Veronica, and walked out at a brisk and
business-like pace toward the house.

"I'm going for a long tramp, auntie," she said.

"Alone, dear?"

"Yes, aunt. I've got a lot of things to think about."

Miss Stanley reflected as Ann Veronica went toward the house. She
thought her niece very hard and very self-possessed and self-confident.
She ought to be softened and tender and confidential at this phase of
her life. She seemed to have no idea whatever of the emotional states
that were becoming to her age and position. Miss Stanley walked round
the garden thinking, and presently house and garden reverberated to Ann
Veronica's slamming of the front door.

"I wonder!" said Miss Stanley.

For a long time she surveyed a row of towering holly-hocks, as though
they offered an explanation. Then she went in and up-stairs, hesitated
on the landing, and finally, a little breathless and with an air of
great dignity, opened the door and walked into Ann Veronica's room. It
was a neat, efficient-looking room, with a writing-table placed with a
business-like regard to the window, and a bookcase surmounted by a
pig's skull, a dissected frog in a sealed bottle, and a pile of
shiny, black-covered note-books. In the corner of the room were two
hockey-sticks and a tennis-racket, and upon the walls Ann Veronica,
by means of autotypes, had indicated her proclivities in art. But Miss
Stanley took no notice of these things. She walked straight across to
the wardrobe and opened it. There, hanging among Ann Veronica's more
normal clothing, was a skimpy dress of red canvas, trimmed with cheap
and tawdry braid, and short--it could hardly reach below the knee. On
the same peg and evidently belonging to it was a black velvet Zouave
jacket. And then! a garment that was conceivably a secondary skirt.

Miss Stanley hesitated, and took first one and then another of the
constituents of this costume off its peg and surveyed it.

The third item she took with a trembling hand by its waistbelt. As she
raised it, its lower portion fell apart into two baggy crimson masses.

"TROUSERS!" she whispered.

Her eyes travelled about the room as if in appeal to the very chairs.

Tucked under the writing-table a pair of yellow and gold Turkish
slippers of a highly meretricious quality caught her eye. She walked
over to them still carrying the trousers in her hands, and stooped to
examine them. They were ingenious disguises of gilt paper destructively
gummed, it would seem, to Ann Veronicas' best dancing-slippers.

Then she reverted to the trousers.

"How CAN I tell him?" whispered Miss Stanley.


Part 2


Ann Veronica carried a light but business-like walking-stick. She walked
with an easy quickness down the Avenue and through the proletarian
portion of Morningside Park, and crossing these fields came into a
pretty overhung lane that led toward Caddington and the Downs. And
then her pace slackened. She tucked her stick under her arm and re-read
Manning's letter.

"Let me think," said Ann Veronica. "I wish this hadn't turned up to-day
of all days."

She found it difficult to begin thinking, and indeed she was anything
but clear what it was she had to think about. Practically it was most
of the chief interests in life that she proposed to settle in this
pedestrian meditation. Primarily it was her own problem, and in
particular the answer she had to give to Mr. Manning's letter, but in
order to get data for that she found that she, having a logical and
ordered mind, had to decide upon the general relations of men to women,
the objects and conditions of marriage and its bearing upon the
welfare of the race, the purpose of the race, the purpose, if any, of
everything....

"Frightful lot of things aren't settled," said Ann Veronica. In
addition, the Fadden Dance business, all out of proportion, occupied
the whole foreground of her thoughts and threw a color of rebellion
over everything. She kept thinking she was thinking about Mr. Manning's
proposal of marriage and finding she was thinking of the dance.

For a time her efforts to achieve a comprehensive concentration were
dispersed by the passage of the village street of Caddington, the
passing of a goggled car-load of motorists, and the struggles of a
stable lad mounted on one recalcitrant horse and leading another. When
she got back to her questions again in the monotonous high-road that led
up the hill, she found the image of Mr. Manning central in her mind.
He stood there, large and dark, enunciating, in his clear voice from
beneath his large mustache, clear flat sentences, deliberately kindly.
He proposed, he wanted to possess her! He loved her.

Ann Veronica felt no repulsion at the prospect. That Mr. Manning loved
her presented itself to her bloodlessly, stilled from any imaginative
quiver or thrill of passion or disgust. The relationship seemed to have
almost as much to do with blood and body as a mortgage. It was something
that would create a mutual claim, a relationship. It was in another
world from that in which men will die for a kiss, and touching hands
lights fires that burn up lives--the world of romance, the world of
passionately beautiful things.

But that other world, in spite of her resolute exclusion of it, was
always looking round corners and peeping through chinks and crannies,
and rustling and raiding into the order in which she chose to live,
shining out of pictures at her, echoing in lyrics and music; it invaded
her dreams, it wrote up broken and enigmatical sentences upon the
passage walls of her mind. She was aware of it now as if it were a
voice shouting outside a house, shouting passionate verities in a hot
sunlight, a voice that cries while people talk insincerely in a darkened
room and pretend not to hear. Its shouting now did in some occult manner
convey a protest that Mr. Manning would on no account do, though he
was tall and dark and handsome and kind, and thirty-five and adequately
prosperous, and all that a husband should be. But there was, it
insisted, no mobility in his face, no movement, nothing about him that
warmed. If Ann Veronica could have put words to that song they
would have been, "Hot-blooded marriage or none!" but she was far too
indistinct in this matter to frame any words at all.

"I don't love him," said Ann Veronica, getting a gleam. "I don't see
that his being a good sort matters. That really settles about that....
But it means no end of a row."

For a time she sat on a rail before leaving the road for the downland
turf. "But I wish," she said, "I had some idea what I was really up to."

Her thoughts went into solution for a time, while she listened to a lark
singing.

"Marriage and mothering," said Ann Veronica, with her mind crystallizing
out again as the lark dropped to the nest in the turf. "And all the rest
of it perhaps is a song."



Part 3


Her mind got back to the Fadden Ball.

She meant to go, she meant to go, she meant to go. Nothing would stop
her, and she was prepared to face the consequences. Suppose her father
turned her out of doors! She did not care, she meant to go. She would
just walk out of the house and go....

She thought of her costume in some detail and with considerable
satisfaction, and particularly of a very jolly property dagger with
large glass jewels in the handle, that reposed in a drawer in her room.
She was to be a Corsair's Bride. "Fancy stabbing a man for jealousy!"
she thought. "You'd have to think how to get in between his bones."

She thought of her father, and with an effort dismissed him from her
mind.

She tried to imagine the collective effect of the Fadden Ball; she had
never seen a fancy-dress gathering in her life. Mr. Manning came into
her thoughts again, an unexpected, tall, dark, self-contained presence
at the Fadden. One might suppose him turning up; he knew a lot of clever
people, and some of them might belong to the class. What would he come
as?

Presently she roused herself with a guilty start from the task of
dressing and re-dressing Mr. Manning in fancy costume, as though he
was a doll. She had tried him as a Crusader, in which guise he seemed
plausible but heavy--"There IS something heavy about him; I wonder if
it's his mustache?"--and as a Hussar, which made him preposterous, and
as a Black Brunswicker, which was better, and as an Arab sheik. Also
she had tried him as a dragoman and as a gendarme, which seemed the most
suitable of all to his severely handsome, immobile profile. She felt
he would tell people the way, control traffic, and refuse admission
to public buildings with invincible correctness and the very finest
explicit feelings possible. For each costume she had devised a suitable
form of matrimonial refusal. "Oh, Lord!" she said, discovering what she
was up to, and dropped lightly from the fence upon the turf and went on
her way toward the crest.

"I shall never marry," said Ann Veronica, resolutely; "I'm not the sort.
That's why it's so important I should take my own line now."


Part 4


Ann Veronica's ideas of marriage were limited and unsystematic. Her
teachers and mistresses had done their best to stamp her mind with an
ineradicable persuasion that it was tremendously important, and on no
account to be thought about. Her first intimations of marriage as a fact
of extreme significance in a woman's life had come with the marriage of
Alice and the elopement of her second sister, Gwen.

These convulsions occurred when Ann Veronica was about twelve. There
was a gulf of eight years between her and the youngest of her brace of
sisters--an impassable gulf inhabited chaotically by two noisy brothers.
These sisters moved in a grown-up world inaccessible to Ann Veronica's
sympathies, and to a large extent remote from her curiosity. She got
into rows through meddling with their shoes and tennis-rackets, and had
moments of carefully concealed admiration when she was privileged to see
them just before her bedtime, rather radiantly dressed in white or pink
or amber and prepared to go out with her mother. She thought Alice a bit
of a sneak, an opinion her brothers shared, and Gwen rather a snatch
at meals. She saw nothing of their love-making, and came home from her
boarding-school in a state of decently suppressed curiosity for Alice's
wedding.

Her impressions of this cardinal ceremony were rich and confused,
complicated by a quite transitory passion that awakened no reciprocal
fire for a fat curly headed cousin in black velveteen and a lace
collar, who assisted as a page. She followed him about persistently, and
succeeded, after a brisk, unchivalrous struggle (in which he pinched and
asked her to "cheese it"), in kissing him among the raspberries behind
the greenhouse. Afterward her brother Roddy, also strange in velveteen,
feeling rather than knowing of this relationship, punched this Adonis's
head.

A marriage in the house proved to be exciting but extremely
disorganizing. Everything seemed designed to unhinge the mind and
make the cat wretched. All the furniture was moved, all the meals were
disarranged, and everybody, Ann Veronica included, appeared in new,
bright costumes. She had to wear cream and a brown sash and a short
frock and her hair down, and Gwen cream and a brown sash and a long
skirt and her hair up. And her mother, looking unusually alert and
hectic, wore cream and brown also, made up in a more complicated manner.

Ann Veronica was much impressed by a mighty trying on and altering and
fussing about Alice's "things"--Alice was being re-costumed from garret
to cellar, with a walking-dress and walking-boots to measure, and a
bride's costume of the most ravishing description, and stockings and
such like beyond the dreams of avarice--and a constant and increasing
dripping into the house of irrelevant remarkable objects, such as--

Real lace bedspread;

Gilt travelling clock;

Ornamental pewter plaque;

Salad bowl (silver mounted) and servers;

Madgett's "English Poets" (twelve volumes), bound purple morocco;

Etc., etc.

Through all this flutter of novelty there came and went a solicitous,
preoccupied, almost depressed figure. It was Doctor Ralph, formerly
the partner of Doctor Stickell in the Avenue, and now with a thriving
practice of his own in Wamblesmith. He had shaved his side-whiskers and
come over in flannels, but he was still indisputably the same person
who had attended Ann Veronica for the measles and when she swallowed
the fish-bone. But his role was altered, and he was now playing the
bridegroom in this remarkable drama. Alice was going to be Mrs. Ralph.
He came in apologetically; all the old "Well, and how ARE we?" note
gone; and once he asked Ann Veronica, almost furtively,

"How's Alice getting on, Vee?" Finally, on the Day, he appeared like
his old professional self transfigured, in the most beautiful light gray
trousers Ann Veronica had ever seen and a new shiny silk hat with a most
becoming roll....

It was not simply that all the rooms were rearranged and everybody
dressed in unusual fashions, and all the routines of life abolished and
put away: people's tempers and emotions also seemed strangely disturbed
and shifted about. Her father was distinctly irascible, and disposed
more than ever to hide away among the petrological things--the study was
turned out. At table he carved in a gloomy but resolute manner. On the
Day he had trumpet-like outbreaks of cordiality, varied by a watchful
preoccupation. Gwen and Alice were fantastically friendly, which seemed
to annoy him, and Mrs. Stanley was throughout enigmatical, with an
anxious eye on her husband and Alice.

There was a confused impression of livery carriages and whips with white
favors, people fussily wanting other people to get in before them,
and then the church. People sat in unusual pews, and a wide margin of
hassocky emptiness intervened between the ceremony and the walls.

Ann Veronica had a number of fragmentary impressions of Alice strangely
transfigured in bridal raiment. It seemed to make her sister downcast
beyond any precedent. The bridesmaids and pages got rather jumbled
in the aisle, and she had an effect of Alice's white back and
sloping shoulders and veiled head receding toward the altar. In some
incomprehensible way that back view made her feel sorry for Alice. Also
she remembered very vividly the smell of orange blossom, and Alice,
drooping and spiritless, mumbling responses, facing Doctor Ralph, while
the Rev. Edward Bribble stood between them with an open book. Doctor
Ralph looked kind and large, and listened to Alice's responses as though
he was listening to symptoms and thought that on the whole she was
progressing favorably.

And afterward her mother and Alice kissed long and clung to each other.
And Doctor Ralph stood by looking considerate. He and her father shook
hands manfully.

Ann Veronica had got quite interested in Mr. Bribble's rendering of the
service--he had the sort of voice that brings out things--and was still
teeming with ideas about it when finally a wild outburst from the organ
made it clear that, whatever snivelling there might be down in the
chancel, that excellent wind instrument was, in its Mendelssohnian
way, as glad as ever it could be. "Pump, pump, per-um-pump, Pum, Pump,
Per-um...."

The wedding-breakfast was for Ann Veronica a spectacle of the unreal
consuming the real; she liked that part very well, until she was
carelessly served against her expressed wishes with mayonnaise. She
was caught by an uncle, whose opinion she valued, making faces at Roddy
because he had exulted at this.

Of the vast mass of these impressions Ann Veronica could make nothing
at the time; there they were--Fact! She stored them away in a mind
naturally retentive, as a squirrel stores away nuts, for further
digestion. Only one thing emerged with any reasonable clarity in her
mind at once, and that was that unless she was saved from drowning by
an unmarried man, in which case the ceremony is unavoidable, or totally
destitute of under-clothing, and so driven to get a trousseau, in which
hardship a trousseau would certainly be "ripping," marriage was an
experience to be strenuously evaded.

When they were going home she asked her mother why she and Gwen and
Alice had cried.

"Ssh!" said her mother, and then added, "A little natural feeling,
dear."

"But didn't Alice want to marry Doctor Ralph?"

"Oh, ssh, Vee!" said her mother, with an evasion as patent as an
advertisement board. "I am sure she will be very happy indeed with
Doctor Ralph."

But Ann Veronica was by no means sure of that until she went over
to Wamblesmith and saw her sister, very remote and domestic and
authoritative, in a becoming tea-gown, in command of Doctor Ralph's
home. Doctor Ralph came in to tea and put his arm round Alice and kissed
her, and Alice called him "Squiggles," and stood in the shelter of his
arms for a moment with an expression of satisfied proprietorship. She
HAD cried, Ann Veronica knew. There had been fusses and scenes dimly
apprehended through half-open doors. She had heard Alice talking and
crying at the same time, a painful noise. Perhaps marriage hurt. But now
it was all over, and Alice was getting on well. It reminded Ann Veronica
of having a tooth stopped.

And after that Alice became remoter than ever, and, after a time, ill.
Then she had a baby and became as old as any really grown-up person, or
older, and very dull. Then she and her husband went off to a Yorkshire
practice, and had four more babies, none of whom photographed well, and
so she passed beyond the sphere of Ann Veronica's sympathies altogether.



Part 5


The Gwen affair happened when she was away at school at
Marticombe-on-Sea, a term before she went to the High School, and was
never very clear to her.

Her mother missed writing for a week, and then she wrote in an unusual
key. "My dear," the letter ran, "I have to tell you that your sister
Gwen has offended your father very much. I hope you will always love
her, but I want you to remember she has offended your father and married
without his consent. Your father is very angry, and will not have her
name mentioned in his hearing. She has married some one he could not
approve of, and gone right away...."

When the next holidays came Ann Veronica's mother was ill, and Gwen was
in the sick-room when Ann Veronica returned home. She was in one of her
old walking-dresses, her hair was done in an unfamiliar manner, she wore
a wedding-ring, and she looked as if she had been crying.

"Hello, Gwen!" said Ann Veronica, trying to put every one at their ease.
"Been and married?... What's the name of the happy man?"

Gwen owned to "Fortescue."

"Got a photograph of him or anything?" said Ann Veronica, after kissing
her mother.

Gwen made an inquiry, and, directed by Mrs. Stanley, produced a portrait
from its hiding-place in the jewel-drawer under the mirror. It presented
a clean-shaven face with a large Corinthian nose, hair tremendously
waving off the forehead and more chin and neck than is good for a man.

"LOOKS all right," said Ann Veronica, regarding him with her head first
on one side and then on the other, and trying to be agreeable. "What's
the objection?"

"I suppose she ought to know?" said Gwen to her mother, trying to alter
the key of the conversation.

"You see, Vee," said Mrs. Stanley, "Mr. Fortescue is an actor, and your
father does not approve of the profession."

"Oh!" said Ann Veronica. "I thought they made knights of actors?"

"They may of Hal some day," said Gwen. "But it's a long business."

"I suppose this makes you an actress?" said Ann Veronica.

"I don't know whether I shall go on," said Gwen, a novel note of
languorous professionalism creeping into her voice. "The other women
don't much like it if husband and wife work together, and I don't think
Hal would like me to act away from him."

Ann Veronica regarded her sister with a new respect, but the traditions
of family life are strong. "I don't suppose you'll be able to do it
much," said Ann Veronica.

Later Gwen's trouble weighed so heavily on Mrs. Stanley in her illness
that her husband consented to receive Mr. Fortescue in the drawing-room,
and actually shake hands with him in an entirely hopeless manner and
hope everything would turn out for the best.

The forgiveness and reconciliation was a cold and formal affair, and
afterwards her father went off gloomily to his study, and Mr. Fortescue
rambled round the garden with soft, propitiatory steps, the Corinthian
nose upraised and his hands behind his back, pausing to look long and
hard at the fruit-trees against the wall.

Ann Veronica watched him from the dining-room window, and after some
moments of maidenly hesitation rambled out into the garden in a reverse
direction to Mr. Fortescue's steps, and encountered him with an air of
artless surprise.

"Hello!" said Ann Veronica, with arms akimbo and a careless, breathless
manner. "You Mr. Fortescue?"

"At your service. You Ann Veronica?"

"Rather! I say--did you marry Gwen?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Mr. Fortescue raised his eyebrows and assumed a light-comedy expression.
"I suppose I fell in love with her, Ann Veronica."

"Rum," said Ann Veronica. "Have you got to keep her now?"

"To the best of my ability," said Mr. Fortescue, with a bow.

"Have you much ability?" asked Ann Veronica.

Mr. Fortescue tried to act embarrassment in order to conceal its
reality, and Ann Veronica went on to ask a string of questions about
acting, and whether her sister would act, and was she beautiful enough
for it, and who would make her dresses, and so on.

As a matter of fact Mr. Fortescue had not much ability to keep her
sister, and a little while after her mother's death Ann Veronica
met Gwen suddenly on the staircase coming from her father's study,
shockingly dingy in dusty mourning and tearful and resentful, and after
that Gwen receded from the Morningside Park world, and not even the
begging letters and distressful communications that her father and aunt
received, but only a vague intimation of dreadfulness, a leakage of
incidental comment, flashes of paternal anger at "that blackguard," came
to Ann Veronica's ears.



Part 6


These were Ann Veronica's leading cases in the question of marriage.
They were the only real marriages she had seen clearly. For the rest,
she derived her ideas of the married state from the observed behavior of
married women, which impressed her in Morningside Park as being tied and
dull and inelastic in comparison with the life of the young, and from a
remarkably various reading among books. As a net result she had come to
think of all married people much as one thinks of insects that have
lost their wings, and of her sisters as new hatched creatures who had
scarcely for a moment had wings. She evolved a dim image of herself
cooped up in a house under the benevolent shadow of Mr. Manning.
Who knows?--on the analogy of "Squiggles" she might come to call him
"Mangles!"

"I don't think I can ever marry any one," she said, and fell suddenly
into another set of considerations that perplexed her for a time. Had
romance to be banished from life?...

It was hard to part with romance, but she had never thirsted so keenly
to go on with her University work in her life as she did that day. She
had never felt so acutely the desire for free initiative, for a life
unhampered by others. At any cost! Her brothers had it practically--at
least they had it far more than it seemed likely she would unless she
exerted herself with quite exceptional vigor. Between her and the fair,
far prospect of freedom and self-development manoeuvred Mr. Manning, her
aunt and father, neighbors, customs, traditions, forces. They seemed to
her that morning to be all armed with nets and prepared to throw them
over her directly her movements became in any manner truly free.

She had a feeling as though something had dropped from her eyes, as
though she had just discovered herself for the first time--discovered
herself as a sleep-walker might do, abruptly among dangers, hindrances,
and perplexities, on the verge of a cardinal crisis.

The life of a girl presented itself to her as something happy and
heedless and unthinking, yet really guided and controlled by others, and
going on amidst unsuspected screens and concealments.

And in its way it was very well. Then suddenly with a rush came reality,
came "growing up"; a hasty imperative appeal for seriousness, for
supreme seriousness. The Ralphs and Mannings and Fortescues came down
upon the raw inexperience, upon the blinking ignorance of the newcomer;
and before her eyes were fairly open, before she knew what had
happened, a new set of guides and controls, a new set of obligations and
responsibilities and limitations, had replaced the old. "I want to be
a Person," said Ann Veronica to the downs and the open sky; "I will not
have this happen to me, whatever else may happen in its place."

Ann Veronica had three things very definitely settled by the time when,
a little after mid-day, she found herself perched up on a gate between a
bridle-path and a field that commanded the whole wide stretch of country
between Chalking and Waldersham. Firstly, she did not intend to marry at
all, and particularly she did not mean to marry Mr. Manning; secondly,
by some measure or other, she meant to go on with her studies, not at
the Tredgold Schools but at the Imperial College; and, thirdly, she was,
as an immediate and decisive act, a symbol of just exactly where she
stood, a declaration of free and adult initiative, going that night to
the Fadden Ball.

But the possible attitude of her father she had still to face. So far
she had the utmost difficulty in getting on to that vitally important
matter. The whole of that relationship persisted in remaining obscure.
What would happen when next morning she returned to Morningside Park?

He couldn't turn her out of doors. But what he could do or might do she
could not imagine. She was not afraid of violence, but she was afraid of
something mean, some secondary kind of force. Suppose he stopped all her
allowance, made it imperative that she should either stay ineffectually
resentful at home or earn a living for herself at once.... It
appeared highly probable to her that he would stop her allowance.

What can a girl do?

Somewhere at this point Ann Veronica's speculations were interrupted
and turned aside by the approach of a horse and rider. Mr. Ramage, that
iron-gray man of the world, appeared dressed in a bowler hat and a suit
of hard gray, astride of a black horse. He pulled rein at the sight of
her, saluted, and regarded her with his rather too protuberant eyes. The
girl's gaze met his in interested inquiry.

"You've got my view," he said, after a pensive second. "I always get off
here and lean over that rail for a bit. May I do so to-day?"

"It's your gate," she said, amiably; "you got it first. It's for you to
say if I may sit on it."

He slipped off the horse. "Let me introduce you to Caesar," he said;
and she patted Caesar's neck, and remarked how soft his nose was, and
secretly deplored the ugliness of equine teeth. Ramage tethered the
horse to the farther gate-post, and Caesar blew heavily and began to
investigate the hedge.

Ramage leaned over the gate at Ann Veronica's side, and for a moment
there was silence.

He made some obvious comments on the wide view warming toward its
autumnal blaze that spread itself in hill and valley, wood and village,
below.

"It's as broad as life," said Mr. Ramage, regarding it and putting a
well-booted foot up on the bottom rail.



Part 7


"And what are you doing here, young lady," he said, looking up at her
face, "wandering alone so far from home?"

"I like long walks," said Ann Veronica, looking down on him.

"Solitary walks?"

"That's the point of them. I think over all sorts of things."

"Problems?"

"Sometimes quite difficult problems."

"You're lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother,
for instance, couldn't. She had to do her thinking at home--under
inspection."

She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of her
free young poise show in his face.

"I suppose things have changed?" she said.

"Never was such an age of transition."

She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know. "Sufficient unto me is
the change thereof," he said, with all the effect of an epigram.

"I must confess," he said, "the New Woman and the New Girl intrigue me
profoundly. I am one of those people who are interested in women, more
interested than I am in anything else. I don't conceal it. And the
change, the change of attitude! The way all the old clingingness
has been thrown aside is amazing. And all the old--the old trick of
shrinking up like a snail at a touch. If you had lived twenty years ago
you would have been called a Young Person, and it would have been your
chief duty in life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to
understand."

"There's quite enough still," said Ann Veronica, smiling, "that one
doesn't understand."

"Quite. But your role would have been to go about saying, 'I beg your
pardon' in a reproving tone to things you understood quite well in your
heart and saw no harm in. That terrible Young Person! she's vanished.
Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young Person!... I hope we may never
find her again."

He rejoiced over this emancipation. "While that lamb was about every man
of any spirit was regarded as a dangerous wolf. We wore invisible chains
and invisible blinkers. Now, you and I can gossip at a gate, and {}Honi
soit qui mal y pense. The change has given man one good thing he never
had before," he said. "Girl friends. And I am coming to believe the best
as well as the most beautiful friends a man can have are girl friends."

He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:

"I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than to any man
alive."

"I suppose we ARE more free than we were?" said Ann Veronica, keeping
the question general.

"Oh, there's no doubt of it! Since the girls of the eighties broke
bounds and sailed away on bicycles--my young days go back to the very
beginnings of that--it's been one triumphant relaxation."

"Relaxation, perhaps. But are we any more free?"

"Well?"

"I mean we've long strings to tether us, but we are bound all the same.
A woman isn't much freer--in reality."

Mr. Ramage demurred.

"One runs about," said Ann Veronica.

"Yes."

"But it's on condition one doesn't do anything."

"Do what?"

"Oh!--anything."

He looked interrogation with a faint smile.

"It seems to me it comes to earning one's living in the long run," said
Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. "Until a girl can go away as a son does
and earn her independent income, she's still on a string. It may be a
long string, long enough if you like to tangle up all sorts of people;
but there it is! If the paymaster pulls, home she must go. That's what I
mean."

Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that. He was a little impressed by
Ann Veronica's metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed to Hetty
Widgett. "YOU wouldn't like to be independent?" he asked, abruptly. "I
mean REALLY independent. On your own. It isn't such fun as it seems."

"Every one wants to be independent," said Ann Veronica. "Every one. Man
or woman."

"And you?"

"Rather!"

"I wonder why?"

"There's no why. It's just to feel--one owns one's self."

"Nobody does that," said Ramage, and kept silence for a moment.

"But a boy--a boy goes out into the world and presently stands on his
own feet. He buys his own clothes, chooses his own company, makes his
own way of living."

"You'd like to do that?"

"Exactly."

"Would you like to be a boy?"

"I wonder! It's out of the question, any way."

Ramage reflected. "Why don't you?"

"Well, it might mean rather a row."

"I know--" said Ramage, with sympathy.

"And besides," said Ann Veronica, sweeping that aspect aside, "what
could I do? A boy sails out into a trade or profession. But--it's one
of the things I've just been thinking over. Suppose--suppose a girl
did want to start in life, start in life for herself--" She looked him
frankly in the eyes. "What ought she to do?"

"Suppose you--"

"Yes, suppose I--"

He felt that his advice was being asked. He became a little more
personal and intimate. "I wonder what you could do?" he said. "I should
think YOU could do all sorts of things....

"What ought you to do?" He began to produce his knowledge of the world
for her benefit, jerkily and allusively, and with a strong, rank flavor
of "savoir faire." He took an optimist view of her chances. Ann Veronica
listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on the turf, and now and then she
asked a question or looked up to discuss a point. In the meanwhile,
as he talked, he scrutinized her face, ran his eyes over her careless,
gracious poise, wondered hard about her. He described her privately to
himself as a splendid girl. It was clear she wanted to get away from
home, that she was impatient to get away from home. Why? While the front
of his mind was busy warning her not to fall into the hopeless miseries
of underpaid teaching, and explaining his idea that for women of
initiative, quite as much as for men, the world of business had by far
the best chances, the back chambers of his brain were busy with the
problem of that "Why?"

His first idea as a man of the world was to explain her unrest by a
lover, some secret or forbidden or impossible lover. But he dismissed
that because then she would ask her lover and not him all these things.
Restlessness, then, was the trouble, simple restlessness: home bored
her. He could quite understand the daughter of Mr. Stanley being bored
and feeling limited. But was that enough? Dim, formless suspicions
of something more vital wandered about his mind. Was the young lady
impatient for experience? Was she adventurous? As a man of the world he
did not think it becoming to accept maidenly calm as anything more than
a mask. Warm life was behind that always, even if it slept. If it
was not an actual personal lover, it still might be the lover not yet
incarnate, not yet perhaps suspected....

He had diverged only a little from the truth when he said that his
chief interest in life was women. It wasn't so much women as Woman that
engaged his mind. His was the Latin turn of thinking; he had fallen
in love at thirteen, and he was still capable--he prided himself--of
falling in love. His invalid wife and her money had been only the thin
thread that held his life together; beaded on that permanent relation
had been an inter-weaving series of other feminine experiences,
disturbing, absorbing, interesting, memorable affairs. Each one had
been different from the others, each had had a quality all its own, a
distinctive freshness, a distinctive beauty. He could not understand how
men could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful
research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing, these
complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and mounted to
the supremest, most passionate intimacy. All the rest of his existence
was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for it, worked for it, kept
himself in training for it.

So while he talked to this girl of work and freedom, his slightly
protuberant eyes were noting t