Ann Veronica : a modern love story

ANN VERONICA

A MODERN LOVE STORY

BY
H. G. WELLS

AUTHOR OF
TONO-BUNGAY, ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

BOOKS BY
H. G. WE LL S

THE FUTURE IN AMERICA. Ill'd. 8vo. net $2.00

ANTICIPATIONS. Post 8vo net 1.80

THE WAR OP THB WORLDS. Post 8vo. . . 1.50

THE INVISIBLE MAN. Post 8vo i.oo

THIRTY STRANGE STORIES. Post 8vo . . . 1.50
WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES. Ill'd. Post 8vo. 1.50

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, N. Y.

Copyright, 1909, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

Ail rights restrvtd.
Published October, 1909.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. ANN VERONICA TALKS TO HER FATHER ... i

II. ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW ... 34

III. THE MORNING OP THE CRISIS 54

IV. THE CRISIS 86

V. THE FLIGHT TO LONDON 95

VI. EXPOSTULATIONS 117

VII. IDEALS AND A REALITY . 136

VIII. BIOLOGY 167

IX. DISCORDS 196

X. THE SUFFRAGETTES 234

XI. THOUGHTS IN PRISON 256

XII. ANN VERONICA PUTS THINGS IN ORDER . . . 268

XIII. THE SAPPHIRE RING 285

XIV. THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT 308

XV. THE LAST DAYS AT HOME 329

XVI. IN THE MOUNTAINS 342

XVII. IN PERSPECTIVE 365

ANN VERONICA

ANN VERONICA

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 conse-
quences 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 grand-
mother beyond measure; she sat with her knees up to
her chin and her hands clasped before them, and she

ANN VERONICA

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 note-
books, a fat text-book, and a chocolate-and-yellow-cov-
ered pamphlet, and leaped neatty 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 let-
ter. At the sight of her he became rigid and a singularly
bright shade of pink. She made herself serenely un-
aware of his existence, though it may be it was his
presence that sent her by the field devour 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

2

ANN VERONICA TALKS

preoccupation. "It's either now or never," she said to
herself. . . .

Morningside Park was a suburb that had not alto-
gether, 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 rail-
way station into an undeveloped wilderness of agricult-
ure, 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 con-
gestion of workmen's dwellings. The road from Sur-
biton 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

3

ANN VERONICA

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 stead-
fastly 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.

§ 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 pre-
occupied. Her lips came together with an expression
between contentment and the faintest shadow pf 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 —

4

ANN VERONICA TALKS

she did not clearly know for what — to do, to be, to ex-
perience. 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 intima-
tion 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 under-
tones. . . .

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 develop-
ments, 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

5

ANN VERONICA

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 matric-
ulated 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 censor-
ship, she took to smuggling any books she thought
might be prohibited instead of bringing them home

6

ANN VERONICA TALKS

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 com-
parative 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 instruc-
tress 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 Morn-
ingside 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

7

ANN VERONICA

smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday morn-
ing, 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 pecul-
iarly 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 ex-
ploring 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.

8

ANN VERONICA TALKS

"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 let-
ter, 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.

§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 inatten-
tive; 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,

9

ANN VERONICA

game he treated very seriously, and partly in the prac-
tices 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 mi-
croscopy 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 micro-
scopic accessories and in rubbing down slices of rock to
a transparent thinness and mounting them in a beauti-
ful and dignified manner. He did it, he said, " to dis-
tract 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 fel-
lows all sorts of distinctions. . . .

He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fic-
tion 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 din-
ner, and Ann Veronica associated it with a tendency to

10

ANN VERONICA TALKS

monopolize the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair of
dappled fawn- skin slippers across the fender. She won-
dered occasionally why his mind needed so much dis-
traction. His favorite newspaper was the Times, which
he began at breakfast in the morning often with mani-
fest irritation, and carried off to finish in the train, leav-
ing 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 creep-
ers 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 fre-
quently 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
« ii

ANN VERONICA

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 bath-
room. 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 pur-
suing 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 lit-
tle 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

12

ANN VERONICA TALKS

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 him-
self 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 con-
ception 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 assump-
tions. 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 dependants — which is absurd. One mar-
ried 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

13

ANN VERONICA

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 in-
describable 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 Sun-
bonnet, gone into his study, lit the gas fire, and written
the letter that had brought these unsatisfactory rela-
tions to a head.

§ 4

"Mv 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.^

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ANN VERONICA TALKS

"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.

"/ 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 pict-
ure of Veronica reading this last sentence. But he was
now too deeply moved to trace a certain unsatisfactori-
ness to its source in a mixture of metaphors. "Well,"

ANN VERONICA

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 ivill 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 tliat 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

16

ANN VERONICA TALKS

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."

ANN VERONICA

"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 com-
fortably 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.

§ 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

18

ANN VERONICA TALKS

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."

19

ANN VERONICA

"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 news-
paper; 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

20

ANN VERONICA TALKS

the City, and affected a cultured urbanity that some-
how 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 content-
ed 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 fountain-
head. 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

21

ANN VERONICA

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-pos-
sessed answers. These things did not harmonize with
his conception of the forthcoming (if unavoidable) inter-
view. After all, it came to him suddenly as a harsh dis-
covery that she might be in a sense regarded as grown-
up. 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 patable — imitating the woman quite re-
markably 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 proc-
lamation 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. Ev-
erybody, 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 Ii1ce Ramage ought to know better
than to draw out a girl, the daughter of a friend and
neighbor. . ...

22

ANN VERONICA TALKS

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 at-
tentions 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.

§ 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

23

ANN VERONICA

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 per-
plexity 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 resent-
ful 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 six-
teen or seventeen, seventeen and a half to be exact,
running about, as one might say, in London. School-
girl. 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."

24

ANN VERONICA TALKS

"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 sen-
suality. 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 ex-
travagant ideas.'

25

ANN VERONICA

" 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 Shake-
speare. 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

26

ANN VERONICA TALKS

are running about as free as air practically, with regis-
try 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!"

§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.
3 27

ANN VERONICA

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 ob-
serve 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, Ve-
ronica?" he asked, with a deliberate note of irony, look-
ing 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 reason-
ableness, " 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."

28

ANN VERONICA TALKS

" Why shouldn't I go?"

"It isn't a suitable place; it isn't a suitable gather-
ing."

" 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 discon-
tinued 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

29

ANN VERONICA

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 some-
thing too precious for life, cooped up in one narrow lit-
tle 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 Inter-
mediate. It isn't as though I haven't done well. I've
never muffed an exam. yet. Roddy muffed two. . . ."

3°

ANN VERONICA TALKS

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 ex-
pression 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?"

ANN VERONICA

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. Under-
stand 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 motion-
less 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, ap-
parently intending to put an arm about her, but she
stepped back from him quickly. She produced a hand-
kerchief, 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

32

ANN VERONICA TALKS

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 situa-
tion. Then he sat down and filled his pipe slowly and
thoughtfully. . . .

" I don't see what else I could have said," he re-
marked.

33

CHAPTER THE SECOND

ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OP VIEW
§ I

" ARE you coming to the Fadden Dance, Ann Veron-
/~V ica?" 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 mis-
cellaneous 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. Con-
stance 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

34

POINTS OF VIEW

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, bear-
ing 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 Veron-
ica 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-/o/" 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.

35

ANN VERONICA

"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 pro-
vocative 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."

36

POINTS OF VIEW

"Thousands of women have married merely for free-
dom," 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 ad-
dressed 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 get-
ting 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 Ex-
change— prejudice bars us."

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

37

ANN VERONICA

"Every one hasn't the Gift. Even there a woman
never gets a fair chance. Men are against her. What-
ever 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 knowl-
edge, 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, em-
phatic discourse on the position of women, full of won-
derful 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 gest-
ures 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 Axen-
strasse, near Fluelen, that hung upon the wall. Ann
Veronica watched her face, vaguely sympathizing with
her, vaguely disliking her physical insufficiency and her

38

POINTS OF VIEW

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 in-
supportable 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 im-
portant 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 im-
portance 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 hold-

39

ANN VERONICA

ing 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 Matri-
archate. 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 ex-
traordinarily 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

40

POINTS OF VIEW

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 ad-
mitted 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 sup-
pressed, "if some of us have to be killed to get it."

ANN VERONICA

And she pressed her lips together in white resolution and
nodded, and she was manifestly full of that same pas-
sion 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. ..."

§ 2

As Ann Veronica went back along the Avenue to her
aunt she became aware of a light-footed pursuer run-
ning. 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 sen-
tences.

"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.

42

POINTS OF VIEW

"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 snort-
ers! 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.

§3

The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that after-
noon 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 dis-
secting-room table. The Widgetts talked with a re-
markable 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
vvrappered world. The Widgett mental furniture was
perhaps worn and shabby, but there it was before you,
undisguised, fading visibly in an almost pitiless sun-
light. 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 Morning-
side Park, and in her superficial and euphuistic way an
4 43

ANN VERONICA

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 after-
noon 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 en-
couraged gossip. They were just nice.

Ann Veronica found herself walking back down the
Avenue that had just been the scene of her first pro-
posal beside her aunt, and speculating for the first time
in her life about that lady's mental attitudes. Her pre-
vailing 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 instinc-
tive 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 repre-
sented, 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 cock-
roach or so or the gnawing of a rat? What was the
mental equivalent of a rat's gnawing? The image was

44

POINTS OF VIEW

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, be-
hind her aunt's complacent visage there was a past as
lurid as any one's — not, of course, her aunt's own per-
sonal 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, cannibal-
ism! Ancestresses with perhaps dim anticipatory like-
nesses 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 Mi ;s Stanley's pacified brain?
Those empty rooms, if they were empty, were the equiva-
lents 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-

45

ANN VERONICA

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

46

POINTS OF VIEW

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 in-
decisively, 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 gentle-
man.

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

47

ANN VERONICA

rather carefully finished verse. It dealt with fine as-
pects 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 appear-
ed as his confederate and disentangled tKe 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? Turn, tay, turn, tay."

Ann Veronica did.

"What have you been doing since our last talk?

48

POINTS OF VIEW

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.

49

ANN VERONICA

"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 im-
portant?"

"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

5°

POINTS OF VIEW

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

ANN VERONICA

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 resolute-
ly 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 them-
selves to save him from that return.

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

"Women would — they do have far more power than
they think, as influences, as inspiratons."

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/'

52

POINTS OF VIEW

" 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
§ I

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

54

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

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, — "7 hope you
will forgive my bothering you with a letter, but I have been
thinking very much over our couversation at Lady Pals-
worthy'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,

55

ANN VERONICA

"'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 tur-
moil 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

56

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

fight to begin with to win my way into the Upper Division
— / 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. Ex-
cept 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 causer ie
dinner clubs of the day, in which successful Bohemianism,
politicians, men of affairs, artists, sculptors, and culti-
vated 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

57

ANN VERONICA

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 look-
ing 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 accumu-
lated 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 dominat-
ing type. Most of my successes in life have been made
with a sort of reckless vigor.

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THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

"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 any-
thing 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 un-
kindly, 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, aunite," 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
s 59

ANN VERONICA

emotional states that were becoming to her age and
position. Miss Stanley walked round the garden think-
ing, 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 lip-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.

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THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

"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.

§ 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 Morning-
side 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 beign 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,

61

ANN VERONICA

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 pro-
portion, 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

62

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

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 move-
ment, 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.

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ANN VERONICA

"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."

§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 dis-
missed 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

64

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

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 in-
vincible correctness and the very finest explicit feelings
possible. For each costume she had devised a suitable
form of matrimonial refusal. " Oh, Lord!" she said, dis-
covering 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."

§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 per-
suasion 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 elope-
ment of her second sister, Gwen.

These convulsions occurred when Ann Veronica was
about twelve. There was a gulf of eight years between

65

ANN VERONICA

her and the youngest of her brace of sisters — an impass-
able 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. After-
ward her brother Roddy, also strange in velveteen, feel-
ing rather than knowing of this relationship, punched
this Adonis's head.

A marriage in the house proved to be exciting but ex-
tremely 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

66

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

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 com-
plicated manner.

Ann Veronica was much impressed by a mighty try-
ing 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 in-
disputably 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 apolo-
getically; all the old " Well, and how are we ?" note gone;
and once he asked Ann Veronica, almost furtively,

67

ANN VERONICA

"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 watch-
ful 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 impres-
sions 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 re-
ceding toward the altar. In some incomprehensible
way that back view made her feel sorry for Alice. Also

68

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

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 look-
ing considerate. He and her father shook hands man-
fully.

Ann Veronica had got quite inteersted in Mr. Dribble'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

69

ANN VERONICA

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 ex-
pression 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 pain-
ful 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

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THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

photographed well, and so she passed beyond the sphere
of Ann Veronica's sympathies altogether.

§ 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 ap-
prove 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-

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ANN VERONICA

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.

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

"Oh!" said Ann Veronia. "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

7*

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

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 hesita-
tion 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

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ANN VERONICA

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 in-
cidental comment, flashes of paternal anger at "that
blackguard," came to Ann Veronica's ears.

§ 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

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THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

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 excep-
tional 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 un-
suspected 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 new-
comer; and before her eyes were fairly open, before she
knew what had happened, a new set of guides and con-
trols, 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
6 75

ANN VERONICA

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 some-
thing 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

76

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

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.

§ 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.

77

ANN VERONICA

"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.

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THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

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 in-
visible blinkers. Now, you and I can gossip at a gate,
and Honi soil 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.

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ANN VERONICA

" 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 pres-
ently 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.

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THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

"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 im-
patient 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

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ANN VERONICA

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. Restless-
ness, 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

82

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

to this pursuit; he lived for it, worked for it, kept him-
self in training for it.

So while he talked to this girl of work and freedom, his
slightly protuberant eyes were noting the gracious
balance of her limbs and body across the gate, the fine
lines of her chin and neck. Her grave fine face, her
warm clear complexion, had already aroused his curiosity
as he had gone to and fro in Morningside Park, and here
suddenly he was near to her and talking freely and in-
timately. He had found her in a communicative mood,
and he used the accumulated skill of years in turning
that to account.

She was pleased and a little flattered by his interest
and sympathy. She became eager to explain herself,
to show herself in the right light. He was manifestly
exerting his mind for her, and she found herself fully
disposed to justify his interest.

She, perhaps, displayed herself rather consciously as
a fine person unduly limited. She even touched lightly
on her father's unreasonableness.

"I wonder," said Ramage, "that more girls don't
think as you do and want to strike out in the world."

And then he speculated. "I wonder if you will?"

"Let me say one thing," he said. "If ever you do
and I can help you in any way, by advice or inquiry or
recommendation — You see, I'm no believer in feminine
incapacity, but I do perceive there is such a thing as
feminine inexperience. As a sex you're a little under-
trained — in affairs. I'd take it — forgive me if I seem a
little urgent — as a sort of proof of friendliness. I can
imagine nothing more pleasant in life than to help you,
because I know it would pay to help you. There's some-

83

ANN VERONICA

thing about you, a little flavor of Will, I suppose, that
makes one feel — good luck about you and success. ..."

And while he talked and watched her as he talked, she
answered, and behind her listening watched and thought
about him. She liked the animated eagerness of his
manner.

His mind seemed to be a remarkably full one; his
knowledge of detailed reality came in just where her own
mind was most weakly equipped. Through all he said
ran one quality that pleased her — the quality of a man
who feels that things can be done, that one need not wait
for the world to push one before one moved. Compared
with her father and Mr. Manning and the men in "fixed"
positions generally that she knew, Ramage, presented by
himself, had a fine suggestion of freedom, of power, of
deliberate and sustained adventure. . . .

She was particularly charmed by his theory of friend-
ship. It was really very jolly to talk to a man in this
way — who saw the woman in her and did not treat her
as a child. She was inclined to think that perhaps for a
girl the converse of his method was the case; an older
man, a man beyond the range of anything "nonsensical,"
was, perhaps, the most interesting sort of friend one could
meet. But in that reservation it may be she went a little
beyond the converse of his view. . . .

They got on wonderfully well together. They talked
for the better part of an hour, and at last walked to-
gether to the junction of highroad and the bridle-path.
There, after protestations of friendliness and helpfulness
that were almost ardent, he mounted a little clumsily
and rode off at an amiable pace, looking his best, making
a leg with his riding gaiters, smiling and saluting, while

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THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

Ann Veronica turned northward and so came to Mickle-
chesil. There, in a little tea and sweet-stuff shop, she
bought and consumed slowly and absent-mindedly the
insufficient nourishment that is natural to her sex on
such occasions.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE CRISIS
§ I

WE left Miss Stanley with Ann Veronica's fancy
dress in her hands and her eyes directed to Ann
Veronica's pseudo-Turkish slippers.

When Mr. Stanley came home at a quarter to six —
an earlier train by fifteen minutes than he affected —
his sister met him in the hall with a hushed expression.
" I'm so glad you're here, Peter," she said. " She means
to go."

"Go!" he said. "Where?"

"To that ball."

"What ball?" The question was rhetorical. He
knew.

"I believe she's dressing up-stairs — now."

"Then tell her to undress, confound her!" The City
had been thoroughly annoying that day, and he was
angry from the outset.

Miss Stanley reflected on this proposal for a moment.

"I don't think she will," she said.

"She must," said Mr. Stanley, and went into his
study. His sister followed. " She can't go now. She'll
have to wait for dinner," he said, uncomfortably.

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THE CRISIS

"She's going to have some sort of meal with the
Widgetts down the Avenue, and go up with them."

"She told you that?"

" Yes."

"When?"

"At tea."

" But why didn't you prohibit once for all the whole
thing? How dared she tell you that?"

"Out of defiance. She just sat and told me that
was her arrangement. I've never seen her quite so
sure of herself."

"What did you say?"

"I said, 'My dear Veronica! how can you think of
such things? ' "

"And then?"

" She had two more cups of tea and some cake, and
told me of her walk."

"She'll meet somebody one of these days — walking
about like that."

"She didn't say she'd met any one."

"But didn't you say some more about that ball?"

" I said everything I could say as soon as I realized
she was trying to avoid the topic. I said, ' It is no use
your telling me about this walk and pretend I've been
told about the ball, because you haven't. Your father
has forbidden you to go!' "

"Well?'r

"She said, 'I hate being horrid to you and father,
but I feel it my duty to go to that ball!' "

"Felt it her duty!"

" ' Very well,' I said, ' then I wash my hands of the whole
business. Your disobedience be upon your own head.' "

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ANN VERONICA

"But that is flat rebellion!" said Mr. Stanley, stand-
ing on the hearthrug with his back to the unlit gas-fire.
"You ought at once — you ought at once to have told
her that. What duty does a girl owe to any one before
her father? Obedience to him, that is surely the first
law. What can she put before that ?" His voice began
to rise. "One would think I had said nothing about
the matter. One would think I had agreed to her going.
I suppose this is what she learns in her infernal Lon-
don colleges. I suppose this is the sort of damned
rubbish — "

"Oh! Ssh, Peter!" cried Miss Stanley.

He stopped abruptly. In the pause a door could
be heard opening and closing on the landing up-stairs.
Then light footsteps became audible, 'descending the
staircase with a certain deliberation and a faint rustle
of skirts.

"Tell her," said Mr. Stanley, with an imperious gest-
ure, "to come in here."

§ 2

Miss Stanley emerged from the study and stood
watching Ann Veronica descend.

The girl was flushed with excitement, bright-eyed,
and braced for a struggle; her aunt had never seen her
looking so fine or so pretty. Her fancy dress, save for the
green-gray stockings, the pseudo-Turkish slippers, and
baggy silk trousered ends natural to a Corsair's bride,
was hidden in a large black-silk-hooded opera-cloak.
Beneath the hood it was evident that her rebellious hair
was bound up with red silk, and fastened by some de-

THE CRISIS

vice in her ears (unless she had them pierced, which was
too dreadful a thing to suppose !) were long brass filigree
earrings.

" I'm just off, aunt," said Ann Veronica.

" Your father is in the study and wishes to speak to
you."

Ann Veronica hesitated, and then stood in the open
doorway and regarded her father's stern presence. She
spoke with an entirely false note of cheerful off-handed-
ness. " I'm just in time to say good-bye before I go,
father. I'm going up to London with the Widgetts to
that ball."

"Now look here, Ann Veronica," said Mr. Stanley,
"just a moment. You are not going to that ball!"

Ann Veronica tried a less genial, more dignified note.

"I thought we had discussed that, father."

" You are not going to that ball ! You are not going
out of this house in that get-up!"

Ann Veronica tried yet more earnestly to treat him,
as she would treat any man, with an insistence upon her
due of masculine respect. "You see," she said, very
gently, " I am going. I am sorry to seem to disobey
you, but I am. I wish" — she found she had embarked
on a bad sentence — " I wish we needn't have quar-
relled."

She stopped abruptly, and turned about toward the
front door. In a moment he was beside her. " I don't
think you can have heard me, Vee," he said, with in-
tensely controlled fury. "I said you were" — he shout-
ed— "not to go!"

She made, and overdid, an immense effort to be a
princess. She tossed her head, and, having no further

89

ANN VERONICA

words, moved toward the door. Her father intercepted
her, and for a moment she and he struggled with their
hands upon the latch. A common rage flushed their
faces. "Let go!" she gasped at him, a blaze of anger.

"Veronica!" cried Miss Stanley, warningly, and,
"Peter!"

For a moment they seemed on the verge of an alto-
gether desperate scuffle. Never for a moment had vio-
lence come between these two since long ago he had,
in spite of her mother's protest in the background,
carried her kicking and squalling to the nursery for
some forgotten crime. With something near to horror
they found themselves thus confronted.

The door was fastened by a catch and a latch with an
inside key, to which at night a chain and two bolts were
added. Carefully abstaining from thrusting against
each other, Ann Veronica and her father began an
absurdly desperate struggle, the one to open the door,
the other to keep it fastened. She seized the key, and
he grasped her hand and squeezed it roughly and pain-
fully between the handle and the ward as she tried to
turn it. His grip twisted her wrist. She cried out with
the pain of it.

A wild passion of shame and self-disgust swept over
her. Her spirit awoke in dismay to an affection in ruins,
to the immense undignified disaster that had come to
them.

Abruptly she desisted, recoiled, and turned and fled
up-stairs.

She made noises between weeping and laughter as
she went. She gained her room, and slammed her door
and locked it as though she feared violence and pursuit.

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THE CRISIS

"Oh God!" she cried, "Oh God!" and flung aside her
opera-cloak, and for a time walked about the room — a
Corsair's bride at a crisis of emotion. "Why can't he
reason with me," she said, again and again, "instead of
doing this?"

§3

There presently came a phase in which she said: "I
won't stand it even now. I will go to-night."

She went as far as her door, then turned to the win-
dow. She opened this and scrambled out — a thing she
had not done for five long years of adolescence — upon
the leaded space above the built-out bath-room on the
first floor. Once upon a time she and Roddy had de-
scended thence by the drain-pipe.

But things that a girl of sixteen may do in short
skirts are not things to be done by a young lady of
twenty-one in fancy dress and an opera-cloak, and just
as she was coming unaided to an adequate realization of
this, she discovered Mr. Pragmar, the wholesale druggist,
who lived three gardens away, and who had been mow-
ing his lawn to get an appetite for dinner, standing in a
fascinated attitude beside the forgotten lawn-mower
and watching her intently.

She found it extremely difficult to infuse an air of
quiet correctitude into her return through the window,
and when she was safely inside she waved clinched fists
and executed a noiseless dance of rage.

When she reflected that Mr. Pragmar probably knew
Mr. Ramage, and might describe the affair to him, she
7 91

ANN VERONICA

cried "Oh!" with renewed vexation, and repeated some
steps of her dance in a new and more ecstatic measure.

§ 4

At eight that evening Miss Stanley tapped at Ann
Veronica's bedroom door.

"I've brought you up some dinner, Vee," she said.

Ann Veronica was lying on her bed in a darkling room
staring at the ceiling. She reflected before answering.
She was frightfully hungry. She had eaten little or no
tea, and her mid-day meal had been worse than nothing.

She got up and unlocked the door.

Her aunt did not object to capital punishment or war,
or the industrial system or casual wards, or flogging of
criminals or the Congo Free State, because none of these
things really got hold of her imagination; but she did
object, she did not like, she could not bear to think of
people not having and enjoying their meals. It was
her distinctive test of an emotional state, its interference
with a kindly normal digestion. Any one very badly
moved choked down a few mouthfuls; the symptom of
supreme distress was not to be able to touch a bit. So
that the thought of Ann Veronica up-stairs had been
extremely painful for her through all the silent dinner-
time that night. As soon as dinner was over she went
into the kitchen and devoted herself to compiling a tray
— not a tray merely of half-cooled dinner things, but a
specially prepared "nice" tray, suitable for tempting
any one. With this she now entered.

Ann Veronica found herself in the presence of the

92

THE CRISIS

most disconcerting fact in human experience, the kindli-
ness of people you believe to be thoroughly wrong. She
took the tray with both hands, gulped, and gave way
to tears.

Her aunt leaped unhappily to the thought of penitence.

"My dear," she began, with an affectionate hand on
Ann Veronica's shoulder, "I do so wish you would
realize how it grieves your father."

Ann Veronica flung away from her hand, and the
pepper-pot on the tray upset, sending a puff of pepper
into the air and instantly filling them both with an in-
tense desire to sneeze.

" I don't think you see," she replied, with tears on her
cheeks, and her brows knitting, "how it shames and,
ah! — disgraces me — ah tishu!"

She put down the tray with a concussion on her toilet-
table.

"But, dear, think! He is your father. Shook!"

"That's no reason," said Ann Veronica, speaking
through her handkerchief and stopping abruptly.

Niece and aunt regarded each other for a moment
over their pocket-handkerchiefs with watery but an-
tagonistic eyes, each far too profoundly moved to see
the absurdity of the position.

"I hope," said Miss Stanley, with dignity, and turned
doorward with features in civil warfare. " Better state
of mind," she gasped. . . .

Ann Veronica stood in the twilight room staring at
the door that had slammed upon her aunt, her pocket-
handkerchief rolled tightly in her hand. Her soul was
full of the sense of disaster. She had made her first
fight for dignity and freedom as a grown-up and inde-

93

ANN VERONICA

pendent Person, and this was how the universe had
treated her. It had neither succumbed to her nor
wrathfully overwhelmed her. It had thrust her back
with an undignified scuffle, with vulgar comedy, with
an unendurable, scornful grin.

"By God!" said Ann Veronica for the first time in
her life. "But I will! I will!"

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

ANN VERONICA had an impression that she did
not sleep at all that night, and at any rate she got
through an immense amount of feverish feeling and
thinking.

What was she going to do?

One main idea possessed her: she must get away
from home, she must assert herself at once or perish.
"Very well," she would say, "then I must go." To
remain, she felt, was to concede everything. And
she would have to go to-morrow. It was clear it must
be to-morrow. If she delayed a day she would delay
two days, if she delayed two days she would delay a
week, and after a week things would be adjusted to
submission forever. "I'll go," she vowed to the night,
"or I'll die!" She made plans and estimated means
and resources. These and her general preparations
had perhaps a certain disproportion. She had a gold
watch, a very good gold watch that had been her
mother's, a pearl necklace that was also pretty good,
some unpretending rings, some silver bangles and a few
other such inferior trinkets, three pounds thirteen

95

ANN VERONICA

shillings unspent of her dress and book allowance,
and a few good salable books. So equipped, she
proposed to set up a separate establishment in the
world.

And then she would find work.

For most of a long and fluctuating night she was
fairly confident that she would find work; she knew
herself to be strong, intelligent, and capable by the
standards of most of the girls she knew. She was
not quite clear how she should find it, but she felt she
would. Then she would write and tell her father what
she had done, and put their relationship on a new
footing.

That was how she projected it, and in general terms
it seemed plausible and possible. But in between these
wider phases of comparative confidence were gaps of
disconcerting doubt, when the universe was presented
as making sinister and threatening faces at her, defying
her to defy, preparing a humiliating and shameful
overthrow. "I don't care," said Ann Veronica to the
darkness; "I'll fight it."

She tried to plan her proceedings in detail. The
only difficulties that presented themselves clearly to
her were the difficulties of getting away from Morning-
side Park, and not the difficulties at the other end of
the journey. These were so outside her experience
that she found it possible to thrust them almost out
of sight by saying they would be "all right" in con-
fident tones to herself. But still she knew they were
not right, and at times they became a horrible obsession
as of something waiting for her round the corner. She
tried to imagine herself "getting something," to project

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THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

herself as sitting down at a desk and writing, or as
returning after her work to some pleasantly equipped
and free and independent flat. For a time she furnished
the flat. But even with that furniture it remained
extremely vague, the possible good and the possible
evil as well! The possible evil! "I'll go," said Ann
Veronica for the hundredth time. "I'll go. I don't
care what happens."

She awoke out of a doze, as though she had never
been sleeping. It was time to get up.

She sat on the edge of her bed and looked about
her, at her room, at the row of black-covered books
and the pig's skull. "I must take them," she said,
to help herself over her own incredulity. "How shall
I get my luggage out of the house? ..."

The figure of her aunt, a little distant, a little pro-
pitiatory, behind the coffee things, filled her with a
sense of almost catastrophic adventure. Perhaps she
might never come back to that breakfast-room again.
Never! Perhaps some day, quite soon, she might
regret that breakfast-room. She helped herself to the
remainder of the slightly congealed bacon, and re-
verted to the problem of getting her luggage out of the
house. She decided to call in the help of Teddy Widgett,
or, failing him, of one of his sisters.

§ 2

She found the younger generation of the Widgetts
engaged in languid reminiscences, and all, as they
expressed it, a "bit decayed." Every one became

97

ANN VERONICA

tremendously animated when they heard that Ann
Veronica had failed them because she had been, as
she expressed it, "locked in."

"My God!" said Teddy, more impressively than ever.

"But what are you going to do?" asked Hetty.

"What can one do?" asked Ann Veronica. "Would
you stand it ? I'm going to clear out."

"Clear out?" cried Hetty.

"Go to London," said Ann Veronica.

She had expected sympathetic admiration, but
instead the whole Widgett family, except Teddy,
expressed a common dismay. "But how can you?"
asked Constance. "Who will you stop with?"

"I shall go on my own. Take a room!"

"I say!" said Constance. "But who's going to pay
for the room?"

"I've got money," said Ann Veronica. "Any-
thing is better than this — this stifled life down here."
And seeing that Hetty and Constance were obviously
developing objections, she plunged at once into a
demand for help. "I've got nothing in the world to
pack with except a toy size portmanteau. Can you lend
me some stuff?"

"You are a chap!" said Constance, and warmed
only slowly from the idea of dissuasion to the idea
of help. But they did what they 'could for her. They
agreed to lend her their hold-all and a large, formless
bag which they called the communal trunk. And Teddy
declared himself ready to go to the ends of the earth
for her, and carry her luggage all the way.

Hetty, looking out of the window — she always
smoked her after-breakfast cigarette at the window

98

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

for the benefit of the less advanced section of Morning-
side Park society — and trying not to raise objections,
saw Miss Stanley going down toward the shops.

"If you must go on with it," said Hetty, "now's
your time." And Ann Veronica at once went back
with the hold-all, trying not to hurry indecently but
to keep up her dignified air of being a wronged person
doing the right thing at a smart trot, to pack. Teddy
went round by the garden backs and dropped the
bag over the fence. All this was exciting and enter-
taining. Her aunt returned before the packing was
done, and Ann Veronica lunched with an uneasy sense
of bag and hold-all packed up-stairs and inadequately
hidden from chance intruders by the valance of the bed.
She went down, flushed and light-hearted, to the
Widgetts' after lunch to make some final arrangements,
and then, as soon as her aunt had retired to lie down
for her usual digestive hour, took the risk of the servants
having the enterprise to report her proceedings and
carried her bag and hold-all to the garden gate, whence
Teddy, in a state of ecstatic service, bore them to the
railway station. Then she went up-stairs again, dressed
herself carefully for town, put on her most businesslike-
looking hat, and with a wave of emotion she found
it hard to control, walked down to catch the 3.17 up-
train.

Teddy handed her into the second-class compartment
her season-ticket warranted, and declared she was
"simply splendid." "If you want anything," he said,
"or get into any trouble, wire me. I'd come back from
the ends of the earth. I'd do anything, Vee. It's hor-
rible to think of you!"

99

ANN VERONICA

"You're an awful brick, Teddy!" she said.

"Who wouldn't be — for you?"

The train began to move. "You're splendid!" said
Teddy, with his hair wild in the wind. "Good luck!
Good luck!"

She waved from the window until the bend hid him.

She found herself alone in the train asking herself
what she must do next, and trying not to think of her-
self as cut off from home or any refuge whatever from
the world she had resolved to face. She felt smaller
and more adventurous even than she had expected to
feel. "Let me see," she said to herself, trying to control
a slight sinking of the heart, " I am going to take a room
in a lodging-house because that is cheaper. . . . But per-
haps I had better get a room in an hotel to-night and
look round. . . .

"It's bound to be all right," she said.

But her heart kept on sinking. What hotel should she
go to? If she told a cabman to drive to an hotel, any
hotel, what would he do — or say? He might drive to
something dreadfully expensive, and not at all the quiet
sort of thing she required. Finally she decided that
even for an hotel she must look round, and that mean-
while she would "book" her luggage at Waterloo. She
told the porter to take it to the booking-office, and it
was only after a disconcerting moment or so that she
found she ought to have directed him to go to the cloak-
room. But that was soon put right, and she walked out
into London with a peculiar exaltation of mind, an ex-
altation that partook of panic and defiance, but was
chiefly a sense of vast unexampled release.

She inhaled a deep breath of air — London air.

100

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

§3

She dismissed the first hotels she passed, she scarcely
knew why, mainly perhaps from the mere dread of en-
tering them, and crossed Waterloo Bridge at a leisurely
pace. It was high afternoon, there was no great throng
of foot-passengers, and many an eye from omnibus and
pavement rested gratefully on her fresh, trim presence
as she passed young and erect, with the light of deter-
mination shining through the quiet self-possession of her
face. She was dressed as English girls do dress for town,
without either coquetry or harshness: her collarless
blouse confessed a pretty neck, her eyes were bright and
steady, and her dark hair waved loosely and graciously
over her ears. . . .

It seemed at first the most beautiful afternoon of all
time to her, and perhaps the thrill of her excitement did
add a distinctive and culminating keenness to the day.
The river, the big buildings on the north bank, West-
minster, and St. Paul's, were rich and wonderful with the
soft sunshine of London, the softest, the finest grained,
the most penetrating and least emphatic sunshine in the
world. The very carts and vans and cabs that Welling-
ton Street poured out incessantly upon the bridge
seemed ripe and good in her eyes. A traffic of copious
barges slumbered over the face of the river — barges
either altogether stagnant or dreaming along in the wake
of fussy tugs; and above circled, urbanely voracious, the
London seagulls. She had never been there before at
that hour, in that light, and it seemed to her as if she
came to it all for the first time. And this great mellow
place, this London, now was hers, to struggle with, to go

101

ANN VERONICA

where she pleased in, to overcome and live in. "I am
glad," she told herself, "I came."

She marked an hotel that seemed neither opulent nor
odd in a little side street opening on the Embankment,
made up her mind with an effort, and, returning by
Hungerford Bridge to Waterloo, took a cab to this
chosen refuge with her two pieces of luggage. There
was just a minute's hesitation before they gave her a
room. The young lady in the bureau said she would in'
quire, and Ann Veronica, while she affected to read the
appeal on a hospital collecting-box upon the bureau
counter, had a disagreeable sense of being surveyed from
behind by a small, whiskered gentleman in a frock-coat,
who came out of the inner office and into the hall among
a number of equally observant green porters to look at
her and her bags. But the survey was satisfactory,
and she found herself presently in Room No. 47,
straightening her hat and waiting for her luggage to
appear.

"All right so far," she said to herself. . . .

§4

But presently, as she sat on the one antimacassared
red silk chair and surveyed her hold-all and bag in that
tidy, rather vacant, and dehumanized apartment, with
its empty wardrobe and desert toilet-table and picture-
less walls and stereotyped furnishings, a sudden blank-
ness came upon her as though she didn't matter, and had
been thrust away into this impersonal corner, she and
her gear. . . .

102

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

She decided to go out into the London afternoon again
and get something to eat in an Aerated Bread shop or
some such place, and perhaps find a cheap room for her-
self. Of course that was what she had to do ; she had to
find a cheap room for herself and work! This Room
No. 47 was no more than a sort of railway compartment
on the way to that.

How does one get work ?

She walked along the Strand and across Trafalgar
Square, and by the Haymarket to Piccadilly, and so
through dignified squares and palatial alleys to Oxford
Street ; and her mind was divided between a speculative
treatment of employment on the one hand, and breezes
— zephyr breezes — of the keenest appreciation for Lon-
don, on the other. The jolly part of it was that for the
first time in her life so far as London was concerned, she
was not going anywhere in particular; for the first time
in her life it seemed to her she was taking London in.

She tried to think how people get work. Ought she
to walk into some of these places and tell them what she
could do ? She hesitated at the window of a shipping-
office in Cockspur Street and at the Army and Navy
Stores, but decided that perhaps there would be some
special and customary hour, and that it would be better
for her to find this out before she made her attempt.
And, besides, she didn't just immediately want to make
her attempt.

She fell into a pleasant dream of positions and work.
Behind every one of these myriad fronts she passed
there must be a career or careers. Her ideas of women's
employment and a modern woman's pose in life were
based largely on the figure of Vivie Warren in Mrs.

103

ANN VERONICA

Warren's Profession. She had seen Mrs. Warren's
Profession furtively with Hetty Widgett from the gal-
lery of a Stage Society performance one Monday after-
noon. Most of it had been incomprehensible to her,
or comprehensible in a way that checked further curi-
osity, but the figure of Vivien, hard, capable, successful,
and bullying, and ordering about a veritable Teddy in
the person of Frank Gardner, appealed to her. She
saw herself in very much Vivie's position — managing
something.

Her thoughts were deflected from Vivie Warren by
the peculiar behavior of a middle-aged gentleman in
Piccadilly. He appeared suddenly from the infinite in
the neighborhood of the Burlington Arcade, crossing
the pavement toward her and with his eyes upon her.
He seemed to her indistinguishably about her father's
age. He wore a silk hat a little tilted, and a morning
coat buttoned round a tight, contained figure; and a
white slip gave a finish to his costume and endorsed the
quiet distinction of his tie. His face was a little flushed
perhaps, and his small, brown eyes were bright. He
stopped on the curb-stone, not facing her but as if he
was on his way to cross the road, and spoke to her sud-
denly over his shoulder.

"Whither away?" he said, very distinctly in a curi-
ously wheedling voice. Ann Veronica stared at his
foolish, propitiatory smile, his hungry gaze, through one
moment of amazement, then stepped aside and went on
her way with a quickened step. But her mind was
ruffled, and its mirror-like surface of satisfaction was not
easily restored.

Queer old gentleman!

104

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

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 could at the same time ask
herself what this queer old gentleman could have meant
by speaking to her, and know — know in general terms,
at least — what that accosting signified. About her, as
she had gone day by day to and from the Tredgold
College, she had seen and not seen many an incidental
aspect of those sides of life about which girls are ex-
pected to know nothing, aspects that were extraordi-
narily relevant to her own position and outlook on the
world, and yet by convention ineffably remote. For
all that she was of exceptional intellectual enterprise,
she had never yet considered these things with un-
averted eyes. She had viewed them askance, and
without exchanging ideas with any one else in the
world about them.

She went on her way now no longer dreaming and
appreciative, but disturbed and unwillingly observant
behind her mask of serene contentment.

That delightful sense of free, unembarrassed move-
ment was gone.

As she neared the bottom of the dip in Piccadilly she
saw a woman approaching her from the opposite direc-
tion— a tall woman who at the first glance seemed alto-
gether beautiful and fine. She came along with the
fluttering assurance of some tall ship. Then as she drew
nearer paint showed upon her face, and a harsh purpose
behind the quiet expression of her open countenance,
and a sort of unreality in her splendor betrayed itself
for which Ann Veronica could not recall the right word

105

ANN VERONICA

— a word, half understood, that lurked and hid in her
mind, the word "meretricious." Behind this woman
and a little to the side of her, walked a man smartly
dressed, with desire and appraisal in his eyes. Some-
thing insisted that those two were mysteriously linked —
that the woman knew the man was there.

It was a second reminder that against her claim to go
free and untrammelled there was a case to be made,
that after all it was true that a girl does not go alone
in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone
in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and
petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk.

It was in the quiet streets and squares toward Oxford
Street that it first came into her head disagreeably that
she herself was being followed. She observed a man
walking on the opposite side of the way and looking
toward her.

" Bother it all!" she swore. " Bother!" and decided that
this was not so, and would not look to right or left again.

Beyond the Circus Ann Veronica went into a British
Tea-Table Company shop to get some tea. And as she
was yet waiting for her tea to come she saw this man
again. Either it was an unfortunate recovery of a
trail, or he had followed her from Mayfair. There was
no mistaking his intentions this time. He came down
the shop looking for her quite obviously, and took up
a position on the other side against a mirror in which
he was able to regard her steadfastly.

Beneath the serene unconcern of Ann Veronica's face
was a boiling tumult. She was furiously angry. She
gazed with a quiet detachment toward the window and
the Oxford Street traffic, and in her heart she was busy

1 06

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

kicking this man to death. He had followed her!
What had he followed her for? He must have followed
her all the way from beyond Grosvenor Square.

He was a tall man and fair, with bluish eyes that were
rather protuberant, and long white hands of which he
made a display. He had removed his silk hat, and now
sat looking at Ann Veronica over an untouched cup of
tea; he sat gloating upon her, trying to catch her eye.
Once, when he thought he had done so, he smiled an
ingratiating smile. He moved, after quiet intervals,
with a quick little movement, and ever and again stroked
his small mustache and coughed a self-conscious cough.

"That he should be in the same world with me!"
said Ann Veronica, reduced to reading the list of good
things the British Tea-Table Company had priced for
its patrons.

Heaven knows what dim and tawdry conceptions of
passion and desire were in that blond cranium, what
romance-begotten dreams of intrigue and adventure!
but they sufficed, when presently Ann Veronica went
out into the darkling street again, to inspire a flitting,
dogged pursuit, idiotic, exasperating, indecent.

She had no idea what she should do. If she spoke
to a policeman she did not know what would ensue.
Perhaps she would have to charge this man and appear
in a police-court next day.

She became angry with herself. She would not be
driven in by this persistent, sneaking aggression. She
would ignore him. Surely she could ignore him. She
stopped abruptly, and looked in a flower-shop window.
He passed, and came loitering back and stood beside
her, silently looking into her face,
s 107

ANN VERONICA

The afternoon had passed now into twilight. The
shops were lighting up into gigantic lanterns of color,
the street lamps were glowing into existence, and she
had lost her way. She had lost her sense of direction,
and was among unfamiliar streets. She went on from
street to street, and all the glory of London had de-
parted. Against the sinister, the threatening, mon-
strous inhumanity of the limitless city, there was nothing
now but this supreme, ugly fact of a pursuit — the pur-
suit of the undesired, persistent male.

For a second time Ann Veronica wanted to swear at
the universe.

There were moments when she thought of turning
upon this man and talking to him. But there was
something in his face at once stupid and invincible that
told her he would go on forcing himself upon her, that
he would esteem speech with her a great point gained.
In the twilight he had ceased to be a person one could
tackle and shame; he had become something more gen-
eral, a something that crawled and sneaked toward her
and would not let her alone. . . .

Then, when the tension was getting unendurable,
and she was on the verge of speaking to some casual
passer-by and demanding help, her follower vanished.
For a time she could scarcely believe he was gone. He
had. The night had swallowed him up, but his work
on her was done. She had lost her nerve, and there
was no more freedom in London for her that night.
She was glad to join in the stream of hurrying home-
ward workers that was now welling out of a thousand
places of employment, and to imitate their driven, pre-
occupied haste. She had followed a bobbing white

1 08

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

hat and gray jacket until she reached the Euston Road
corner of Tottenham Court Road, and there, by the
name on a bus and the cries of a conductor, she made a
guess of her way. And she did not merely affect to be
driven — she felt driven. She was afraid people would
follow her, she was afraid of the dark, open doorways she
passed, and afraid of the blazes of light; she was afraid
to be alone, and she knew not what it was she feared.

It was past seven when she got back to her hotel.
She thought then that she had shaken off the man of
the bulging blue eyes forevei, but that night she found
he followed her into her dreams. He stalked her, he
stared at her, he craved her, he sidled slinking and pro-
pitiatory and yet relentlessly toward her, until at last
she awoke from the suffocating nightmare nearness of
his approach, and lay awake in fear and horror listening
to the unaccustomed sounds of the hotel.

She came very near that night to resolving that she
would return to her home next morning. But the morn-
ing brought courage again, and those first intimations
of horror vanished completely from her mind.

§ 5

She had sent her father a telegram from the East
Strand post-office worded thus:

All

is

well

with

me

and

quite

safe

Veronica

109

ANN VERONICA

and afterward she had dined h la carte upon a cutlet,
and had then set herself to write an answer to Mr. Man-
ning's proposal of marriage. But she had found it very
difficult.

"DEAR MR. MANNING," she had begun. So far it
had been plain sailing, and it had seemed fairly evident
to go on: "/ find it very difficult to answer your letter."

But after that neither ideas nor phrases had come,
and she had fallen thinking of the events of the day.
She had decided that she would spend the next morn-
ing answering advertisements in the papers that abound-
ed in the writing-room; and so, after half an hour's pe-
rusal of back numbers of the Sketch in the drawing-room,
she had gone to bed.

She found next morning, when she came to this
advertisement answering, that it was more difficult
than she had supposed. In the first place there were
not so many suitable advertisements as she had expect-
ed. She sat down by the paper-rack with a general
feeling of resemblance to Vivie Warren, and looked
through the Morning Post and Standard and Telegraph,
and afterward the half-penny sheets. The Morning
Post was hungry for governesses and nursery governesses,
but held out no other hopes; the Daily Telegraph that
morning seemed eager only for skirt hands. She went
to a writing-desk and made some memoranda on a sheet
of note-paper, and then remembered that she had no
address as yet to which letters could be sent.

She decided to leave this matter until the morrow
and devote the morning to settling up with Mr. Man-
no

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

ning. At the cost of quite a number of torn drafts she
succeeded in evolving this:

" DEAR MR. MANNING, — I find it very difficult to answer
your letter. I hope you won't mind if I say first that I
think it does me an extraordinary honor that you should
think of any one like myself so highly and seriously, and,
secondly, that I wish it had not been written"

She surveyed this sentence for some time before going
on. "I wonder," she said, "why one writes him sen-
tences like that? It '11 have to go," she decided, "I've
written too many already." She went on, with a des-
perate attempt to be easy and colloquial:

" You see, we were rather good friends, I thought, and
now perhaps it will be difficult for us to get back to the old
friendly footing. But if that can possibly be done I want
it to be done. You see, the plain fact of the case is that I
think I am too young and ignorant for marriage. I have
been thinking these things over lately, and it seems to me
that marriage for a girl is just the supremest thing in life.
It isn't just one among a number of important things; for
her it is the important thing, and until she knows far more
than I know of the facts of life, how is she to undertake it?
So please, if you will, forget that you wrote that letter, and
forgive this answer. 1 want you to think of me just as if
I was a man, and quite outside marriage altogether.

" I do hope you will be able to do this, because I value
men friends. I shall be very sorry if I cannot have you
for a friend. I think that there is no better friend for a
girl than a man rather older than herself.

in

ANN VERONICA

"Perhaps by this time you will have heard of the step
I have taken in leaving my home. Very likely you will
disapprove highly of what I have done — / wonder? You
may, perhaps, think I have done it just in a fit of childish
petulance because my father locked me in when I wanted
to go to a ball of which he did not approve. But really it
is much more than that. At Morningside Park I feel as
though all my growing up was presently to stop, as though
I was being shut in from the light of life, and, as they say
in botany, etiolated. I was just like a sort of dummy that
does things as it is told — that is to say, as the strings are
pulled. I want to be a person by myself, and to pull my
own strings. I had rather have trouble and hardship like
that than be taken care of by others. I want to be myself.
I wonder if a man can quite understand tliat passionate
feeling? It is quite a passionate feeling. So I am al-
ready no longer the girl you knew at Morningside Park.
I am a young person seeking employment and freedom
and self-development, just as in quite our first talk of
all I said I wanted to be.

"I do hope you will see how things are, and not be
offended with me or frightfully shocked and distressed
by what I have done.

" Very sincerely yours,

"ANN VERONICA STANLEY."

§ 6

In the afternoon she resumed her search for apart-
ments. The intoxicating sense of novelty had given
place to a more business-like mood. She drifted north-

112

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

ward from the Strand, and came on some queer and
dingy quarters.

She had never imagined life was half so sinister as
it looked to her in the beginning of these investigations.
She found herself again in the presence of some element
in life about which she had been trained not to think,
about which she was perhaps instinctively indisposed
to think; something which jarred, in spite of all her
mental resistance, with all her preconceptions of a clean
and courageous girl walking out from Morningside Park
as one walks out of a cell into a free and spacious world.
One or two landladies refused her with an air of conscious
virtue that she found hard to explain. "We don't
let to ladies," they said.

She drifted, via Theobald's Road, obliquely toward
the region about Titchfield Street. Such apartments
as she saw were either scandalously dirty or unaccount-
ably dear, or both. And some were adorned with engrav-
ings that struck her as being more vulgar and undesir-
able than anything she had ever seen in her life. Ann
Veronica loved beautiful things, and the beauty of
un draped loveliness not least among them; but these
were pictures that did but insist coarsely upon the round-
ness of women's bodies. The windows of these rooms
were obscured with draperies, their floors a carpet
patchwork; the china ornaments on their mantels were
of a class apart. After the first onset several of the
women who had apartments to let said she would not
do for them, and in effect dismissed her. This also
struck her as odd.

About many of these houses hung a mysterious
taint as of something weakly and commonly and dustily

ANN VERONICA

evil; the women who negotiated the rooms looked
out through a friendly manner as though it was a mask,
with hard, defiant eyes. Then one old crone, short-
sighted and shaky-handed, called Ann Veronica "dearie,"
and made some remark, obscure and slangy, of which
the spirit rather than the words penetrated to her
understanding.

For a time she looked at no more apartments, and
walked through gaunt and ill-cleaned streets, through
the sordid under side of life, perplexed and troubled,
ashamed of her previous obtuseness. She had some-
thing of the feeling a Hindoo must experience who has
been into surroundings or touched something that
offends his caste. She passed people in the streets
and regarded them with a quickening apprehension;
once or twice came girls dressed in slatternly finery,
going toward Regent Street from out these places.
It did not occur to her that they at least had found a
way of earning a living, and had that much economic
superiority to herself. It did not occur to her that save
for some accidents of education and character they had
souls like her own.

For a time Ann Veronica went on her way gauging
the quality of sordid streets. At last, a little way to
the northward of Euston Road, the moral cloud seemed
to lift, the moral atmosphere to change; clean blinds
appeared in the windows, clean doorsteps before the
doors, a different appeal in the neatly placed cards
bearing the word

APARTMENTS
114

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

in the clear bright windows. At last in a street near
the Hampstead Road she hit upon a room that had
an exceptional quality of space and order, and a tall
woman with a kindly face to show it. "You're a
student, perhaps?" said the tall woman. "At the
Tredgold Women's College," said Ann Veronca. She
felt it would save explanations if she did not state she
had left her home and was looking for employment.
The room was papered with green, large-patterned
paper that was at worst a trifle dingy, and the arm-chair
and the seats of the other chairs were covered with the
unusual brightness of a large-patterned chintz, which
also supplied the window-curtain. There was a round
table covered, not with the usual "tapestry" cover,
but with a plain green cloth that went passably with the
wall-paper. In the recess beside the fireplace were some
open bookshelves. The carpet was a quiet drugget
and not excessively worn, and the bed in the corner
was covered by a white quilt. There were neither
texts nor rubbish on the walls, but only a stirring
version of Belshazzar's feast, a steel engraving in the
early Victorian manner that had some satisfactory
blacks. And the woman who showed this room was
tall, with an understanding eye and the quiet manner
of the well-trained servant.

Ann Veronica brought her luggage in a cab from the
hotel; she tipped the hotel porter sixpence and overpaid
the cabman eighteenpence, unpacked some of her books
and possessions, and so made the room a little homelike,
and then sat down in a by no means uncomfortable
arm-chair before the fire. She had arranged for a supper
of tea, a boiled egg, and some tinned peaches. She

"5

ANN VERONICA

had discussed the general question of supplies with the
helpful landlady. "And now," said Ann Veronica,
surveying her apartment with an unprecedented sense
of proprietorship, "what is the next step?"

She spent the evening in writing — it was a little
difficult — to her father and — which was easier — to
the Widgetts. She was greatly heartened by doing
this. The necessity of defending herself and assuming
a confident and secure tone did much to dispell the
sense of being exposed and indefensible in a huge
dingy world that abounded in sinister possibilities.
She addressed her letters, meditated on them for a
time, and then took them out and posted them. After-
ward she wanted to get her letter to her father back
in order to read it over again, and, if it tallied with her
general impression of it, re-write it.

He would know her address to-morrow. She re-
flected upon that with a thrill of terror that was also,
somehow, in some faint remote way, gleeful.

"Dear old Daddy," she said, "he'll make a fearful
fuss. Well, it had to happen somewhen. . . . Somehow.
I wonder what he'll say?"

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

EXPOSTULATIONS
§ I

THE next morning opened calmly, and Ann Veronica
sat in her own room, her very own room, and con-
sumed an egg and marmalade, and read the adver-
tisements in the Daily Telegraph. Then began ex-
postulations, preluded by a telegram and headed by her
aunt. The telegram reminded Ann Veronica that she
had no place for interviews except her bed-sitting-room,
and she sought her landlady and negotiated hastily for
the use of the ground floor parlor, which very fortunately
was vacant. She explained she was expecting an im-
portant interview, and asked that her visitor should be
duly shown in. Her aunt arrived about half-past ten,
in black and with an unusually thick spotted veil. She
raised this with the air of a conspirator unmasking, and
displayed a tear-flushed face. For a moment she re-
mained silent.

"My dear," she said, when she could get her breath,
"you must come home at once."

Ann Veronica closed the door quite softly and stood
still.

"This has almost killed your father. . . . After Gwen!"
117

ANN VERONICA

"I sent a telegram."

"He cares so much for you. He did so care for you."

"I sent a telegram to say I was all right."

"All right! And I never dreamed anything of the
sort was going on. I had no idea!" She sat down
abruptly and threw her wrists limply upon the table.
"Oh, Veronica!" she said, "to leave your home!"

She had been weeping. She was weeping now. Ann
Veronica was overcome by this amount of emotion.

"Why did you do it?" her aunt urged. "Why could
you not confide in us?"

"Do what?" said Ann Veronica.

"What you have done."

"But what have I done?"

"Elope! Go off in this way. We had no idea. We
had such a pride in you, such hope in you. I had no
idea you were not the happiest girl. Everything I could
do! Your father sat up all night. Until at last I per-
suaded him to go to bed. He wanted to put on his over-
coat and come after you and look for you — in London.
We made sure — it was just like Gwen. Only Gwen left
a letter — on the pincushion. You didn't even do that,
Vee; not even that."

"I sent a telegram, aunt," said Ann Veronica.

1 ' Like a stab . You didn't even put the twelve words. ' '

"I said I was all right."

"Gwen said she was happy. Before that came your
father didn't even know you were gone. He was just
getting cross about your being late for dinner — you know
his way — when it came. He opened it — just off-hand,
and then when he saw what it was he hit at the table and
sent his soup spoon flying and splashing on to the table-

118

EXPOSTULATIONS

cloth. 'My Godl' he said, 'I'll go after them and kill
him. I'll go after them and kill him.' For the moment
I thought it was a telegram from Gwen."

"But what did father imagine?"

"Of course he imagined ! Any one would ! ' What has
happened, Peter?' I asked. He was standing up with
the telegram crumpled in his hand. He used a most
awful word! Then he said, 'It's Ann Veronica gone to
join her sister!' 'Gone!' I said. 'Gone!' he said.
'Read that,' and threw the telegram at me, so that it
went into the tureen. He swore when I tried to get it
out with the ladle, and told me what it said. Then he
sat down again in a chair and said that people who
wrote novels ought to be strung up. It was as much as
I could do to prevent him flying out of the house there
and then and coming after you. Never since I was a
girl have I seen your father so moved. 'Oh! little Vee!'
he cried, 'little Vee!' and put his face between his hands
and sat still for a long time before he broke out again."

Ann Veronica had remained standing while her aunt
spoke.

"Do you mean, aunt," she asked, "that my father
thought I had gone off — with some man?"

"What else could he think? Would any one dream
you would be so mad as to go off alone?"

"After — after what had happened the night before?"

"Oh, why raise up old scores? If you could see him
this morning, his poor face as white as a sheet and all
cut about with shaving! He was for coming up by the
very first train and looking for you, but I said to him,
'Wait for the letters,' and there, sure enough, was yours.
He could hardly open the envelope, he trembled so,

119

ANN VERONICA

Then he threw the letter at me. ' Go and fetch her home,'
he said; 'it isn't what we thought! It's just a practical
joke of hers.' And with that he went off to the City,
stern and silent, leaving his bacon on his plate — a great
slice of bacon hardly touched. No breakfast he's had;
no dinner, hardly a mouthful of soup — since yesterday
at tea."

She stopped. Aunt and niece regarded each other
silently.

"You must come home to him at once," said Miss
Stanley.

Ann Veronica looked down at her fingers on the claret-
colored table-cloth. Her aunt had summoned up an
altogether too vivid picture of her father as the masterful
man, overbearing, emphatic, sentimental, noisy, aimless.
Why on earth couldn't he leave her to grow in her own
way? Her pride rose at the bare thought of return.
"I don't think I can do that," she said. She looked up
and said, a little breathlessly, "I'm sorry, aunt, but I
don't think I can."

§ 2

Then it was the expostulations really began.

From first to last, on this occasion, her aunt ex-
postulated for about two hours. "But, my dear," she
began, "it is Impossible! It is quite out of the Ques-
tion. You simply can't." And to that, through vast
rhetorical meanderings, she clung. It reached her only
slowly that Ann Veronica was standing to her resolution.
"How will you live?" she appealed. "Think of what
people will say!" That became a refrain. "Think of

120

EXPOSTULATIONS

what Lady Palsworthy will say! Think of what" —
So-and-so — "will say! What are we to tell people?

"Besides, what am I to tell your father?"

At first it had not been at all clear to Ann Veronica
that she would refuse to return home ; she had had some
dream of a capitulation that should leave her an enlarged
and denned freedom, but as her aunt put this aspect
and that of her flight to her, as she wandered illogically
and inconsistently from one urgent consideration to an-
other, as she mingled assurances and aspects and emo-
tions, it became clearer and clearer to the girl that there
could be little or no change in the position of things if
she returned. "And what will Mr. Manning think?"
said her aunt.

"I don't care what any one thinks," said Ann Ve-
ronica.

"I can't imagine what has come over you," said her
aunt. " I can't conceive what you want. You foolish
girl!"

Ann Veronica took that in silence. At the back of
her mind, dim and yet disconcerting, was the perception
that she herself did not know what she wanted. . And
yet she knew it was not fair to call her a foolish
girl.

"Don't you care for Mr. Manning?" said her aunt.

"I don't see what he has to do with my coming to
London?"

" He — he worships the ground you tread on. You
don't deserve it, but he does. Or at least he did the
day before yesterday. And here you are!"

Her aunt opened all the fingers of her gloved hand
in a rhetorical gesture. " It seems to me all madness —

121

ANN VERONICA

madness! Just because your father — wouldn't let you
disobey him!"

§3

In the afternoon the task of expostulation was taken
up by Mr. Stanley in person. Her father's ideas of
expostulation were a little harsh and forcible, and over
the claret-colored table-cloth and under the gas chan-
delier, with his hat and umbrella between them like
the mace in Parliament, he and his daughter contrived
to have a violent quarrel. She had intended to be
quietly dignified, but he was in a smouldering rage from
the beginning, and began by assuming, which alone was
more than flesh and blood could stand, that the insur-
rection was over and that she was coming home sub-
missively. In his desire to be emphatic and to avenge
himself for his over-night distresses, he speedily became
brutal, more brutal than she had ever known him before.

"A nice time of anxiety you've given me, young
lady," he said, as he entered the room. "I hope you're
satisfied."

She was frightened — his anger always did frighten
her — and in her resolve to conceal her fright she carried
a queen-like dignity to what she felt even at the time
was a preposterous pitch. She said she hoped she had
not distressed him by the course she had felt obliged
to take, and he told her not to be a fool. She tried to
keep her side up by declaring that he had put her into
an impossible position, and he replied by shouting,
" Nonsense! Nonsense! Any father in my place would
have done what I did."

122

EXPOSTULATIONS

Then he went on to say: "Well, you've had your lit-
tle adventure, and I hope now you've had enough of it.
So go up-stairs and get your things together while I
look out for a hansom."

To which the only possible reply seemed to be, "I'm
not coming home."

"Not coming home!"

"No!" And, in spite of her resolve to be a Person,
Ann Veronica began to weep with terror at herself.
Apparently she was always doomed to weep when she
talked to her father. But he was always forcing her to
say and do such unexpectedly conclusive things. She
feared he might take her tears as a sign of weakness.
So she said: "I won't come home. I'd rather starve!"

For a moment the conversation hung upon that
declaration. Then Mr. Stanley, putting his hands on
the table in the manner rather of a barrister than a
solicitor, and regarding her balefully through his glasses
with quite undisguised animosity, asked, " And may I
presume to inquire, then, what you mean to do? — how
do you propose to live?"

"I shall live," sobbed Ann Veronica. "You needn't
be anxious about that! I shall contrive to live."

"But I am anxious," said Mr. Stanley, "I am anx-
ious. Do you think it's nothing to me to have my
daughter running about London looking for odd jobs
and disgracing herself?"

"Sha'n't get odd jobs," said Ann Veronica, wiping
her eyes.

And from that point they went on to a thoroughly
embittering wrangle. Mr. Stanley used his authority,
and commanded Ann Veronica to come home, to which,
9 123

ANN VERONICA

of course, she said she wouldn't; and then he warned
her not to defy him, warned her very solemnly, and then
commanded her again. He then said that if she would
not obey him in this course she should "never darken
his doors again," and was, indeed, frightfully abusive.
This threat terrified Ann Veronica so much that she
declared with sobs and vehemence that she would never
come home again, and for a time both talked at once
and very wildly. He asked her whether she understood
what she was saying, and went on to say still more
precisely that she should never touch a penny of his
money until she came home again — not one penny.
Ann Veronica said she didn't care.

Then abruptly Mr. Stanley changed his key. "You
poor child!" he said; "don't you see the infinite folly
of these proceedings? Think! Think of the love and
affection you abandon! Think of your aunt, a sec-
ond mother to you. Think if your own mother was
alive!"

He paused, deeply moved.

" If my own mother was alive," sobbed Ann Veronica,
"she would understand."

The talk became more and more inconclusive and ex-
hausting. Ann Veronica found herself incompetent,
undignified, and detestable, holding on desperately to a
hardening antagonism to her father, quarrelling with
him, wrangling with him, thinking of repartees — almost
as if he was a brother. It was horrible, but what could
she do ? She meant to live her own life, and he meant,
with contempt and insults, to prevent her. Anything
else that was said she now regarded only as an aspect of
or diversion from that.

124

EXPOSTULATIONS

In the retrospect she was amazed to think how things
had gone to pieces, for at the outset she had been quite
prepared to go home again upon terms. While waiting
for his coming she had stated her present and future
relations with him with what had seemed to her the
most satisfactory lucidity and completeness. She had
looked forward to an explanation. Instead had come
this storm, this shouting, this weeping, this confusion
of threats and irrelevant appeals. It was not only that
her father had said all sorts of inconsistent and unrea-
sonable things, but that by some incomprehensible in-
fection she herself had replied in the same vein. He
had assumed that her leaving home was the point at
issue, that everything turned on that, and that the sole
alternative was obedience, and she had fallen in with
that assumption until rebellion seemed a sacred prin-
ciple. Moreover, atrociously and inexorably, he allowed
it to appear ever and again in horrible gleams that he
suspected there was some man in the case. . . . Some
man!

And to conclude it all was the figure of her father in
the doorway, giving her a last chance, his hat in one
hand, his umbrella in the other, shaken at her to em-
phasize his point.

"You understand, then," he was saying, "you under-
stand?"

"I understand," said Ann Veronica, tear-wet and
flushed with a reciprocal passion, but standing up to
him with an equality that amazed even herself, "I
understand." She controlled a sob. "Not a pen-
ny— not one penny — and never darken your doors
again!"

"5

ANN VERONICA

§ 4

The next day her aunt came again and expostulated,
and was just saying it was "an unheard-of thing" for a
girl to leave her home as Ann Veronica had done, when
her father arrived, and was shown in by the pleasant-
faced landlady.

Her father had determined on a new line. He put
down his hat and umbrella, rested his hands on his hips,
and regarded Ann Veronica firmly.

"Now," he said, quietly, "it's time we stopped this
nonsense."

Ann Veronica was about to reply, when he went on,
with a still more deadly quiet: "I am not here to bandy
words with you. Let us have no more of this humbug.
You are to come home."

"I thought I explained — "

"I don't think you can have heard me," said her
father; "I have told you to come home."

"I thought I explained — "

"Come home!"

Ann Veronica shrugged her shoulders.

"Very well," said her father.

"I think this ends the business," he said, turning to
his sister. "It's not for us to supplicate any more.
She must learn wisdom — as God pleases."

"But, my dear Peter!" said Miss Stanley.

"No," said her brother, conclusively, "it's not for a
parent to go on persuading a child."

Miss Stanley rose and regarded Ann Veronica fixedly.
The girl stood with her hands behind her back, sulky,
resolute, and intelligent, a strand of her black hair over

126

EXPOSTULATIONS

one eye and looking more than usually delicate- featured,
and more than ever like an obdurate child.

"She doesn't know."

"She does."

" I can't imagine what makes you fly out against every-
thing like this," said Miss Stanley to her niece.

"What is the good of talking?" said her brother.
"She must go her own way. A man's children nowadays
are not his own. That's the fact of the matter. Their
minds are turned against him. . . . Rubbishy novels and
pernicious rascals. We can't even protect them from
themselves."

An immense gulf seemed to open between father and
daughter as he said these words.

" I don't see," gasped Ann Veronica, "why parents and
children . . . shouldn't be friends."

" Friends!" said her father. "When we see you going
through disobedience to the devil! Come, Molly, she
must go her own way. I've tried to use my authority.
And she defies me. What more is there to be said?
She defies me!"

It was extraordinary. Ann Veronica felt suddenly an
effect of tremendous pathos; she would have given any-
thing to have been able to frame and make some appeal,
some utterance that should bridge this bottomless chasm
that had opened between her and her father, and she
could find nothing whatever to say that was in the least
sincere and appealing.

"Father," she cried, "I have to live!"

He misunderstood her. "That," he said, grimly, with
his hand on the door-handle, "must be your own affair,
unless you choose to live at Morningside Park."

127

Miss Stanley turned to her. "Vee," she said, "come
home. Before it is too late."

"Come, Molly," said Mr. Stanley, at the door.

"Vee!" said Miss Stanley, "you hear what your father
says!"

Miss Stanley struggled with emotion. She made a
curious movement toward her niece, then suddenly, con-
vulsively, she dabbed down something lumpy on the
table and turned to follow her brother. Ann Veronica
stared for a moment in amazement at this dark-green ob-
ject that clashed as it was put down. It was a purse.
She made a step forward. "Aunt!" she said, " I can't — "

Then she caught a wild appeal in her aunt's blue eye,
halted, and the door clicked upon them.

There was a pause, and then the front door slammed. . . .

Ann Veronica realized that she was alone with the
world. And this time the departure had a tremendous
effect of finality. She had to resist an impulse of sheer
terror, to run out after them and give in.

"Gods," she said, at last, "I've done it this time!"

" Well!" She took up the neat morocco purse, opened
it, and examined the contents.

It contained three sovereigns, six and fourpence, two
postage stamps, a small key, and her aunt's return half
ticket to Morningside Park.

IS

After the interview Ann Veronica considered her-
self formally cut off from home. If nothing else had
clinched that, the purse had. Nevertheless there came

128

EXPOSTULATIONS

a residuum of expostulations. Her brother Roddy, who
was in the motor line, came to expostulate; her sister
Alice wrote. And Mr. Manning called.

Her sister Alice seemed to have developed a religious
sense away there in Yorkshire, and made appeals that
had no meaning for Ann Veronica's mind. She exhorted
Ann Veronica not to become one of "those unsexed
intellectuals, neither man nor woman."

Ann Veronica meditated over that phrase. "That's
him," said Ann Veronica, in sound, idiomatic English.
"Poor old Alice!"

Her brother Roddy came to her and demanded tea,
and asked her to state a case. "Bit thick on the old
man, isn't it?" said Roddy, who had developed a bluff,
straightforward style in the motor shop.

"Mind my smoking ?" said Roddy. " I don't see quite
what your game is, Vee, but I suppose you've got a
game on somewhere.

"Rummy lot we are!" said Roddy. "Alice — Alice
gone dotty, and all over kids. Gwen — I saw Gwen the
other day, and the paint 's thicker than ever. Jim is up
to the neck in Mahatmas and Theosophy and Higher
Thought and rot — writes letters worse than Alice. And
now you're on the war-path. I believe I'm the only
sane member of the family left. The G.V.'s as mad as
any of you, in spite of all his respectability; not a bit of
him straight anywhere, not one bit."

"Straight?"

"Not a bit of it! He's been out after eight per
cent, since the beginning. Eight per cent.! He'll
come a cropper one of these days, if you ask me. He's
been near it once or twice already. That's got his

129

ANN VERONICA

nerves to rags. I suppose we're all human beings
really, but what price the sacred Institution of the
Family! Us as a bundle! Eh? ... I don't half dis-
agree with you, Vee, really; only thing is, I don't see
how you're going to pull it off. A home may be a sort
of cage, but still — it's a home. Gives you a right to hang
on to the old man until he busts — practically. Jolly
hard life for a girl, getting a living. Not my affair."

He asked questions and listened to her views for
a time.

"I'd chuck this lark right off if I were you, Vee,"
he said. " I'm five years older than you, and no end
wiser, being a man. What you're after is too risky.
It's a damned hard thing to do. It's all very handsome
starting out on your own, but it's too damned hard.
That's my opinion, if you ask me. There's nothing a
girl can do that isn't sweated to the bone. You square
the G.V., and go home before you have to. That's
my advice. If you don't eat humble-pie now you may
live to fare worse later. I can't help you a cent. Life's
hard enough nowadays for an unprotected male. Let
alone a girl. You got to take the world as it is, and
the only possible trade for a girl that isn't sweated is
to get hold of a man and make him do it for her. It's
no good flying out at that, Vee; 7 didn't arrange it. It's
Providence. That's how things are; that's the order
of the world. Like appendicitis. It isn't pretty, but
we're made so. Rot, no doubt; but we can't alter it.
You go home and live on the G.V., and get some other
man to live on as soon as possible. It isn't sentiment,
but it's horse sense. All this Woman- who- Diddery —
no damn good. After all, old P. — Providence, I mean —

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EXPOSTULATIONS

has arranged it so that men will keep you, more or less.
He made the universe on those lines. You've got to
take what you can get."

That was the quintessence of her brother Roddy.

He played variations on this theme for the better
part of an hour.

"You go home," he said, at parting; "you go home.
It's all very fine and all that, Vee, this freedom, but
it isn't going to work. The world isn't ready for girls
to start out on their own yet; that's the plain fact of the
case. Babies and females have got to keep hold of
somebody or go under — anyhow, for the next few genera-
tions. You go home and wait a century, Vee, and then
try again. Then you may have a bit of a chance.
Now you haven't the ghost of one — not if you play the
game fair."

§ 6

It was remarkable to Ann Veronica how completely
Mr. Manning, in his entirely different dialect, indorsed
her brother Roddy's view of things. He came along,
he said, just to call, with large, loud apologies, radiantly
kind and good. Miss Stanley, it was manifest, had
given him Ann Veronica's address. The kindly faced
landlady had failed to catch his name, and said he was
a tall, handsome gentleman with a great black mustache.
Ann Veronica, with a sigh at the cost of hospitality,
made a hasty negotiation for an extra tea and for a
fire in the ground-floor apartment, and preened herself
carefully for the interview. In the little apartment,
under the gas chandelier, his inches and his stoop were

ANN VERONICA

certainly very effective. In the bad light he looked
at once military and sentimental and studious, like one
of Ouida's guardsmen revised by Mr. Haldane and the
London School of Economics and finished in the Keltic
school.

"It's unforgivable of me to call, Miss Stanley," he
said, shaking hands in a peculiar, high, fashionable
manner; "but you know you said we might be friends."

"It's dreadful for you to be here," he said, indicating
the yellow presence of the first fog of the year without,
" but your aunt told me something of what had happened.
It's just like your Splendid Pride to do it. Quite!"

He sat in the arm-chair and took tea, and consumed
several of the extra cakes which she had sent out for,
and talked to her and expressed himself, looking very
earnestly at her with his deep-set eyes, and carefully
avoiding any crumbs on his mustache the while. Ann
Veronica sat firelit by her tea-tray with, quite un-
consciously, the air of an expert hostess.

" But how is it all going to end ? " said Mr. Manning.

"Your father, of course," he said, "must come to
realize just how Splendid you are! He doesn't under-
stand. I've seen him, and he doesn't a bit understand.
/ didn't understand before that letter. It makes me
want to be just everything I can be to you. You're
like some splendid Princess in Exile in these Dreadful
Dingy apartments!"

"I'm afraid I'm anything but a Princess when it
comes to earning a salary," said Ann Veronica. " But,
frankly, I mean to fight this through if I possibly can."

" My God! " said Manning, in a stage-aside. " Earning
a salary!"

132

EXPOSTULATIONS

"You're like a Princess in Exile!" he repeated,
overruling her. " You come into these sordid surround-
ings— you mustn't mind my calling them sordid —
and it makes them seem as though they didn't matter.
... I don't think they do matter. I don't think any
surroundings could throw a shadow on you."

Ann Veronica felt a slight embarrassment. "Won't
you have some more tea, Mr. Manning?" she asked.

"You know," said Mr. Manning, relinquishing his
cup without answering her question, "when I hear you
talk of earning a living, it's as if I heard of an arch-
angel going on the Stock Exchange — or Christ selling
doves. . . . Forgive my daring. I couldn't help the
thought."

"It's a very good image," said Ann Veronica.

" I knew you wouldn't mind."

"But does it correspond with the facts of the case?
You know, Mr. Manning, all this sort of thing is very
well as sentiment, but does it correspond with the
realities? Are women truly such angelic things and
men so chivalrous? You men have, I know, meant to
make us Queens and Goddesses, but in practice — well,
look, for example, at the stream of girls one meets going
to work of a morning, round-shouldered, cheap, and
underfed! They aren't queens, and no one is treating
them as queens. And look, again, at the women one
finds letting lodgings. ... I was looking for rooms last
week. It got on my nerves — the women I saw. Worse
than any man. Everywhere I went and rapped at a
door I found behind it another dreadful dingy woman —
another fallen queen, I suppose — dingier than the last,
dirty, you know, in grain. Their poor hands!"

133

ANN VERONICA

"I know," said Mr. Manning, with entirely suitable
emotion.

" And think of the ordinary wives and mothers, with
their anxiety, their limitations, their swarms of children ! "

Mr. Manning displayed distress. He fended these
things off from him with the rump of his fourth piece
of cake. " I know that our social order is dreadful
enough," he said, "and sacrifices all that is best and
most beautiful in life. I don't defend it."

"And besides, when it comes to the idea of queens,"
Ann Veronica went on, "there's twenty-one and a half
million women to twenty million men. Suppose our
proper place is a shrine. Still, that leaves over a million
shrines short, not reckoning widows who re-marry. And
more boys die than girls, so that the real disproportion
among adults is even greater."

"I know," said Mr. Manning, "I know these Dreadful
Statistics. I know there's a sort of right in your im-
patience at the slowness of Progress. But tell me one
thing I don't understand — tell me one thing: How
can you help it by coming down into the battle and the
mire? That's the thing that concerns me."

"Oh, I'm not trying to help it," said Ann Veronica.
"I'm only arguing against your position of what a
woman should be, and trying to get it clear in my own
mind. I'm in this apartment and looking for work
because — Well, what else can I do, when my father
practically locks me up?"

"I know," said Mr. Manning, "I know. Don't think
I can't sympathize and understand. Still, here we are
in this dingy, foggy city. Ye gods! what a wilderness
it is! Every one trying to get the better of every one,

EXPOSTULATIONS

every one regardless of every one — it's one of those
days when every one bumps against you — every one
pouring coal smoke into the air and making confusion
worse confounded, motor omnibuses clattering and
smelling, a horse down in the Tottenham Court Road,
an old woman at the corner coughing dreadfully — all
the painful sights of a great city, and here you come
into it to take your chances. It's too valiant, Miss
Stanley, too valiant altogether!"

Ann Veronica meditated. She had had two days of
employment-seeking now. " I wonder if it is."

" It isn't," said Mr. Manning, " that I mind Courage in
a Woman — I love and admire Courage. What could be
more splendid than a beautiful girl facing a great, glori-
ous tiger? Una and the Lion again, and all that! But
this isn't that sort of thing; this is just a great, ugly, end-
less wilderness of selfish, sweating, vulgar competition!"

"That you want to keep me out of?"

"Exactly!" said Mr. Manning.

"In a sort of beautiful garden-close — wearing lovely
dresses and picking beautiful flowers?"

"Ah! If one could!"

" While those other girls trudge to business and those
other women let lodgings. And in reality even that
magic garden-close resolves itself into a villa at Morn-
ingside Park and my father being more and more cross
and overbearing at meals — and a general feeling of in-
security and futility."

Mr. Manning relinquished his cup, and looked mean-
ingly at Ann Veronica. "There," he said, "you don't
treat me fairly, Miss Stanley. My garden-close would
be a better thing than that."

135

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

IDEALS AND A REALITY
§ I

AND now for some weeks Ann Veronica was to test
her market value in the world. She went about in
a negligent November London that had become very
dark and foggy and greasy and forbidding indeed, and
tried to find that modest but independent employment
she had so rashly assumed. She went about, intent-
looking and self-possessed, trim and fine, concealing her
emotions whatever they were, as the realities of her
position opened out before her. Her little bed-sitting-
room was like a lair, and she went out from it into this
vast, dun world, with its smoke-gray houses, its glaring
streets of shops, its dark streets of homes, its orange-lit
windows, under skies of dull copper or muddy gray or
black, much as an animal goes out to seek food. She
would come back and write letters, carefully planned
and written letters, or read some book she had fetched
from Mudie's — she had invested a half-guinea with
Mudie's — or sit over her fire and think.

Slowly and reluctantly she came to realize that Vivie
Warren was what is called an "ideal." There were no
such girls and no such positions. No work that of-

136

IDEALS AND A REALITY

fered was at all of the quality she had vaguely postu-
lated for herself. With such qualifications as she pos-
sessed, two chief channels of employment lay open, and
neither attracted her, neither seemed really to offer a
conclusive escape from that subjection to mankind
against which, in the person of her father, she was
rebelling. One main avenue was for her to become a
sort of salaried accessory wife or mother, to be a gov-
erness or an assistant schoolmistress, or a very high type
of governess-nurse. The other was to go into business
— into a photographer's reception-room, for example,
or a costumier's or hat-shop. The first set of occupa-
tions seemed to her to be altogether too domestic and
restricted ; for the latter she was dreadfully handicapped
by her want of experience. And also she didn't like
them. She didn't like the shops, she didn't like the
other women's faces; she thought the smirking men in
frock-coats who dominated these establishments the
most intolerable persons she had ever had to face. One
called her very distinctly "My dear!"

Two secretarial posts did indeed seem to offer them-
selves in which, at least, there was no specific ex-
clusion of womanhood; one was under a Radical Mem-
ber of Parliament, and the other under a Harley Street
doctor, and both men declined her proffered services
with the utmost civility and admiration and terror.
There was also a curious interview at a big hotel with
a middle-aged, white-powdered woman, all covered with
jewels and reeking of scent, who wanted a Companion.
She did not think Ann Veronica would do as her com-
panion.

And nearly all these things were fearfully ill-paid.

ANN VERONICA

They carried no more than bare subsistence wages,
and they demanded all her time and energy. She
had heard of women journalists, women writers, and
so forth; but she was not even admitted to the pres-
ence of the editors she demanded to see, and by no
means sure that if she had been she could have done
any work they might have given her. One day she
desisted from her search and went unexpectedly to the
Tredgold College. Her place was not filled ; she had been
simply noted as absent, and she did a comforting day
of admirable dissection upon the tortoise. She was so
interested, and this was such a relief from the trudging
anxiety of her search for work, that she went on for a
whole week as if she was still living at home. Then a
third secretarial opening occurred and renewed her hopes
again : a position as amanuensis — with which some of the
lighter duties of a nurse were combined — to an infirm
gentleman of means living at Twickenham, and engaged
upon a great literary research to prove that the "Faery
Queen" was really a treatise upon molecular chemistry
written in a peculiar and picturesquely handled cipher.

§ 2

Now, while Ann Veronica was taking these soundings
in the industrial sea, and measuring herself against the
world as it is, she was also making extensive explorations
among the ideas and attitudes of a number of human
beings who seemed to be largely concerned with the
world as it ought to be. She was drawn first by Miss
Miniver, and then by her own natural interest, into a

138

IDEALS AND A REALITY

curious stratum of people who are busied with dreams
of world progress, of great and fundamental changes, of a
New Age that is to replace all the stresses and disorders
of contemporary life.

Miss Miniver learned of her flight and got her address
from the Widgetts. She arrived about nine o'clock
the next evening in a state of tremulous enthusiasm.
She followed the landlady half way up- stairs, and
called up to Ann Veronica, "May I come up? It's
me! You know — Nettie Miniver!" She appeared before
Ann Veronica could clearly recall who Nettie Miniver
might be.

There was a wild light in her eye, and her straight hair
was out demonstrating and suffragetting upon some
independent notions of its own. Her fingers were burst-
ing through her gloves, as if to get at once into touch
with Ann Veronica. "You're Glorious!" said Miss
Miniver in tones of rapture, holding a hand in each of
hers and peering up into Ann Veronica's face. " Glorious!
You're so calm, dear, and so resolute, so serene !

"It's girls like you who will show them what We are,"
said Miss Miniver; "girls whose spirits have not been
broken!"

Ann Veronica sunned herself a little in this warmth.

"I was watching you at Morningside Park, dear,"
said Miss Miniver. " I am getting to watch all women.
I thought then perhaps you didn't care, that you were
like so many of them. Now it's just as though you had
grown up suddenly."

She stopped, and then suggested: "I wonder — I should
love — if it was anything I said."

She did not wait for Ann Veronica's reply. She seem-
10 139

ANN VERONICA

ed to assume that it must certainly be something she
had said. "They all catch on," she said. "It spreads
like wildfire. This is such a grand time ! Such a glorious
time! There never was such a time as this! Every-
thing seems so close to fruition, so coming on and lead-
ing on! The Insurrection of Women! They spring up
everywhere. Tell me all that happened, one sister-
woman to another."

She chilled Ann Veronica a little by that last phrase,
and yet the magnetism of her fellowship and enthusiasm
was very strong; and it was pleasant to be made out a
heroine after so much expostulation and so many secret
doubts.

But she did not listen long; she wanted to talk. She
sat, crouched together, by the corner of the hearthrug
under the bookcase that supported the pig's skull, and
looked into the fire and up at Ann Veronica's face, and
let herself go. "Let us put the lamp out," she said;
"the flames are ever so much better for talking," and
Ann Veronica agreed. "You are coming right out into
life — facing it all."

Ann Veronica sat with her chin on her hand, red-
lit and saying little, and Miss Miniver discoursed. As
she talked, the drift and significance of what she was
saying shaped itself slowly to Ann Veronica's appre-
hension. It presented itself in the likeness of a great,
gray, dull world — a brutal, superstitious, confused, and
wrong-headed world, that hurt people and limited people
unaccountably. In remote times and countries its evil
tendencies had expressed themselves in the form of
tyrannies, massacres, wars, and what not; but just at
present in England they shaped as commercialism and

140

IDEALS AND A REALITY

competition, silk hats, suburban morals, the sweating
system, and the subjection of women. So far the thing
was acceptable enough. But over against the world
Miss Miniver assembled a small but energetic minority,
the Children of Light — people she described as "being in
the van," or "altogether in the van," about whom Ann
Veronica's mind was disposed to be more sceptical.

Everything, Miss Miniver said, was "working up,"
everything was "coming on" — the Higher Thought, the
Simple Life, Socialism, Humanitarianism, it was all the
same really. She loved to be there, taking part in it all,
breathing it, being it. Hitherto in the world's history
there had been precursors of this Progress at great in-
tervals, voices that had spoken and ceased, but now it
was all coming on together in a rush. She mentioned,
with familiar respect, Christ and Buddha and Shelley
and Nietzsche and Plato. Pioneers all of them. Such
names shone brightly in the darkness, with black spaces
of unilluminated emptiness about them, as stars shine
in the night; but now — now it was different; now it was
dawn — the real dawn.

"The women are taking it up," said Miss Miniver;
"the women and the common people, all pressing for-
ward, all roused."

Ann Veronica listened with her eyes on the fire.

"Everybody is taking it up," said Miss Miniver.
" You had to come in. You couldn't help it. Some-
thing drew you. Something draws everybody. From
suburbs, from country towns — everywhere. I see all
the Movements. As far as I can, I belong to them all.
I keep my ringer on the pulse of things."

Ann Veronica said nothing.
141

ANN VERONICA

"The dawn!" said Miss Miniver, with her glasses re-
flecting the fire like pools of blood-red flame.

"I came to London," said Ann Veronica, "rather be-
cause of my own difficulty. I don't know that I under-
stand altogether."

"Of course you don't," said Miss Miniver, gesticulat-
ing triumphantly with her thin hand and thinner wrist,
and patting Ann Veronica's knee. " Of course you don't.
That's the wonder of it. But you will, you will. You
must let me take you to things — to meetings and things,
to conferences and talks. Then you will begin to see.
You will begin to see it all opening out. I am up to the
ears in it all — every moment I can spare. I throw up
work — everything! I just teach in one school, one good
school, three days a week. All the rest — Movements!
I can live now on fourpence a day. Think how free that
leaves me to follow things up ! I must take you every-
where. I must take you to the Suffrage people, and the
Tolstoyans, and the Fabians."

"I have heard of the Fabians," said Ann Veronica.

"It's the Society!" said Miss Miniver. "It's the
centre of the intellectuals. Some of the meetings are
wonderful! Such earnest, beautiful women! Such
deep-browed men! . . . And to think that there they are
making history! There they are putting together the
plans of a new world. Almos light-heartedly. There is
Shaw, and Webb, and Wilkins the author, and Toomer,
and Doctor Tumpany — the most wonderful people!
There you see them discussing, deciding, planning!
Just think — they are making a new world!"

"But are these people going to alter everything?"
said Ann Veronica.

142

IDEALS AND A REALITY

"What else can happen?" asked Miss Miniver, with
a little weak gesture at the glow. " What else can possi-
bly happen — as things are going now?"

§3

Miss Miniver let Ann Veronica into her peculiar
levels of the world with so enthusiastic a generosity
that it seemed ingratitude to remain critical. Indeed,
almost insensibly Ann Veronica became habituated to
the peculiar appearance and the peculiar manners of
the people " in the van." The shock of their intellectual
attitude was over, usage robbed it of the first quaint
effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many
respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more
and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also
somehow, and even in direct relation to that lightness,
absurd.

Very central in Miss Miniver's universe were the
Goopes. The Goopes were the oddest little couple con-
ceivable, following a fruitarian career upon an upper
floor in Theobald's Road. They were childless and
servantless, and they had reduced simple living to the
finest of fine arts. Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered,
was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his
wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian
cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion,
appendicitis, and the Higher Thought generally, and
assisted in the management of a fruit shop in the Totten-
ham Court Road . Their very furniture had mysteriously
a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home

143

ANN VERONICA

dressed simply in a pajama-shaped suit of canvas
sacking tied with brown ribbons, while his wife wore a
purple djibbah with a richly embroidered yoke. He
was a small, dark, reserved man, with a large inflexible-
looking convex forehead, and his wife was very pink
and high-spirited, with one of those chins that pass
insensibly into a full, strong neck. Once a week, every
Saturday, they had a little gathering from nine till the
small hours, just talk and perhaps reading aloud and
fruitarian refreshments — chestnut sandwiches buttered
with nutter, and so forth — and lemonade and unfer-
mented wine ; and to one of these symposia Miss Miniver,
after a good deal of preliminary solicitude, conducted
Ann Veronica.

She was introduced, perhaps a little too obviously
for her taste, as a girl who was standing out against
her people, to a gathering that consisted of a very old
lady with an extremely wrinkled skin and a deep voice,
who was wearing what appeared to Ann Veronica's
inexperienced eye to be an antimacassar upon her head,
a shy, blond young man with a narrow forehead and
glasses, two undistinguished women in plain skirts and
blouses, and a middle-aged couple, very fat and alike
in black, Mr. and Mrs. Alderman Dunstable, of the
Borough Council of Marylebone. These were seated in
an imperfect semicircle about a very copper-adorned
fireplace, surmounted by a carved wood inscription:

"DO IT NOW."

And to them were presently added a roguish-looking
young man, with reddish hair, an orange tie, and a fluffy

144

IDEALS AND A REALITY

tweed suit, and others who, in Ann Veronica's memory,
in spite of her efforts to recall details, remained ob-
stinately just "others."

The talk was animated, and remained always brilliant
in form even when it ceased to be brilliant in substance.
There were moments when Ann Veronica rather more
than suspected the chief speakers to be, as school-boys
say, showing off at her.

They talked of a new substitute for dripping in
vegetarian cookery that Mrs. Goopes was convinced
exercised an exceptionally purifying influence on the
mind. And then they talked of Anarchism and Social-
ism, and whether the former was the exact opposite of the
latter or only a higher form. The reddish -haired young
man contributed allusions to the Hegelian philosophy
that momentarily confused the discussion. Then Alder-
man Dunstable, who had hitherto been silent, broke out
into speech and went off at a tangent, and gave his
personal impressions of quite a number of his fellow-
councillors. He continued to do this for the rest of the
evening intermittently, in and out, among other topics.
He addressed himself chiefly to Goopes, and spoke as
if in reply to long-sustained inquiries on the part of
Goopes into the personnel of the Marylebone Borough
Council. "If you were to ask me," he would say, "I
should say Blinders is straight. An ordinary type, of
course — "

Mrs. Dunstable's contributions to the conversation
were entirely in the form of nods; whenever Alderman
Dunstable praised or blamed she nodded twice or thrice,
according to the requirements of his emphasis. And
she seemed always to keep one eye on Ann Veronica's

145

ANN VERONICA

dress. Mrs. Goopes disconcerted the Alderman a little
by abruptly challenging the roguish-looking young man
in the orange tie (who, it seemed, was the assistant
editor of New Ideas) upon a critique of Nietzsche and
Tolstoy that had appeared in his paper, in which doubts
had been cast upon the perfect sincerity of the latter.
Everybody seemed greatly concerned about the sincerity
of Tolstoy.

Miss Miniver said that if once she lost her faith in
Tolstoy's sincerity, nothing she felt would really matter
much any more, and she appealed to Ann Veronica
whether she did not feel the same; and Mr. Goopes
said that we must distinguish between sincerity and
irony, which was often indeed no more than sincerity
at the sublimated level.

Alderman Dunstable said that sincerity was often a
matter of opportunity, and illustrated the point to the
fair young man with an anecdote about Blinders on the
Dust Destructor Committee, during which the young
man in the orange tie succeeded in giving the whole
discussion a daring and erotic flavor by questioning
whether any one could be perfectly sincere in love.

Miss Miniver thought that there was no true sincerity
except in love, and appealed to Ann Veronica, but the
young man in the orange tie went on to declare that it
was quite possible to be sincerely in love with two people
at the same time, although perhaps on different planes
with each individual, and deceiving them both. But
that brought Mrs. Goopes down on him with the lesson
Titian teaches so beautifully in his "Sacred and Profane
Love," and became quite eloquent upon the impossibility
of any deception in the former.

146

IDEALS AND A REALITY

Then they discoursed on love for a time, and Alder-
man Dunstable, turning back to the shy, blond young
man and speaking in undertones of the utmost clearness,
gave a brief and confidential account of an unfounded
rumor of the bifurcation of the affections of Blinders
that had led to a situation of some unpleasantness upon
the Borough Council.

The very old lady in the antimacassar touched Ann
Veronica's arm suddenly, and said, in a deep, arch voice:

"Talking of love again; spring again, love again.
Oh! you young people!"

The young man with the orange tie, in spite of Sis-
yphus-like efforts on the part of Goopes to get the topic
on to a higher plane, displayed great persistence in spec-
ulating upon the possible distribution of the affections
of highly developed modern types.

The old lady in the antimacassar said, abruptly,
" Ah ! you young people, you young people, if you only
knew!" and then laughed and then mused in a marked
manner; and the young man with the narrow forehead
and glasses cleared his throat and asked the young man
in the orange tie whether he believed that Platonic love
was possible. Mrs. Goopes said she believed in nothing
else, and with that she glanced at Ann Veronica, rose a
little abruptly, and directed Goopes and the shy young
man in the handing of refreshments.

But the young man with the orange tie remained in
his place, disputing whether the body had not some-
thing or other which he called its legitimate claims.
And from that they came back by way of the Kreutzer
Sonata and Resurrection to Tolstoy again.

So the talk went on. Goopes, who had at first been

M7

ANN VERONICA

a little reserved, resorted presently to the Socratic meth-
od to restrain the young man with the orange tie, and
bent his forehead over him, and brought out at last very
clearly from him that the body was only illusion and
everything nothing but just spirit and molecules of
thought. It became a sort of duel at last between
them, and all the others sat and listened — every one,
that is, except the Alderman, who had got the blond
young man into a corner by the green-stained dresser
with the aluminium things, and was sitting with his
back to every one else, holding one hand over his mouth
for greater privacy, and telling him, with an accent of
confidential admission, in whispers of the chronic strug-
gle between the natural modesty and general inoffen-
siveness of the Borough Council and the social evil in
Marylebone.

So the talk went on, and presently they were criticis-
ing novelists, and certain daring essays of Wilkins got
their due share of attention, and then they were discus-
sing the future of the theatre. Ann Veronica inter-
vened a little in the novelist discussion with a defence
of Esmond and a denial that the Egoist was obscure, and
when she spoke every one else stopped talking and lis-
tened. Then they deliberated whether Bernard Shaw
ought to go into Parliament. And that brought them
to vegetarianism and teetotalism, and the young man
in the orange tie and Mrs. Goopes had a great set-to
about the sincerity of Chesterton and Belloc that was
ended by Goopes showing signs of resuming the Socratic
method.

And at last Ann Veronica and Miss Miniver came down
the dark staircase and out into the foggy spaces of the

148

IDEALS AND A REALITY

London squares, and crossed Russell Square, Woburn
Square, Gordon Square, making an oblique route to
Ann Veronica's lodging. They trudged along a little
hungry, because of the fruitarian refreshments, and
mentally very active. And Miss Miniver fell discussing
whether Goopes or Bernard Shaw or Tolstoy or Doctor
Tumpany or Wilkins the author had the more power-
ful and perfect mind in existence at the present time.
She was clear there were no other minds like them in
all the world.

§4

Then one evening Ann Veronica went with Miss
Miniver into the back seats of the gallery at Essex Hall,
and heard and saw the giant leaders of the Fabian So-
ciety who are re-making the world: Bernard Shaw and
Toomer and Doctor Tumpany and Wilkins the author,
all displayed upon a platform. The place was crowded,
and the people about her were almost equally made up
of very good-looking and enthusiastic young people and
a great variety of Goopes-like types. In the discussion
there was the oddest mixture of things that were per-
sonal and petty with an idealist devotion that was fine
beyond dispute. In nearly every speech she heard
was the same implication of great and necessary changes
in the world — changes to be won by effort and sacrifice
indeed, but surely to be won. And afterward she saw
a very much larger and more enthusiastic gathering, a
meeting of the advanced section of the woman move-
ment in Caxton Hall, where the same note of vast
changes in progress sounded; and she went to a soiree

149

ANN VERONICA

of the Dress Reform Association and visited a Food
Reform Exhibition, where imminent change was made
even alarmingly visible. The women's meeting was
much more charged with emotional force than the So-
cialists'. Ann Veronica was carried off her intellectual
and critical feet by it altogether, and applauded and
uttered cries that subsequent reflection failed to en-
dorse. "I knew you would feel it," said Miss Miniver,
as they came away flushed and heated. "I knew you
would begin to see how it all falls into place to-
gether."

It did begin to fall into place together. She became
more and more alive, not so much to a system of ideas
as to a big diffused impulse toward change, to a great
discontent with and criticism of life as it is lived, to a
clamorous confusion of ideas for reconstruction — re-
construction of the methods of business, of economic
development, of the rules of property, of the status of
children, of the clothing and feeding and teaching of
every one ; she developed a quite exaggerated conscious-
ness of a multitude of people going about the swarming
spaces of London with their minds full, their talk and
gestures full, their very clothing charged with the sug-
gestion of the urgency of this pervasive project of altera-
tion. Some indeed carried themselves, dressed them-
selves even, rather as foreign visitors from the land of
"Looking Backward" and "News from Nowhere" than
as the indigenous Londoners they were. For the most
part these were detached people: men practising the
plastic arts, young writers, young men in employment,
a very large proportion of girls and women — self-sup-
porting women or girls of the student class. They made

150

IDEALS AND A REALITY

a stratum into which Ann Veronica was now plunged up
to her neck; it had become her stratum.

None of the things they said and did were altogether
new to Ann Veronica, but now she got them massed
and alive, instead of by glimpses or in books — alive
and articulate and insistent. The London backgrounds,
in Bloomsbury and Marylebone, against which these
people went to and fro, took on, by reason of their
gray facades, their implacably respectable windows and
window-blinds, their reiterated unmeaning iron railings,
a stronger and stronger suggestion of the flavor of her
father at his most obdurate phase, and of all that she
felt herself fighting against.

She was already a little prepared by her discursive
reading and discussion under the Widgett influence for
ideas and "movements," though temperamentally per-
haps she was rather disposed to resist and criticise than
embrace them. But the people among whom she was
now thrown through the social exertions of Miss Miniver
and the Widgetts — for Teddy and Hetty came up from
Morningside Park and took her to an eighteen-penny
dinner in Soho and introduced her to some art students,
who were also Socialists, and so opened the way to an
evening of meandering talk in a studio — carried with
them like an atmosphere this implication, not only that
the world was in some stupid and even obvious way
wrong, with which indeed she was quite prepared to
agree, but that it needed only a few pioneers to behave
as such and be thoroughly and indiscriminately "ad-
vanced," for the new order to achieve itself. When
ninety per cent, out of the ten or twelve people one
meets in a month not only say but feel and assume a

ANN VERONICA

thing, it is very hard not to fall into the belief that the
thing is so. Imperceptibly almost Ann Veronica began
to acquire the new attitude, even while her mind still
resisted the felted ideas that went with it. And Miss
Miniver began to sway her.

The very facts that Miss Miniver never stated an argu-
ment clearly, that she was never embarrassed by a sense
of self-contradiction, and had little more respect for
consistency of statement than a washerwoman has for
wisps of vapor, which made Ann Veronica critical and
hostile at their first encounter in Morningside Park,
became at last with constant association the secret of
Miss Miniver's growing influence. The brain tires of
resistance, and when it meets again and again, incoher-
ently active, the same phrases, the same ideas that it
has already slain, exposed and dissected and buried, it
becomes less and less energetic to repeat the operation.
There must be something, one feels, in ideas that achieve
persistently a successful resurrection. What Miss Mini-
ver would have called the Higher Truth supervenes.

Yet through these talks, these meetings and confer-
ences, these movements and efforts, Ann Veronica, for
all that she went with her friend, and at times ap-
plauded with her enthusiastically, yet went nevertheless
with eyes that grew more and more puzzled, and fine
eyebrows more and more disposed to knit. She was
with these movements — akin to them, she felt it at
times intensely — and yet something eluded her. Morn-
ingside Park had been passive and defective; all this
rushed about and was active, but it was still defective.
It still failed in something. It did seem germane to the
matter that so many of the people "in the van" were

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IDEALS AND A REALITY

plain people, or faded people, or tired-looking people.
It did affect the business that they all argued badly and
were egotistical in their manners and inconsistent in
their phrases. There were moments when she doubted
whether the whole mass of movements and societies and
gatherings and talks was not simply one coherent spec-
tacle of failure protecting itself from abjection by the
glamour of its own assertions. It happened that at the
extremest point of Ann Veronica's social circle from the
Widgetts was the family of the Morningside Park horse-
dealer, a company of extremely dressy and hilarious
young women, with one equestrian brother addicted to
fancy waistcoats, cigars, and facial spots. These girls
wore hats at remarkable angles and bows to startle and
kill; they liked to be right on the spot every time and
up to everything that was it from the very beginning,
and they rendered their conception of Socialists and all
reformers by the words "positively frightening" and
"weird." Well, it was beyond dispute that these words
did convey a certain quality of the Movements in gen-
eral amid which Miss Miniver disported herself. They
were weird. And yet for all that —

It got into Ann Veronica's nights at last and kept her
awake, the perplexing contrast between the advanced
thought and the advanced thinker. The general prop-
ositions of Socialism, for example, struck her as admir-
able, but she certainly did not extend her admiration to
any of its exponents. She was still more stirred by the
idea of the equal citizenship of men and women, by the
realization that a big and growing organization of women
were giving form and a generalized expression to just
that personal pride, that aspiration for personal free-

ANN VERONICA

dom and respect which had brought her to London ; but
when she heard Miss Miniver discoursing on the next
step in the suffrage campaign, or read of women badger-
ing Cabinet Ministers, padlocked to railings, or getting
up in a public meeting to pipe out a demand for votes
and be carried out kicking and screaming, her soul re-
volted. She could not part with dignity. Something
as yet unformulated within her kept her estranged from
all these practical aspects of her beliefs.

"Not for these things, O Ann Veronica, have you
revolted," it said; "and this is not your appropriate
purpose."

It was as if she faced a darkness in which was some-
thing very beautiful and wonderful as yet unimagined.
The little pucker in her brows became more perceptible.

§ 5

In the beginning of December Ann Veronica began
to speculate privately upon the procedure of pawning.
She had decided that she would begin with her pearl
necklace. She spent a very disagreeable afternoon and
evening — it was raining fast outside, and she had very
unwisely left her soundest pair of boots in the boothole
of her father's house in Morningside Park — thinking over
the economic situation and planning a course of action.
Her aunt had secretly sent on to Ann Veronica some new
warm underclothing, a dozen pairs of stockings, and her
last winter's jacket, but the dear lady had overlooked
those boots.

These things illuminated her situation extremely.

IDEALS AND A REALITY

Finally she decided upon a step that had always seemed
reasonable to her, but that hitherto she had, from mo-
tives too faint for her to formulate, refrained from tak-
ing. She resolved to go into the City to Ramage and
ask for his advice. And next morning she attired herself
with especial care and neatness, found his address in
the Directory at a post-office, and went to him.

She had to wait some minutes in an outer office,
wherein three young men of spirited costume and ap-
pearance regarded her with ill-concealed curiosity and
admiration. Then Ramage appeared with effusion, and
ushered her into his inner apartment. The three young
men exchanged expressive glances.

The inner apartment was rather gracefully furnished
with a thick, fine Turkish carpet, a good brass fender, a
fine old bureau, and on the walls were engravings of two
young girls' heads by Greuze, and of some modern picture
of boys bathing in a sunlit pool.

"But this is a surprise!" said Ramage. "This is
wonderful! I've been feeling that you had vanished
from my world. Have you been away from Morning-
side Park?"

"I'm not interrupting you?"

"You are. Splendidly. Business exists for such
interruptions. There you are, the best client's chair."

Ann Veronica sat down, and Ramage's eager eyes
feasted on her.

" I've been looking out for you," he said. " I confess
it."

She had not, she reflected, remembered how prom-
inent his eyes were.

"I want some advice," said Ann Veronica.

ANN VERONICA

"Yes?"

"You remember once, how we talked — at a gate on
the Downs? We talked about how a girl might get
an independent living."

"Yes, yes."

"Well, you see, something has happened at home."

She paused.

"Nothing has happened to Mr. Stanley?"

" I've fallen out with my father. It was about — a
question of what I might do or might not do. He —
In fact, he — he locked me in my room. Practically."

Her breath left her for a moment.

"I say!" said Mr. Ramage.

"I wanted to go to an art-student ball of which he
disapproved."

"And why shouldn't you?"

" I felt that sort of thing couldn't go on. So I packed
up and came to London next day."

"To a friend?"

"To lodgings — alone."

"I say, you know, you have some pluck. You did
it on your own?"

Ann Veronica smiled. "Quite on my own," she said.

"It's magnificent!" He leaned back and regarded
her with his head a little on one side. "By Jove!"
he said, " there is something direct about you. I wonder
if I should have locked you up if I'd been your father.
Luckily I'm not. And you started out forthwith to
fight the world and be a citizen on your own basis?"
He came forward again and folded his hands under
him on his desk. "How has the world taken it?" he
asked. " If I was the world I think I should have put

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IDEALS AND A REALITY

down a crimson carpet, and asked you to say what you
wanted, and generally walk over me. But the world
didn't do that."

"Not exactly."

"It presented a large impenetrable back, and went
on thinking about something else."

"It offered from fifteen to two-and-twenty shillings
a week — for drudgery."

"The world has no sense of what is due to youth
and courage. It never has had,"

"Yes," said Ann Veronica. "But the thing is,
I want a job."

"Exactly! And so you came along to me. And
you see, I don't turn my back, and I am looking at you
and thinking about you from top to toe."

"And what do you think I ought to do?"

"Exactly!" He lifted a paper-weight and dabbed
it gently down again. "What ought you to do?"

"I've hunted up all sorts of things."

"The point to note is that fundamentally you don't
want particularly to do it."

"I don't understand."

"You want to be free and so forth, yes. But you
don't particularly want to do the job that sets you free —
for its own sake. I mean that it doesn't interest you
in itself."

"I suppose not."

"That's one of our differences. We men are like
children. We can get absorbed in play, in games,
in the business we do. That's really why we do them
sometimes rather well and get on. But women —
women as a rule don't throw themselves into things

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ANN VERONICA

like that. As a matter of fact it isn't their affair. And,
as a natural consequence, the)7 don't do so well, and they
don't get on — and so the world doesn't pay them.
They don't catch on to discursive interests, you see,
because they are more serious, they are concentrated on
the central reality of life, and a little impatient of its —
its outer aspects. At least that, I think, is what makes
a clever woman's independent career so much more
difficult than a clever man's."

"She doesn't develop a specialty." Ann Veronica
was doing her best to follow him.

"She has one, that's why. Her specialty is the
central thing in life, it is life itself, the warmth of life,
sex — and love."

He pronounced this with an air of profound con-
viction and with his eyes on Ann Veronica's face. He
had an air of having told her a deep, personal se-
cret. She winced as he thrust the fact at her, was
about to answer, and checked herself. She colored
faintly.

"That doesn't touch the question I asked you,"
she said. " It may be true, but it isn't quite what I
have in mind."

"Of course not," said Ramage, as one who rouses
himself from deep preoccupations And he began
to question her in a business-like way upon the steps
she had taken and the inquiries she had made. He
displayed none of the airy optimism of their previous
talk over the downland gate. He was helpful, but
gravely dubious. "You see," he said, "from my point
of view you're grown up — you're as old as all the god-
desses and the contemporary of any man alive. But

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IDEALS AND A REALITY

from the — the economic point of view you're a very
young and altogether inexperienced person."

He returned to and developed that idea. "You're
still," he said, "in the educational years. From the
point of view of most things in the world of employment
which a woman can do reasonably well and earn a living
by, you're unripe and half-educated. If you had taken
.your degree, for example."

He spoke of secretarial work, but even there she
would need to be able to do typing and shorthand.
He made it more and more evident to her that her
proper course was not to earn a salary but to accu-
mulate equipment. "You see," he said, "you are
like an inaccessible gold-mine. In all this sort of matter.
You're splendid stuff, you know, but you've got nothing
ready to sell. That's the flat business situation."

He thought. Then he slapped his hand on his desk
and looked up with the air of a man struck by a brilliant
idea. "Look here," he said, protruding his eyes;
"why get anything to do at all just yet? Why, if
you must be free, why not do the sensible thing? Make
yourself worth a decent freedom. Go on with your
studies at the Imperial College, for example, get a degree,
and make yourself good value. Or become a thorough-
going typist and stenographer and secretarial expert."

"But I can't do that."

"Why not?"

"You see, if I do go home my father objects to the
College, and as for typing — "

"Don't go home."

"Yes, but you forget; how am I to live?"

"Easily. Easily. . . . Borrow. . . . From me."

ANN VERONICA

"I couldn't do that," said Ann Veronica, sharply.

"I see no reason why you shouldn't."

"It's impossible."

"As one friend to another. Men are always doing it,
and if you set up to be a man — "

"No, it's absolutely out of the question, Mr. Ramage."
And Ann Veronica's face was hot.

Ramage pursed his rather loose lips and shrugged his
shoulders, with his eyes fixed steadily upon her. " Well,
anyhow — I don't see the force of your objection, you
know. That's my advice to you. Here I am. Con-
sider you've got resources deposited with me. Perhaps
at the first blush — it strikes you as odd. People are
brought up to be so shy about money. As though it
was indelicate. It's just a sort of shyness. But here
I am to draw upon. Here I am as an alternative either
to nasty work — or going home."

"It's very kind of you — " began Ann Veronica.

" Not a bit. Just a friendly polite suggestion. I don't
suggest any philanthropy. I shall charge you five per
cent., you know, fair and square."

Ann Veronica opened her lips quickly and did not
speak. But the five per cent, certainly did seem to im-
prove the aspect of Ramage's suggestion.

"Well, anyhow, consider it open." He dabbed with
his paper-weight again, and spoke in an entirely in-
different tone. "And now tell me, please, how you
eloped from Morningside Park. How did you get your
luggage out of the house? Wasn't it — wasn't it rather
in some respects — rather a lark ? It's one of my regrets
for my lost youth. I never ran away from anywhere
with anybody anywhen. And now — I suppose I

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IDEALS AND A REALITY

should be considered too old. I don't feel it. ... Didn't
you feel rather eventful — in the train — coming up to
Waterloo?"

§6

Before Christmas Ann Veronica had gone to Ramage
again and accepted this offer she had at first declined.

Many little things had contributed to that decision.
The chief influence was her awakening sense of the need
of money. She had been forced to buy herself that pair
of boots and a walking -skirt, and the pearl necklace at
the pawnbrokers' had yielded very disappointingly. And,
also, she wanted to borrow that money. It did seem
in so many ways exactly what Ramage said it was — the
sensible thing to do. There it was — to be borrowed.
It would put the whole adventure on a broader and bet-
ter footing; it seemed, indeed, almost the only possible
way in which she might emerge from her rebellion with
anything like success. If only for the sake of her argu-
ment with her home, she wanted success. And why,
after all, should she not borrow money from Ramage?

It was so true what he said; middle-class people
were ridiculously squeamish about money. Why should
they be?

She and Ramage were friends, very good friends. If
she was in a position to help him she would help him;
only it happened to be the other way round. He was in
a position to help her. What was the objection?

She found it impossible to look her own diffidence in
the face. So she went to Ramage and came to the point
almost at once.

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ANN VERONICA

"Can you spare me forty pounds?" she said.

Mr. Ramage controlled his expression and thought
very quickly.

"Agreed," he said, "certainly," and drew a check-
book toward him.

"It's best," he said, "to make it a good round sum.

"I won't give you a check though — Yes, I will.
I'll give you an uncrossed check, and then you can get it
at the bank here, quite close by. . . . You'd better not
have all the money on you ; you had better open a small
account in the post-office and draw it out a fiver at a
time. That won't involve references, as a bank account
would — and all that sort of thing. The money will last
longer, and — it won't bother you."

He stood up rather close to her and looked into her
eyes. He seemed to be trying to understand some-
thing very perplexing and elusive. "It's jolly," he said,
"to feel you have come to me. It's a sort of guarantee
of confidence. Last time — you made me feel snubbed."

He hesitated, and went off at a tangent. "There's no
end of things I'd like to talk over with you. It's just
upon my lunch-time. Come and have lunch with me."

Ann Veronica fenced for a moment. "I don't want
to take up your time."

"We won't go to any of these Qity places. They're
just all men, and no one is safe from scandal. But I
know a little place where we'll get a little quiet talk."

Ann Veronica for some indefinable reason did not
want to lunch with him, a reason indeed so indefinable
that she dismissed it, and Ramage went through the
outer office with her, alert and attentive, to the vivid
interest of the three clerks. The three clerks fought

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IDEALS AND A REALITY

for the only window, and saw her whisked into a hansom.
Their subsequent conversation is outside the scope of our
story.

"Ritter's!" said Ramage to the driver, "Dean Street."

It was rare that Ann Veronica used hansoms, and to
be in one was itself eventful and exhilarating. She
liked the high, easy swing of the thing over its big wheels,
the quick clatter-patter of the horse, the passage of the
teeming streets. She admitted her pleasure to Ramage.

And Ritter's, too, was very amusing and foreign and
discreet; a little rambling room with a number of small
tables, with red electric light shades and flowers. It was
an overcast day, albeit not foggy, and the electric light
shades glowed warmly, and an Italian waiter with in-
sufficient English took Ramage's orders, and waited
with an appearance of affection. Ann Veronica thought
the whole affair rather jolly. Ritter sold better food
than most of his compatriots, and cooked it better, and
Ramage, with a fine perception of a feminine palate,
ordered Vero Capri. It was, Ann Veronica felt, as a sip
or so of that remarkable blend warmed her blood, just
the sort of thing that her aunt would not approve, to be
lunching thus, tete-a-tete with a man ; and yet at the same
time it was a perfectly innocent as well as agreeable
proceeding.

They talked across their meal in an easy and friendly
manner about Ann Veronica's affairs. He was really
very bright and clever, with a sort of conversational
boldness that was just within the limits of permissible
daring. She described the Goopes and the Fabians to
him, and gave him a sketch of her landlady; and he
talked in the most liberal and entertaining way of a

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ANN VERONICA

modern young woman's outlook. He seemed to know
a great deal about life. He gave glimpses of possibilities.
He roused curiosities. He contrasted wonderfully with
the empty showing -off of Teddy. His friendship seemed
a thing worth having. . . .

But when she was thinking it over in her room that
evening vague and baffling doubts came drifting across
this conviction. She doubted how she stood toward him
and what the restrained gleam of his face might signify.
She felt that perhaps, in her desire to play an adequate
part in the conversation, she had talked rather more
freely than she ought to have done, and given him a
wrong impression of herself.

§ 7

That was two days before Christmas Eve. The next
morning came a compact letter from her father.

"Mv DEAR DAUGHTER," it ran, — "Here, on the verge
of the season of forgiveness I hold out a last hand to you
in the hope of a reconciliation. I ask you, although it is
not my place to ask you, to return home. This roof is
still open to you. You will not be taunted if you return,
and everything that can be done will be done to make you
happy.

"Indeed, I must implore you to return. This adventure
of yours has gone on altogether too long; it has become a
serious distress to both your aunt and myself. We fail
altogether to understand your motives in doing what you
are doing, or, indeed, how you are managing to do it, or

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IDEALS AND A REALITY

what you are managing on. If you will think only of one
trifling aspect — the inconvenience it must be to us to ex-
plain your absence — / think you may begin to realize what
it all means for us. I need hardly say that your aunt
joins with me very heartily in this request.

"Please come home. You will not -find me unreasonable
with you.

11 Your affectionate

"FATHER."

Ann Veronica sat over her fire with her father's note
in her hand. "Queer letters he writes," she said. "I
suppose most people's letters are queer. Roof open —
like a Noah's Ark. I wonder if he really wants me to
go home. It's odd how little I know of him, and of
how he feels and what he feels.

"I wonder how he treated Gwen."

Her mind drifted into a speculation about her sister.
"I ought to look up Gwen," she said. "I wonder what
happened."

Then she fell to thinking about her aunt. "I would
like to go home," she cried, "to please her. She has
been a dear. Considering how little he lets her have."

The truth prevailed. "The unaccountable thing is
that I wouldn't go home to please her. She is, in her
way, a dear. One ought to want to please her. And I
don't. I don't care. I can't even make myself care."

Presently, as if for comparison with her father's letter,
she got out Ramage's check from the box that contained
her papers. For so far she had kept it uncashed. She
had not even endorsed it.

"Suppose I chuck it," she remarked, standing with

165

ANN VERONICA

the mauve slip in her hand — "suppose I chuck it, and
surrender and go home! Perhaps, after all, Roddy
was right.'

"Father keeps opening the door and shutting it, but
a time will come —

"I could still go home!"

She held Ramage's check as if to tear it across. " No,"
she said at last; "I'm a human being — not a timid fe-
male. What could I do at home? The other's a
crumple-up — just surrender. Funk! I'll see it out."

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

BIOLOGY
§ I

JANUARY found Ann Veronica a student in the
biological laboratory of the Central Imperial Col-
lege that towers up from among the back streets in
the angle between Euston Road and Great Portland
Street. She was working very steadily at the Advanced
Course in Comparative Anatomy, wonderfully relieved
to have her mind engaged upon one methodically devel-
oping theme in the place of the discursive uncertainties
of the previous two months, and doing her utmost to
keep right in the back of her mind and out of sight the
facts, firstly, that she had achieved this haven of sat-
isfactory activity by incurring a debt to Ramage of
forty pounds, and, secondly, that her present position
was necessarily temporary and her outlook quite un-
certain.

The biological laboratory had an atmosphere that
was all its own. It was at the top of the building, and
looked clear over a clustering mass of inferior buildings
toward Regent's Park. It was long and narrow, a well-
lit, well-ventilated, quiet gallery of small tables and
sinks, pervaded by a thin smell of methylated spirit

167

ANN VERONICA

and of a mitigated and sterilized organic decay. Along
the inner side was a wonderfully arranged series of dis-
played specimens that Russell himself had prepared.
The supreme effect for Ann Veronica was its surpassing
relevance; it made every other atmosphere she knew
seem discursive and confused. The whole place and
everything in it- aimed at one thing — to illustrate, to
elaborate, to criticise and illuminate, and make ever
plainer and plainer the significance of animal and vege-
table structure. It dealt from floor to ceiling and end
to end with the Theory of the Forms of Life; the very
duster by the blackboard was there to do its share in
that work, the very washers in the taps; the room was
more simply concentrated in aim even than a church.
To that, perhaps, a large part of its satisfyingness was
due. Contrasted with the confused movement and
presences of a Fabian meeting, or the inexplicable en-
thusiasm behind the suffrage demand, with the speeches
that were partly egotistical displays, partly artful ma-
noeuvres, and partly incoherent cries for unsoundly for-
mulated ends, compared with the comings and goings
of audiences and supporters that were like the eddy-
driven drift of paper in the street, this long, quiet, me-
thodical chamber shone like a star seen through clouds.
Day after day for a measured hour in the lecture-
theatre, with elaborate power and patience, Russell
pieced together difficulty and suggestion, instance and
counter-instance, in the elaborate construction of the
family tree of life. And then the students went into
the long laboratory and followed out these facts in al-
most living tissue with microscope and scalpel, probe
and microtome, and the utmost of their skill and care,

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BIOLOGY

making now and then a raid into the compact museum
of illustration next door, in which specimens and models
and directions stood in disciplined ranks, under the di-
rection of the demonstrator Capes. There was a couple
of blackboards at each end of the aisle of tables, and at
these Capes, with quick and nervous speech that con-
trasted vividly with Russell's slow, definitive articulation,
directed the dissection and made illuminating com-
ments on the structures under examination. Then
he would come along the laboratory, sitting down by
each student in turn, checking the work and discussing
its difficulties, and answering questions arising out of
Russell's lecture.

Ann Veronica had come to the Imperial College
obsessed by the great figure of Russell, by the part he
had played in the Darwinian controversies, and by the
resolute effect of the grim-lipped, yellow, leonine face
beneath the mane of silvery hair. Capes was rather a
discovery. Capes was something superadded. Russell
burned like a beacon, but Capes illuminated by darting
flashes and threw light, even it it was but momentary
light, into a hundred corners that Russell left stead-
fastly in the shade.

Capes was an exceptionally fair man of two or three-
and-thirty, so ruddily blond that it was a mercy he had
escaped light eyelashes, and with a minor but by no
means contemptible reputation of his own. He talked
at the blackboard in a pleasant, very slightly lisping
voice with a curious spontaneity, and was sometimes
very clumsy in his exposition, and sometimes very vivid.
He dissected rather awkwardly and hurriedly, but, on
the whole, effectively, and drew with an impatient di-

169

ANN VERONICA

rectness that made up in significance what it lacked in
precision. Across the blackboard the colored chalks
flew like flights of variously tinted rockets as diagram
after diagram flickered into being.

There happened that year to be an unusual proportion
of girls and women in the advanced laboratory, per-
haps because the class as a whole was an exceptionally
small one. It numbered nine, and four of these were
women students. As a consequence of its small size,
it was possible to get along with the work on a much
easier and more colloquial footing than a larger class
would have permitted. And a custom had grown up of
a general tea at four o'clock, under the auspices of a
Miss Garvice, a tall and graceful girl of distinguished
intellectual incompetence, in whom the hostess instinct
seemed to be abnormally developed.

Capes would come to these teas; he evidently liked
to come, and he would appear in the doorway of the
preparation-room, a pleasing note of shyness in his man-
ner, hovering for an invitation.

From the first, Ann Veronica found him an excep-
tionally interesting man. To begin with, he struck her
as being the most variable person she had ever en-
countered. At times he was brilliant and masterful,
talked round and over every one, and would have been
domineering if he had not been extraordinarily kindly;
at times he was almost monosyllabic, and defeated Miss
Garvice's most skilful attempts to draw him out. Some-
times he was obviously irritable and uncomfortable and
unfortunate in his efforts to seem at ease. And some-
times he overflowed with a peculiarly malignant wit that
played, with devastating effect, upon any topics that

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BIOLOGY

had the courage to face it. Ann Veronica's experiences
of men had been among more stable types — Teddy, who
was always absurd; her father, who was always au-
thoritative and sentimental; Manning, who was always
Manning. And most of the others she had met had,
she felt, the same steadfastness. Goopes, she was sure,
was always high-browed and slow and Socratic. And
Ramage too — about Ramage there would always be
that air of avidity, that air of knowledge and inquiry,
the mixture of things in his talk that were rather good
with things that were rather poor. But one could not
count with any confidence upon Capes.

The five men students were a mixed company. There
was a very white-faced youngster of eighteen who
brushed back his hair exactly in Russell's manner, and
was disposed to be uncomfortably silent when he was
near her, and to whom she felt it was only Christian
kindness to be consistently pleasant; and a lax young
man of five-and-twenty in navy blue, who mingled Marx
and Bebel with the more orthodox gods of the biological
pantheon. There was a short, red-faced, resolute youth,
who inherited an authoritative attitude upon bacteriol-
ogy from his father; a Japanese student of unassuming
manners who drew beautifully and had an imperfect
knowledge of English; and a dark, unwashed Scotch-
man with complicated spectacles, who would come
every morning as a sort of volunteer supplementary dem-
onstrator, look very closely at her work and her, tell
her that her dissections were "fairish," or "very fairish
indeed," or "high above the normal female standard,"
hover as if for some outbreak of passionate gratitude,
and with admiring retrospects that made the facetted
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ANN VERONICA

spectacles gleam like diamonds, return to his own
place.

The women, Ann Veronica thought, were not quite
so interesting as the men. There were two school-
mistresses, one of whom — Miss Klegg — might have been
a first cousin to Miss Miniver, she had so many Miniver
traits; there was a preoccupied girl whose name Ann
Veronica never learned, but who worked remarkably
well; and Miss Garvice, who began by attracting her
very greatly — she moved so beautifully — and ended by
giving her the impression that moving beautifully was
the beginning and end of her being.

§ 2

The next few weeks were a time of the very liveliest
thought and growth for Ann Veronica. The crowding
impressions of the previous weeks seemed to run to-
gether directly her mind left the chaotic search for em-
ployment and came into touch again with a coherent
and systematic development of ideas. The advanced
work at the Central Imperial College was in the closest
touch with living interests and current controversies;
it drew its illustrations and material from Russell's two
great researches — upon the relation of the brachiopods
to the echinodermata, and upon the secondary and
tertiary mammalian and pseudo-mammalian factors in
the free larval forms of various marine organisms. More-
over, a vigorous fire of mutual criticism was going on now
between the Imperial College and the Cambridge Men-
delians and echoed in the lectures. From beginning to
end it was first-hand stuff.

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BIOLOGY

But the influence of the science radiated far beyond
its own special field — beyond those beautiful but highly
technical problems with which we do not propose for a
moment to trouble the naturally terrified reader. Bi-
ology is an extraordinarily digestive science. It throws
out a number of broad experimental generalizations, and
then sets out to bring into harmony or relation with
these an infinitely multifarious collection of phenomena.
The little streaks upon the germinating area of an egg,
the nervous movements of an impatient horse, the trick
of a calculating boy, the senses of a fish, the fungus at
the root of a garden flower, and the slime upon a sea-
wet rock — ten thousand such things bear their witness
and are illuminated. And not only did these tentacular
generalizations gather all the facts of natural history
and comparative anatomy together, but they seemed
always stretching out further and further into a world
of interests that lay altogether outside their legitimate
bounds.

It came to Ann Veronica one night after a long talk
with Miss Miniver, as a sudden remarkable thing, as a
grotesque, novel aspect, that this slowly elaborating
biological scheme had something more than an academic
interest for herself. And not only so, but that it was,
after all, a more systematic and particular method of
examining just the same questions that underlay the
discussions of the Fabian Society, the talk of the West
Central Arts Club, the chatter of the studios and the
deep, the bottomless discussions of the simple-life homes.
It was the same Bios whose nature and drift and ways
and methods and aspects engaged them all. And she,
she in her own person too, was this eternal Bios, begin-

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ANN VERONICA

ning again its recurrent journey to selection and multi-
plication and failure or survival.

But this was but a momentary gleam of personal ap-
plication, and at this time she followed it up no further.

And now Ann Veronica's evenings were also becoming
very busy. She pursued her interest in the Socialist
movement and in the Suffragist agitation in the company
of Miss Miniver. They went to various central and
local Fabian gatherings, and to a number of suffrage
meetings. Teddy Widgett hovered on the fringe of all
these gatherings, blinking at Ann Veronica and oc-
casionally making a wildly friendly dash at her, and
carrying her and Miss Miniver off to drink cocoa with a
choice diversity of other youthful and congenial Fabians
after the meetings. Then Mr. Manning loomed up ever
and again into her world, full of a futile solicitude, and
almost always declaring she was splendid, splendid, and
wishing he could talk things out with her. Teas he con-
tributed to the commissariat of Ann Veronica's cam-
paign— quite a number of teas. He would get her to
come to tea with him, usually in a pleasant tea-room
over a fruit-shop in Tottenham Court Road, and he
would discuss his own point of view and hint at a thou-
sand devotions were she but to command him. And
he would express various artistic sensibilities and
aesthetic appreciations in carefully punctuated sentences
and a large, clear voice. At Christmas he gave her a
set of a small edition of Meredith's novels, very prettily
bound in flexible leather, being guided in the choice of an
author, as he intimated, rather by her preferences than
his own.

There was something markedly and deliberately

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liberal-minded in his manner in all their encounters.
He conveyed not only his sense of the extreme want of
correctitude in their unsanctioned meetings, but also
that, so far as he was concerned, this irregularity mat-
tered not at all, that he had flung — and kept on flinging
— such considerations to the wind.

And, in addition, she was now seeing and talking to
Ramage almost weekly, on a theory which she took very
gravely, that they were exceptionally friends. He would
ask her to come to dinner with him in some little Italian
or semi-Bohemian restaurant in the district toward
Soho, or in one of the more stylish and magnificent es-
tablishments about Piccadilly Circus, and for the most
part she did not care to refuse. Nor, indeed, did she
want to refuse. These dinners, from their lavish display
of ambiguous hors d'ceuvre to their skimpy ices in dishes
of frilled paper, with their Chianti flasks and Parmesan
dishes and their polyglot waiters and polyglot clientele,
were very funny and bright; and she really liked Ramage,
and valued his help and advice. It was interesting to
see how different and characteristic his mode of approach
was to all sorts of questions that interested her, and
it was amusing to discover this other side to the life of a
Morningside Park inhabitant. She had thought that
all Morningside Park householders came home before
seven at the latest, as her father usually did. Ramage
talked always about women or some woman's concern,
and very much about Ann Veronica's own outlook upon
life. He was always drawing contrasts between a wom-
an's lot and a man's, and treating her as a wonderful new
departure in this comparison. Ann Veronica liked their
relationship all the more because it was an unusual one.

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After these dinners they would have a walk, usually
to the Thames Embankment to see the two sweeps of
river on either side of Waterloo Bridge; and then they
would part at Westminster Bridge, perhaps, and he
would go on to Waterloo. Once he suggested they
should go to a music-hall and see a wonderful new
dancer, but Ann Veronica did not feel she cared to see a
new dancer. So, instead, they talked of dancing and
what it might mean in a human life. Ann Veronica
thought it was a spontaneous release of energy expressive
of well-being, but Ramage thought that by dancing,
men, and such birds and animals as dance, come to feel
and think of their bodies.

This intercourse, which had been planned to warm
Ann Veronica to a familiar affection with Ramage, was
certainly warming Ramage to a constantly deepening in-
terest in Ann Veronica. He felt that he was getting on
with her very slowly indeed, but he did not see how he
could get on faster. He had, he felt, to create certain
ideas and vivify certain curiosities and feelings in her.
Until that was done a certain experience of life assured
him that a girl is a locked coldness against a man's
approach. She had all the fascination of being absolute-
ly perplexing in this respect. On the one hand, she
seemed to think plainly and simply, and would talk
serenely and freely about topics that most women have
been trained either to avoid or conceal; and on the other
she was unconscious, or else she had an air of being un-
conscious— that was the riddle — to all sorts of personal
applications that almost any girl or woman, one might
have thought, would have made. He was always do-
ing his best to call her attention to the fact that he was a

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man of spirit and quality and experience, and she a
young and beautiful woman, and that all sorts of con-
structions upon their relationship were possible, trusting
her to go on from that to the idea that all sorts of re-
lationships were possible. She responded with an un-
faltering appearance of insensibility, and never as a
young and beautiful woman conscious of sex; always in
the character of an intelligent girl student.

His perception of her personal beauty deepened and
quickened with each encounter. Every now and then
her general presence became radiantly dazzling in his
eyes ; she would appear in the street coming toward him ,
a surprise, so fine and smiling and welcoming was she, so
expanded and illuminated and living, in contrast with
his mere expectation. Or he would find something —
a wave in her hair, a little line in the contour of her brow
or neck, that made an exquisite discovery.

He was beginning to think about her inordinately.
He would sit in his inner office and compose conversa-
tions with her, penetrating, illuminating, and nearly
conclusive — conversations that never proved to be of the
slightest use at all with her when he met her face to face.
And he began also at times to wake at night and think
about her.

He thought of her and himself, and no longer in that
vein of incidental adventure in which he had begun. He
thought, too, of the fretful invalid who lay in the next
room to his, whose money had created his business and
made his position in the world.

"I've had most of the things I wanted," said Ramage,
in the stillness of the night.

ANN VERONICA

§3

For a time Ann Veronica's family had desisted
from direct offers of a free pardon; they were evidently
waiting for her resources to come to an end. Neither
father, aunt, nor brothers made a sign, and then one
afternoon in early February her aunt came up in a state
between expostulation and dignified resentment, but
obviously very anxious for Ann Veronica's welfare.
"I had a dream in the night," she said. "I saw you
in a sort of sloping, slippery place, holding on by your
hands and slipping. You seemed to me to be slipping
and slipping, and your face was white. It was really
most vivid, most vivid! You seemed to be slipping
and just going to tumble and holding on. It made
me wake up, and there I lay thinking of you, spending
your nights up here all alone, and no one to look after
you. I wondered what you could be doing and what
might be happening to you. I said to myself at once,
'Either this is a coincidence or the caper sauce.' But
I made sure it was you. I felt I must do something
anyhow, and up I came just as soon as I could to see
you.'

She had spoken rather rapidly. " I can't help saying
it," she said, with the quality of her voice altering,
"but I do not think it is right for an unprotected girl
to be in London alone as you are."

"But I'm quite equal to taking care of myself, aunt."

"It must be most uncomfortable here. It is most
uncomfortable for every one concerned."

She spoke with a certain asperity. She felt that
Ann Veronica had duped her in that dream, and now

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that she had come up to London she might as well
speak her mind.

"No Christmas dinner," she said, "or anything
nice! One doesn't even know what you are doing."

"I'm going on working for my degree."

"Why couldn't you do that at home?"

"I'm working at the Imperial College. You see,
aunt, it's the only possible way for me to get a good
degree in my subjects, and father won't hear of it.
There'd only be endless rows if I was at home. And
how could I come home — when he locks me in rooms
and all that?"

"I do wish this wasn't going on," said Miss Stanley,
after a pause. "I do wish you and your father could
come to some agreement."

Ann Veronica responded with conviction: "I wish so,
too."

" Can't we arrange something ? Can't we make a sort
of treaty ?"

"He wouldn't keep it. He would get very cross
one evening and no one would dare to remind him of
it."

"How can you say such things?"

"But he would!"

"Still, it isn't your place to say so."

"It prevents a treaty."

"Couldn't / make a treaty?"

Ann Veronica thought, and could not see any possible
treaty that would leave it open for her to have quasi-
surreptitious dinners with Ramage or go on walking
round the London squares discussing Socialism with
Miss Miniver toward the small hours. She had tasted

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ANN VERONICA

freedom now, and so far she had not felt the need
of protection. Still, there certainly was something in
the idea of a treaty.

"I don't see at all how you can be managing," said
Miss Stanley, and Ann Veronica hastened to reply, " I
do on very little." Her mind went back to that treaty.

" And aren't there fees to pay at the Imperial College ?"
her aunt was saying — a disagreeable question.

"There are a few fees."

"Then how have you managed?"

"Bother!" said Ann Veronica to herself, and tried
not to look guilty. " I was able to borrow the
money."

" Borrow the money ! But who lent you the money ? "

"A friend," said Ann Veronica.

She felt herself getting into a corner. She sought
hastily in her mind for a plausible answer to an obvious
question that didn't come. Her aunt went off at a
tangent. "But my dear Ann Veronica, you will be
getting into debt!"

Ann Veronica at once, and with a feeling of immense
relief, took refuge in her dignity. "I think, aunt," she
said, "you might trust to my self-respect to keep me out
of that."

For the moment her aunt could not think of any
reply to this counterstroke, and Ann Veronica followed
up her advantage by a sudden inquiry about her aban-
doned boots.

But in the train going home her aunt reasoned it
out.

"If she is borrowing money," said Miss Stanley,
"she must be getting into debt. It's all nonsense. ..."

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§ 4

It was by imperceptible degrees that Capes became
important in Ann Veronica's thoughts. But then he
began to take steps, and, at last, strides to something
more and more like predominance. She began by
being interested in his demonstrations and his biological
theory, then she was attracted by his character, and then,
in a manner, she fell in love with his mind.

One day they were at tea in the laboratory and a
discussion sprang up about the question of women's
suffrage. The movement was then in its earlier militant
phases, and one of the women only, Miss Garvice,
opposed it, though Ann Veronica was disposed to be
lukewarm. But a man's opposition always inclined
her to the suffrage side; she had a curious feeling of
loyalty in seeing the more aggressive women through.
Capes was irritatingly judicial in the matter, neither
absurdly against, in which case one might have smashed
him, or hopelessly undecided, but tepidly sceptical.
Miss Klegg and the youngest girl made a vigorous attack
on Miss Garvice, who had said she thought women lost
something infinitely precious by mingling in the con-
flicts of life. The discussion wandered, and was punctu-
ated with bread and butter. Capes was inclined to
support Miss Klegg until Miss Garvice cornered him
by quoting him against himself, and citing a recent
paper in the Nineteenth Century, in which, following
Atkinson, he had made a vigorous and damaging attack
on Lester Ward's case for the primitive matriarchate
and the predominant importance of the female through-
out the animal kingdom.

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ANN VERONICA

Ann Veronica was not aware of this literary side
of her teacher; she had a little tinge of annoyance at
Miss Garvice's advantage. Afterwards she hunted
up the article in question, and it seemed to her quite
delightfully written and argued. Capes had the gift of
easy, unaffected writing, coupled with very clear and
logical thinking, and to follow his written thought gave
her the sensation of cutting things with a perfectly
new, perfectly sharp knife. She found herself anxious
to read more of him, and the next Wednesday she went
to the British Museum and hunted first among the
half-crown magazines for his essays and then through
various scientific quarterlies for his research papers.
The ordinary research paper, when it is not extravagant
theorizing, is apt to be rather sawdusty in texture,
and Ann Veronica was delighted to find the same easy
and confident luminosity that distinguished his work
for the general reader. She returned to these latter,
and at the back of her mind, as she looked them over
again, was a very distinct resolve to quote them after
the manner of Miss Garvice at the very first oppor-
tunity.

When she got home to her lodgings that evening she
reflected with something like surprise upon her half-
day's employment, and decided that it showed nothing
more nor less than that Capes was a really very inter-
esting person indeed.

And then she fell into a musing about Capes. She
wondered why he was so distinctive, so unlike other
men, and it never occurred to her for some time that
this might be because she was falling in love with
him.

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§ 5

Yet Ann Veronica was thinking a very great deal
about love. A dozen shynesses and intellectual bar-
riers were being outflanked or broken down in her mind.
All the influences about her worked with her own pre-
disposition and against all the traditions of her home
and upbringing to deal with the facts of life in an un-
abashed manner. Ramage, by a hundred skilful hints,
had led her to realize that the problem of her own life
was inseparably associated with, and indeed only one
special case of, the problems of any woman's life, and
that the problem of a woman's life is love.

"A young man conies into life asking how best he
may place himself," Ramage had said; "a woman
comes into life thinking instinctively how best she may
give herself."

She noted that as a good saying, and it germinated
and spread tentacles of explanation through her brain.
The biological laboratory, perpetually viewing life as
pairing and breeding and selection, and again pairing
and breeding, seemed only a translated generalization
of that assertion. And all the talk of the Miniver peo-
ple and the Widgett people seemed always to be like a
ship in adverse weather on the lee shore of love. " For
seven years," said Ann Veronica, "I have been trying
to keep myself from thinking about love. . . .

" I have been training myself to look askance at
beautiful things."

She gave herself permission now to look at this square-
ly. She made herself a private declaration of liberty.
"This is mere nonsense, mere tongue-tied fear!" she

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ANN VERONICA

said. "This is the slavery of the veiled life. I might
as well be at Morningside Park. This business of love
is the supreme affair in life, it is the woman's one event
and crisis that makes up for all her other restrictions,
and I cower — as we all cower — with a blushing and
paralyzed mind until it overtakes me! . . .

"I'll be hanged if I do."

But she could not talk freely about love, she found,
for all that manumission.

Ramage seemed always fencing about the forbidden
topic, probing for openings, and she wondered why she
did not give him them. But something instinctive pre-
vented that, and with the finest resolve not to be " silly "
and prudish she found that whenever he became at all
bold in this matter she became severely scientific and
impersonal, almost entomological indeed, in her method ;
she killed every remark as he made it and pinned it out
for examination. In the biological laboratory that was
their invincible tone. But she disapproved more and
more of her own mental austerity. Here was an ex-
perienced man of the world, her friend, who evidently
took a great interest in this supreme topic and was will-
ing to give her the benefit of his experiences! Why
should not she be at her ease with him? Why should
not she know things? It is hard enough anyhow for a
human being to learn, she decided, but it is a dozen times
more difficult than it need be because of all this locking
of the lips and thoughts.

She contrived to break down the barriers of shyness
at last in one direction, and talked one night of love and
the facts of love with Miss Miniver.

But Miss Miniver was highly unsatisfactory. She
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repeated phrases of Mrs. Goopes's: "Advanced people,"
she said, with an air of great elucidation, " tend to gen-
eralize love. ' He prayeth best who loveth best — all
things both great and small.' For my own part I go
about loving."

" Yes, but men," said Ann Veronica, plunging; " don't
you want the love of men ?"

For some seconds they remained silent, both shocked
by this question.

Miss Miniver looked over her glasses at her friend
almost balefully. "No!" she said, at last, with some-
thing in her voice that reminded Ann Veronica of a
sprung tennis-racket.

" I've been through all that," she went on, after a
pause.

She spoke slowly. " I have never yet met a man
whose intellect I could respect."

Ann Veronica looked at her thoughtfully for a mo-
ment, and decided to persist on principle.

"But if you had?" she said.

" I can't imagine it," said Miss Miniver. " And
think, think" — her voice sank — "of the horrible coarse-
ness!"

"What coarseness?" said Ann Veronica.

"MydearVee!" Her voice became very low. "Don't
you know?"

"Oh! I know—"

"Well — " Her face was an unaccustomed pink.

Ann Veronica ignored her friend's confusion.

"Don't we all rather humbug about the coarseness?
All we women, I mean," said she. She decided to go
on, after a momentary halt. "We pretend bodies are

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ANN VERONICA

ugly. Really they are the most beautiful things in the
world. We pretend we never think of everything that
makes us what we are."

"No," cried Miss Miniver, almost vehemently. "You
are wrong! I did not think you thought such things.
Bodies! Bodies! Horrible things! We are souls.
Love lives on a higher plane. We are not animals. If
ever I did meet a man I could love, I should love him"
— her voice dropped again — "platonically."

She made her glasses glint. "Absolutely platonical-
ly," she said. " Soul to soul."

She turned her face to the fire, gripped her hands
upon her elbows, and drew her thin shoulders together
in a shrug. "Ugh!" she said.

Ann Veronica watched her and wondered about her.

"We do not want the men," said Miss Miniver; "we
do not want them, with their sneers and loud laughter.
Empty, silly, coarse brutes. Brutes! They are the
brute still with us! Science some day may teach us a
way to do without them. It is only the women matter.
It is not every sort of creature needs — these males.
Some have no males."

"There's green-fly," admitted Ann Veronica. "And
even then — "

The conversation hung for a thoughtful moment.

Ann Veronica readjusted her chin on her hand. " I
wonder which of us is right," she said. "I haven't a
scrap — of this sort of aversion."

"Tolstoy is so good about this," said Miss Miniver,
regardless of her friend's attitude. "He sees through
it all. The Higher Life and the Lower. He sees men
all defiled by coarse thoughts, coarse ways of living,

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cruelties. Simply because they are hardened by — by
bestiality, and poisoned by the juices of meat slain in
anger and fermented drinks — fancy! drinks that have
been swarmed in by thousands and thousands of horri-
ble little bacteria!"

"It's yeast," said Ann Veronica — "a vegetable."

"It's all the same," said Miss Miniver. "And then
they are swollen up and inflamed and drunken with
matter. They are blinded to all fine and subtle things;
they look at life with bloodshot eyes and dilated nos-
trils. They are arbitrary and unjust and dogmatic and
brutish and lustful."

" But do you really think men's minds are altered by
the food they eat?"

"I know it," said Miss Miniver. " Experte credo.
When I am leading a true life, a pure and simple life,
free of all stimulants and excitements, I think — I think
— oh ! with pellucid clearness ; but if I so much as take a
mouthful of meat — or anything — the mirror is all
blurred."

§ 6

Then, arising she knew not how, like a new-born ap-
petite, came a craving in Ann Veronica for the sight
and sound of beauty.

It was as if her aesthetic sense had become inflamed.
Her mind turned and accused itself of having been cold
and hard. She began to look for beauty and discover
it in unexpected aspects and places. Hitherto she had
seen it chiefly in pictures and other works of art, inci-
dentally, and as a thing taken out of life. Now the
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ANN VERONICA

sense of beauty was spreading to a multitude of hitherto
unsuspected aspects of the world about her.

The thought of beauty became an obsession. It
interwove with her biological work. She found herself
asking more and more curiously, "Why, on the princi-
ple of the survival of the fittest, have I any sense of
beauty at all?" That enabled her to go on thinking
about beauty when it seemed to her right that she should
be thinking about biology.

She was very greatly exercised by the two systems
of values — the two series of explanations that her com-
parative anatomy on the one hand and her sense of
beauty on the other, set going in her thoughts. She
could not make up her mind which was the finer, more
elemental thing, which gave its values to the other.
Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced
as a sort of necessary by-product these intense prefer-
ences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical
outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward,
even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value
and all the manifest discretions of life? She went -to
Capes with that riddle and put it to him very carefully
and clearly, and he talked well — he always talked at
some length when she took a difficulty to him — and sent
her to a various literature upon the markings of butter-
flies, the incomprehensible elaboration and splendor of
birds of Paradise and humming-birds' plumes, the pat-
terning of tigers, and a leopard's spots. He was inter-
esting and inconclusive, and the original papers to
which he referred her discursive were at best only sug-
gestive. Afterward, one afternoon, he hovered about
her, and came and sat beside her and talked of beauty

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and the riddle of beauty for some time. He displayed
a quite unprofessional vein of mysticism in the matter.
He contrasted with Russell, whose intellectual meth-
ods were, so to speak, sceptically dogmatic. Their
talk drifted to the beauty of music, and they took that
up again at tea-time.

But as the students sat about Miss Garvice's tea-
pot and drank tea or smoked cigarettes, the talk got
away from Capes. The Scotchman informed Ann Ve-
ronica that your view of beauty necessarily depended
on your metaphysical premises, and the young man
with the Russell-like hair became anxious to distinguish
himself by telling the Japanese student that Western
art was symmetrical and Eastern art asymmetrical, and
that among the higher organisms the tendency was
toward an external symmetry veiling an internal want
of balance. Ann Veronica decided she would have to
go on with Capes another day, and, looking up, discov-
ered him sitting on a stool with his hands in his pockets
and his head a little on one side, regarding her with a
thoughtful expression. She met his eye for a moment
in curious surprise.

He turned his eyes and stared at Miss Garvice like
one who wakes from a reverie, and then got up and
strolled down the laboratory toward his refuge, the prep-
aration-room.

§ 7

Then one day a little thing happened that clothed
itself in significance.

She had been working upon a ribbon of microtome

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ANN VERONICA

sections of the developing salamander, and he came to
see what she had made of them. She stood up and he
sat down at the microscope, and for a time he was busy
scrutinizing one section after another. She looked
down at him and saw that the sunlight was gleaming
from his cheeks, and that all over his cheeks was a
fine golden down of delicate hairs. And at the sight
something leaped within her. Something changed for
her.

She became aware of his presence as she had never
been aware of any human being in her life before. She
became aware of the modelling of his ear, of the muscles
of his neck and the textures of the hair that came off
his brow, the soft minute curve of eyelid that she could
just see beyond his brow ; she perceived all these familiar
objects as though they were acutely beautiful things.
They were, she realized, acutely beautiful things. Her
sense followed the shoulders under his coat, down to
where his flexible, sensitive-looking hand rested lightly
upon the table. She felt him as something solid and
strong and trustworthy beyond measure. The percep-
tion of him flooded her being.

He got up. "Here's something rather good," he
said, and with a start and an effort she took his place at
the microscope, while he stood beside her and almost
leaning over her.

She found she was trembling at his nearness and full
of a thrilling dread that he might touch her. She pulled
herslf together and put her eye to the eye-piece.

" You see the pointer ?" he asked.

"I see the pointer," she said.

"It's like this," he said, and dragged a stool beside her

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and sat down with his elbow four inches from hers and
made a sketch. Then he got up and left her.

She had a feeling at his departure as of an immense
cavity, of something enormously gone; she could not tell
whether it was infinite regret or infinite relief. . . .

But now Ann Veronica knew what was the matter
with her.

§ 8

And as she sat on her bed that night, musing and half-
undressed, she began to run one hand down her arm and
scrutinize the soft flow of muscle under her skin. She
thought of the marvellous beauty of skin, and all the
delightfulness of living texture. On the back of her
arm she found the faintest down of hair in the world.
" Etherialized monkey," she said. She held out her arm
straight before her, and turned her hand this way and
that.

"Why should one pretend?" she whispered. "Why
should one pretend?

"Think of all the beauty in the world that is covered
up and overlaid."

She glanced shyly at the mirror above her dressing-
table, and then about her at the furniture, as though it
might penetrate to the thoughts that peeped in her mind.

" I wonder," said Ann Veronica at last, " if I am beau-
tiful? I wonder if I shall ever shine like a light, like a
translucent goddess? —

"I wonder —

"I suppose girls and women have prayed for this,
have come to this — In Babylon, in Nineveh.

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ANN VERONICA

"Why shouldn't one face the facts of one's self?"
She stood up. She posed herself before her mirror
and surveyed herself with gravely thoughtful, gravely
critical, and yet admiring eyes. "And, after all, I am
just one common person!"

She watched the throb of the arteries in the stem of her
neck, and put her hand at last gently and almost timidly
to where her heart beat beneath her breast.

§9

The realization that she was in love flooded Ann
Veronica's mind, and altered the quality of all its topics.

She began to think persistently of Capes, and it seemed
to her now that for some weeks at least she must have
been thinking persistently of him unawares. She was
surprised to find how stored her mind was with impres-
sions and memories of him, how vividly she remembered
his gestures and little things that he had said. It
occurred to her that it was absurd and wrong to be so
continuously thinking of one engrossing topic, and she
made a strenuous effort to force her mind to other ques-
tions.

But it was extraordinary what seemingly irrelevant
things could restore her to the thought of Capes again.
And when she went to sleep, then always Capes became
the novel and wonderful guest of her dreams.

For a time it really seemed all-sufficient to her that she
should love. That Capes should love her seemed be-
yond the compass of her imagination. Indeed, she did
not want to think of him as loving her. She wanted

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to think of him as her beloved person, to be near him
and watch him, to have him going about, doing this and
that, saying this and that, unconscious of her, while she
too remained unconscious of herself. To think of him
as loving her would make all that different. Then he
would turn his face to her, and she would have to think
of herself in his eyes. She would become defensive —
what she did would be the thing that mattered. He
would require things of her, and she would be passionate-
ly concerned to meet his requirements. Loving was
better than that. Loving was self-forgetfulness, pure
delighting in another human being. She felt that with
Capes near to her she would be content always to go on
loving.

She went next day to the schools, and her world seem-
ed all made of happiness just worked up roughly into
shapes and occasions and duties. She found she could
do her microscope work all the better for being in love.
She winced when first she heard the preparation-room
door open and Capes came down the laboratory; but
when at last he reached her she was self-possessed. She
put a stool for him at a little distance from her own, and
after he had seen the day's work he hesitated, and then
plunged into a resumption of their discussion about beauty.

"I think," he said, "I was a little too mystical about
beauty the other day."

"I like the mystical way," she said.

"Our business here is the right way. I've been
thinking, you know — I'm not sure that primarily the
perception of beauty isn't just intensity of feeling free
from pain; intensity of perception without any tissue
destruction."

193

ANN VERONICA

"I like the mystical way better," said Ann Veronica,
and thought. "A number of beautiful things are not
intense."

"But delicacy, for example, may be intensely per-
ceived."

"But why is one face beautiful and another not?"
objected Ann Veronica; "on your theory any two faces
side by side in the sunlight ought to be equally beau-
tiful. One must get them with exactly the same inten-
sity."

He did not agree with that. " I don't mean simply in-
tensity of sensation. I said intensity of perception.
You may perceive harmony, proportion, rhythm, in-
tensely. They are things faint and slight in themselves,
as physical facts, but they are like the detonator of a
bomb: they let loose the explosive. There's the internal
factor as well as the external. ... I don't know if I express
myself clearly. I mean that the point is that vividness
of perception is the essential factor of beauty; but, of
course, vividness may be created by a whisper."

"That brings us back," said Ann Veronica, "to the
mystery. Why should some things and not others open
the deeps?"

" Well, that might, after all, be an outcome of selection
— like the preference for blue flowers, which are not
nearly so bright as yellow, of some insects."

"That doesn't explain sunsets."

"Not quite so easily as it explains an insect alighting
on colored paper. But perhaps if people didn't like clear,
bright, healthy eyes — which is biologically understand-
able— they couldn't like precious stones. One thing
may be a necessary collateral of the others. And, after

194

BIOLOGY

all, a fine clear sky of bright colors is the signal to come
out of hiding and rejoice and go on with life."

"H'm!" said Ann Veronica, and shook her head.

Capes smiled cheerfully with his eyes meeting hers.
"I throw it out in passing," he said. "What I am after
is that beauty isn't a special inserted sort of thing ; that's
my idea. It's just life, pure life, life nascent, running
clear and strong."

He stood up to go on to the next student.

"There's morbid beauty," said Ann Veronica.

"I wonder if there is!" said Capes, and paused, and
then bent down over the boy who wore his hair like
Russell.

Ann Veronica surveyed his sloping back for a mo-
ment, and then drew her microscope toward her. Then
for a time she sat very still. She felt that she had passed
a difficult corner, and that now she could go on talking
with him again, just as she had been used to do before
she understood what was the matter with her. . . .

She had one idea, she found, very clear in her mind — •
that she would get a Research Scholarship, and so con-
trive another year in the laboratory.

"Now I see what everything means," said Ann Ve-
ronica to herself; and it really felt for some days as
though the secret of the universe, that had been wrapped
and hidden from her so obstinately, was at last alto-
gether displayed.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

DISCORDS

•

§ I

ONE afternoon, soon after Ann Veronica's great dis-
covery, a telegram came into the laboratory for
her. It ran:

Bored

and

nothing

to

do

will

you

dine

with

me

to-night

somewhere

and

talk

I

shall

be

grateful

Ramage

Ann Veronica was rather pleased by this. She had
not seen Ramage for ten or eleven days, and she was
quite ready for a gossip with him. And now her mind
was so full of the thought that she was in love — in
love! — that marvellous state! that I really believe she
had some dim idea of talking to him about it. At any
rate, it would be good to hear him saying the sort of
things he did — perhaps now she would grasp them
better — with this world-shaking secret brandishing it-
self about inside her head within a yard of him.

196

DISCORDS

She was sorry to find Ramage a little disposed to be
melancholy.

"I have made over seven hundred pounds in the last
week," he said.

"That's exhilarating," said Ann Veronica.

"Not a bit of it," he said; "it's only a score in a
game."

"It's a score you can buy all sorts of things with."

"Nothing that one wants."

He turned to the waiter, who held a wine - card.
"Nothing can cheer me," he said, "except champagne."
He meditated. "This," he said, and then: "No! Is
this sweeter? Very well."

"Everything goes well with me," he said, folding his
arms under him and regarding Ann Veronica with the
slightly projecting eyes wide open. "And I'm not
happy. I believe I'm in love."

He leaned back for his soup.

Presently he resumed: "I believe I must be in love."

"You can't be that," said Ann Veronica, wisely.

"How do you know?"

"Well, it isn't exactly a depressing state, is it?"

"You don't know."

"One has theories," said Ann Veronica, radiantly.

"Oh, theories! Being in love is a fact."

"It ought to make one happy."

"It's an unrest— a longing— What's that?" The
waiter had intervened. "Parmesan — take it away!"

He glanced at Ann Veronica's face, and it seemed to
him that she really was exceptionally radiant. He
wondered why she thought love made people happy,
and began to talk of the smilax and pinks that adorned

197

ANN VERONICA

the table. He filled her glass with champagne. "You
must," he said, "because of my depression."

They were eating quails when they returned to the
topic of love. "What made you think," he said,
abruptly, with the gleam of avidity in his face, "that
love makes people happy?"

"I know it must."

"But how?"

He was, she thought, a little too insistent. "Women
know these things by instinct," she answered.

"I wonder," he said, "if women do know things by
instinct? I have my doubts about feminine instinct.
It's one of our conventional superstitions. A woman
is supposed to know when a man is in love with her.
Do you think she does?"

Ann Veronica picked among her salad with a judicial
expression of face. "I think she would," she decided.

"Ah!" said Ramage, impressively.

Ann Veronica looked up at him and found him re-
garding her with eyes that were almost woebegone,
and into which, indeed, he was trying to throw much
more expression than they could carry. There was a
little pause between them, full for Ann Veronica of rapid
elusive suspicions and intimations.

"Perhaps one talks nonsense about a woman's in-
stinct," she said. "It's a way of avoiding explanations.
And girls and women, perhaps, are different. I don't
know. I don't suppose a girl can tell if a man is in love
with her or not in love with her." Her mind went off
to Capes. Her thoughts took words for themselves.
"She can't. I suppose it depends on her own state of
mind. If one wants a thing very much, perhaps one

198

DISCORDS

is inclined to think one can't have it. I suppose if one
were to love some one, one would feel doubtful. And
if one were to love some one very much, it's just so that
one would be blindest, just when one wanted most to
see."

She stopped abruptly, afraid that Ramage might
be able to infer Capes from the things she had said,
and indeed his face was very eager.

"Yes?" he said.

Ann Veronica blushed. "That's all," she said.
"I'm afraid I'm a little confused about these things."

Ramage looked at her, and then fell into deep re-
flection as the waiter came to paragraph their talk
again.

"Have you ever been to the opera, Ann Veronica?"
said Ramage.

"Once or twice."

"Shall we go now?"

"I think I would like to listen to music. What is
there?"

" Tristan."

"I've never heard Tristan and Isolde."

"That settles it. We'll go. There's sure to be a place
somewhere."

"It's rather jolly of you," said Ann Veronica.

"It's jolly of you to come," said Ramage.

So presently they got into a hansom together, and
Ann Veronica sat back feeling very luxurious and
pleasant, and looked at the light and stir and misty
glitter of the street traffic from under slightly drooping
eyelids, while Ramage sat closer to her than he need
have done, and glanced ever and again at her face,

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ANN VERONICA

and made to speak and said nothing. And when they
got to Covent Garden Ramage secured one of the little
upper boxes, and they came into it as the overture
began.

Ann Veronica took off her jacket and sat down in
the corner chair, and leaned forward to look into the
great hazy warm brown cavity of the house, and Ramage
placed his chair to sit beside her and near her, facing
the stage. The music took hold of her slowly as her
eyes wandered from the indistinct still ranks of the
audience to the little busy orchestra with its quivering
violins, its methodical movements of brown and silver
instruments, its brightly lit scores and shaded lights.
She had never been to the opera before except as one
of a congested mass of people in the cheaper seats, and
with backs and heads and women's hats for the frame
of the spectacle ; there was by contrast a fine large sense
of space and ease in her present position. The curtain
rose out of the concluding bars of the overture and
revealed Isolde on the prow of the barbaric ship. The
voice of the young seaman came floating down from
the masthead, and the story of the immortal lovers
had begun. She knew the story only imperfectly, and
followed it now with a passionate and deepening interest.
The splendid voices sang on from phase to phase of
love's unfolding, the ship drove across the sea to the
beating rhythm of the rowers. The lovers broke into
passionate knowledge of themselves and each other, and
then, a jarring intervention, came King Mark amidst the
shouts of the sailormen, and stood beside them.

The curtain came festooning slowly down, the music
ceased, the lights in the auditorium glowed out, and

200

DISCORDS

Ann Veronica woke out of her confused dream of in-
voluntary and commanding love in a glory of sound
and colors to discover that Ramage was sitting close
beside her with one hand resting lightly on her waist.
She made a quick movement, and the hand fell away.

"By God! Ann Veronica," he said, sighing deeply.
"This stirs one."

She sat quite still looking at him.

"I wish you and I had drunk that love potion,"
he said.

She found no ready reply to that, and he went on:
"This music is the food of love. It makes me desire
life beyond measure. Life! Life and love! It makes
me want to be always young, always strong, always
devoting my life — and dying splendidly."

"It is very beautiful," said Ann Veronica in a low
tone.

They said no more for a moment, and each was now
acutely aware of the other. Ann Veronica was excited
and puzzled, with a sense of a strange and disconcerting
new light breaking over her relations with Ramage.
She had never thought of him at all in that way before.
It did not shock her; it amazed her, interested her
beyond measure. But also this must not go on. She
felt he was going to say something more — something
still more personal and intimate. She was curious, and
at the same time clearly resolved she must not hear it.
She felt she must get him talking upon some impersonal
theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind.
"What is the exact force of a motif?" she asked at ran-
dom. "Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard
enthusiastic descriptions of it from a mistress I didn't

201

ANN VERONICA

like at school. She gave me an impression of a sort of
patched quilt; little bits of patterned stuff coming up
again and again."

She stopped with an air of interrogation.

Ramage looked at her for a long and discriminating
interval without speaking. He seemed to be hesitating
between two courses of action. "I don't know much
about the technique of music," he said at last, with his
eyes upon her. "It's a matter of feeling with me."

He contradicted himself by plunging into an ex-
position of motifs. By a tacit agreement they ignored
the significant thing between them, ignored the slipping
away of the ground on which they had stood together
hitherto. . . .

All through the love music of the second act, until
the hunting horns of Mark break in upon the dream,
Ann Veronica's consciousness was flooded with the
perception of a man close beside her, preparing some
new thing to say to her, preparing, perhaps, to touch
her, stretching hungry invisible tentacles about her.
She tried to think what she should do in this eventuality
or that. Her mind had been and was full of the thought
of Capes, a huge generalized Capes-lover. And in some
incomprehensible way, Ramage was confused with
Capes; she had a grotesque disposition to persuade
herself that this was really Capes who surrounded her,
as it were, with wings of desire. The fact that it was
her trusted friend making illicit love to her remained,
in spite of all her effort, an insignificant thing in her
mind. The music confused and distracted her, and
made her struggle against a feeling of intoxication.
Her head swam. That was the inconvenience of it;

202

DISCORDS

her head was swimming. The music throbbed into the
warnings that preceded the king's irruption.

Abruptly he gripped her wrist. "I love you, Ann
Veronica. I love you — with all my heart and soul."

She put her face closer to his. She felt the warm
nearness of his. " Don't!" she said, and wrenched
her wrist from his retaining hand.

"My God! Ann Veronica," he said, struggling to keep
his hold upon her; "my God! Tell me — tell me now —
tell me you love me!"

His expression was as it were rapaciously furtive.
She answered in whispers, for there was the white
arm of a woman in the next box peeping beyond the
partition within a yard of him.

"My hand! This isn't the place."

He released her hand and talked in eager undertones
against an auditory background of urgency and distress.

"Ann Veronica," he said, "I tell you this is love. I
love the soles of your feet. I love your very breath.
I have tried not to tell you — tried to 'be simply your
friend. It is no good. I want you. I worship you. I
would do anything — I would give anything to make you
mine. ... Do you hear me? Do you hear what I am
saying? . . . Love!"

He held her arm and abandoned it again at her quick
defensive movement. For a long time neither spoke
again.

She sat drawn together in her chair in the corner of
the box, at a loss what to say or do — afraid, curious, per-
plexed. It seemed to her that it was her duty to get up
and clamor to go home to her room, to protest against
his advances as an insult. But she did not in the least
14 203

ANN VERONICA

want to do that. These sweeping dignities were not
within the compass of her will ; she remembered she liked
Ramage, and owed things to him, and she was interested
— she was profoundly interested. He was in love with
her! She tried to grasp all the welter of values in the
situation simultaneously, and draw some conclusion from
their disorder.

He began to talk again in quick undertones that she
could not clearly hear.

"I have loved you," he was saying, "ever since you
sat on that gate and talked. I have always loved you.
I don't care what divides us. I don't care what else
there is in the world. I want you beyond measure or
reckoning. ..."

His voice rose and fell amidst the music and the
singing of Tristan and King Mark, like a voice heard in a
badly connected telephone. She stared at his pleading
face.

She turned to the stage, and Tristan was wounded
in Kurvenal's arms, with Isolde at his feet, and King
Mark, the incarnation of masculine force and obligation,
the masculine creditor of love and beauty, stood over
him, and the second climax was ending in wreaths and
reek of melodies ; and then the curtain was coming down
in a series of short rushes, the music had ended, and the
people were stirring and breaking out into applause, and
the lights of the auditorium were resuming. The
ligh ting-up pierced the obscurity of the box, and Ramage
stopped his urgent flow of words abruptly and sat back.
This helped to restore Ann Veronica's self-command.

She turned her eyes to him again, and saw her late
friend and pleasant and trusted companion, who had seen

204

DISCORDS

fit suddenly to change into a lover, babbling interesting
inacceptable things. He looked eager and flushed and
troubled. His eyes caught at hers with passionate in-
quiries. "Tell me," he said; "speak to me." She
realized it was possible to be sorry for him — acutely sorry
for the situation. Of course this thing was absolutely
impossible. But she was disturbed, mysteriously dis-
turbed. She remembered abruptly that she was really
living upon his money. She leaned forward and ad-
dressed him.

"Mr. Ramage," she said, "please don't talk like this."

He made to speak and did not.

" I don't want you to do it, to go on talking to me. I
don't want to hear you. If I had known that you had
meant to talk like this I wouldn't have come here."

" But how can I help it? How can I keep silence ?"

"Please!" she insisted. "Please not now."

" I must talk with you. I must say what I have to say !"

"But not now — not here."

"It came," he said. "I never planned it — And
now I have begun — "

She felt acutely that he was entitled to explanations,
and as acutely that explanations were impossible that
night. She wanted to think.

"Mr. Ramage," she said, " I can't — Not now. Will
you please — Not now, or I must go."

He stared at her, trying to guess at the mystery of her
thoughts.

"You don't want to go?"

" No. But I must— I ought—"

" I must talk about this. Indeed I must."

"Not now."

205

ANN VERONICA

"But I love you. I love you — unendurably . "

"Then don't talk to me now. I don't want you to
talk to me now. There is a place — This isn't the
place. You have misunderstood. I can't explain — "

They regarded one another, each blinded to the
other. " Forgive me," he decided to say at last, and his
voice had a little quiver of emotion, and he laid his
hand on hers upon her knee. " I am the most foolish
of men. I was stupid — stupid and impulsive beyond
measure to burst upon you in this way. I — I am a love-
sick idiot, and not accountable for my actions. Will
you forgive me — if I say no more?"

She looked at him with perplexed, earnest eyes.

"Pretend," he said, "that all I have said hasn't been
said. And let us go on with our evening. Why not?
Imagine I've had a fit of hysteria — and that I've come
round."

" Yes," she said, and abruptly she liked him enormous-
ly. She felt this was the sensible way out of this oddly
sinister situation.

He still watched her and questioned her.

" And let us have a talk about this — some other time.
Somewhere, where we can talk without interruption.
Will you?"

She thought, and it seemed to him she had never
looked so self-disciplined and deliberate and beautiful.
"Yes," she said, "that is what we ought to do." But
now she doubted again of the quality of the armistice
they had just made.

He had a wild impulse to shout. "Agreed," he said
with queer exaltation, and his grip tightened on her
hand. "And to-night we are friends?"

206

DISCORDS

"We are friends," said Ann Veronica, and drew her
hand quickly away from him.

"To-night we are as we have always been. Except
that this music we have been swimming in is divine.
While I have been pestering you, have you heard it?
At least, you heard the first act. And all the third act
is love-sick music. Tristan dying and Isolde coming
to crown his death. Wagner had just been in love when
he wrote it all. It begins with that queer piccolo solo.
Now I shall never hear it but what this evening will come
pouring back over me."

The lights sank, the prelude to the third act was be-
ginning, the music rose and fell in crowded intimations
of lovers separated — lovers separated with scars and
memories between them, and the curtain went reefing
up to display Tristan lying wounded on his couch and
the shepherd crouching with his pipe.

§ 2

They had their explanations the next evening, but
they were explanations in quite other terms than Ann
Veronica had anticipated, quite other and much more
startling and illuminating terms. Ramage came for her
at her lodgings, and she met him graciously and kindly
as a queen who knows she must needs give sorrow to a
faithful liege. She was unusually soft and gentle in her
manner to him. He was wearing a new silk hat, with a
slightly more generous brim than its predecessor, and it
suited his type of face, robbed his dark eyes a little of
their aggressiveness and gave him a solid and dignified

207

ANN VERONICA

and benevolent air. A faint anticipation of triumph
showed in his manner and a subdued excitement.

"We'll go to a place where we can have a private
room," he said. "Then — then we can talk things out."

So they went this time to the Rococo, in Germain
Street, and up-stairs to a landing upon which stood a
bald-headed waiter with whiskers like a French admiral
and discretion beyond all limits in his manner. He
seemed to have expected them. He ushered them with
an amiable flat hand into a minute apartment with a
little gas-stove, a silk crimson-covered sofa, and a bright
little table, gay with napery and hot-house flowers.

"Odd little room," said Ann Veronica, dimly ap-
prehending that obtrusive sofa.

"One can talk without undertones, so to speak," said
Ramage. "It's — private." He stood looking at the
preparations before them with an unusual preoccupa-
tion of manner, then roused himself to take her jacket,
a little awkwardly, and hand it to the waiter who hung
it in the corner of the room. It appeared he had al-
ready ordered dinner and wine, and the whiskered waiter
waved in his subordinate with the soup forthwith.

" I'm going to talk of indifferent themes," said Ram-
age, a little fussily, "until these interruptions of the
service are over. Then — then we shall be together. . . .
How did you like Tristan?"

Ann Veronica paused the fraction of a second before
her reply came.

" I thought much of it amazingly beautiful."

" Isn't it. And to think that man got it all out of
the poorest little love-story for a respectable titled lady !
Have you read of it?"

208

DISCORDS

"Never."

"It gives in a nutshell the miracle of art and the
imagination. You get this queer irascible musician
quite impossibly and unfortunately in love with a
wealthy patroness, and then out of his brain comes
this, a tapestry of glorious music, setting out love to
lovers, lovers who love in spite of all that is wise and
respectable and right."

Ann Veronica thought. She did not want to seem
to shrink from conversation, but all sorts of odd ques-
tions were running through her mind. " I wonder why
people in love are so defiant, so careless of other con-
siderations?"

"The very hares grow brave. I suppose because it
is the chief thing in life." He stopped and said earnest-
ly: "It is the chief thing in life, and everything else
goes down before it. Everything, my dear, every-
thing! . . . But we have got to talk upon indifferent
themes until we have done with this blond young gentle-
man from Bavaria. ..."

The dinner came to an end at last, and the whiskered
waiter presented his bill and evacuated the apartment
and closed the door behind him with an almost osten-
tatious discretion. Ramage stood up, and suddenly
turned the key in the door in an off-hand manner.
"Now," he said, "no one can blunder in upon us. We
are alone and we can say and do what we please. We
two." He stood still, looking at her.

Ann Veronica tried to seem absolutely unconcerned.
The turning of the key startled her, but she did not
see how she could make an objection. She felt she had
stepped into a world of unknown usages.

209 •

ANN VERONICA

" I have waited for this," he said, and stood quite
still, looking at her until the silence became oppressive.

"Won't you sit down," she said, "and tell me what
you want to say?" Her voice was flat and faint.
Suddenly she had become afraid. She struggled not to
be afraid. After all, what could happen?

He was looking at her very hard and earnestly.
"Ann Veronica," he said.

Then before she could say a word to arrest him he
was at her side. "Don't!" she said, weakly, as he had
bent down and put one arm about her and seized her
hands with his disengaged hand and kissed her — kissed
her almost upon her lips. He seemed to do ten things
before she could think to do one, to leap upon her and
take possession.

Ann Veronica's universe, which had never been alto-
gether so respectful to her as she could have wished,
gave a shout and whirled head over heels. Everything
in the world had changed for her. If hate could kill,
Ramage would have been killed by a flash of hate.
"Mr. Ramage!" she cried, and struggled to her feet.

"My darling!" he said, clasping her resolutely in his
arms, "my dearest!"

"Mr. Ramage!" she began, and his mouth sealed hers
and his breath was mixed with her breath. Her eye
met his four inches away, and his was glaring, immense,
and full of resolution, a stupendous monster of an eye.

She shut her lips hard, her jaw hardened, and she set
herself to struggle with him. She wrenched her head
away from his grip and got her arm between his chest
and hers. They began to wrestle fiercely. Each be-
came frightfully aware of the other as a plastic energetic

210

DISCORDS

body, of the strong muscles of neck against cheek, of
hands gripping shoulder-blade and waist. " How dare
you!" she panted, with her world screaming and grimac-
ing insult at her. " How dare you!"

They were both astonished at the other's strength.
Perhaps Ramage was the more astonished. Ann Ve-
ronica had been an ardent hockey player and had had
a course of jiu-jitsu in the High School. Her defence
ceased rapidly to be in any sense ladylike, and became
vigorous and effective; a strand of black hair that had
escaped its hairpins came athwart Ramage's eyes, and
then the knuckles of a small but very hardly clinched
fist had thrust itself with extreme effectiveness and pain-
fulness under his jawbone and ear.

"Let go!" said Ann Veronica, through her teeth,
strenuously inflicting agony, and he cried out sharply
and let go and receded a pace.

"Now!" said Ann Veronica. "Why did you dare to
do that?"

§3

Each of them stared at the other, set in a universe
that had changed its system of values with kaleido-
scopic completeness. She was flushed, and her eyes
were bright and angry; her Breath came sobbing, and
her hair was all abroad in wandering strands of black.
He too was flushed and ruffled; one side of his collar
had slipped from its stud and he held a hand to the
corner of his jaw.

" You vixen!" said Mr. Ramage, speaking the simplest
first thought of his heart.

211

ANN VERONICA

" You had no right — " panted Ann Veronica.

"Why on earth," he asked, "did you hurt me like
that?"

Ann Veronica did her best to think she had not de-
liberately attempted to cause him pain. She ignored
his question.

"I never dreamt!" she said.

"What on earth did you expect me to do, then?" he
asked.

§ 4

Interpretation came pouring down upon her almost
blindingly; she understood now the room, the waiter,
the whole situation. She understood. She leaped to a
world of shabby knowledge, of furtive base realizations.
She wanted to cry out upon herself for the uttermost
fool in existence.

"I thought you wanted to have a talk to me," she
said.

"I wanted to make love to you.

"You knew it," he added, in her momentary silence.

"You said you were in love with me," said Ann
Veronica; "I wanted to explain — "

"I said I loved and wanted you." The brutality of
his first astonishment was evaporating. "I am in love
with you. You know I am in love with you. And
then you go — and half throttle me. ... I believe you've
crushed a gland or something. It feels like it."

"I am sorry," said Ann Veronica. "What else was
I to do?"

For some seconds she stood watching him, and both

212

DISCORDS

were thinking very quickly. Her state of mind would
have seemed altogether discreditable to her grand-
mother. She ought to have been disposed to faint and
scream at all these happenings ; she ought to have main-
tained a front of outraged dignity to veil the sinking
of her heart. I would like to have to tell it so. But
indeed that is not at all a good description of her atti-
tude. She was an indignant queen, no doubt; she was
alarmed and disgusted within limits; but she was highly
excited, and there was something, some low adventu-
rous strain in her being, some element, subtle at least if
base, going about the rioting ways and crowded in-
surgent meeting-places of her mind declaring that the
whole affair was after all — they are the only words
that express it — a very great lark indeed. At the bot-
tom of her heart she was not a bit afraid of Ramage.
She had unaccountable gleams of sympathy with and
liking for him. And the grotesquest fact was that she
did not so much loathe, as experience with a quite crit-
ical condemnation this strange sensation of being kissed.
Never before had any human being kissed her lips. . . .

It was only some hours after that these ambiguous
elements evaporated and vanished and loathing came,
and she really began to be thoroughly sick and ashamed
of the whole disgraceful quarrel and scuffle.

He, for his part, was trying to grasp the series of
unexpected reactions that had so wrecked their tete-a-
tete. He had meant to be master of his fate that evening
and it had escaped him altogether. It had, as it were,
blown up at the concussion of his first step. It dawned
upon him that he had been abominably used by Ann
Veronica.

213

ANN VERONICA

"Look here," he said, "I brought you here to make
love to you."

"I didn't understand — your idea of making love.
You had better let me go again."

"Not yet," he said. "I do love you. I love you
all the more for the streak of sheer devil in you. . . .
You are the most beautiful, the most desirable thing
I have ever met in this world. It was good to kiss you,
even at the price. But, by Jove! you are fierce! You
are like those Roman women who carry stilettos in
their hair."

"I came here to talk reasonably, Mr. Ramage. It is
abominable — '

"What is the use of keeping up this note of indig-
nation, Ann Veronica? Here I am! I am your lover,
burning for you. I mean to have you! Don't frown
me off now. Don't go back into Victorian respecta-
bility and pretend you don't know and you can't think
and all the rest of it. One comes at last to the step
from dreams to reality. This is your moment. No
one will ever love you as I love you now. I have been
dreaming of your body and you night after night. I
have been imaging —

"Mr. Ramage, I came here — I didn't suppose for
one moment you would dare — "

"Nonsense! That is your mistake! You are too
intellectual. You want to do everything with your
mind. You are afraid of kisses. You are afraid of
the warmth in your blood. It's just because all that
side of your life hasn't fairly begun."

He made a step toward her.

"Mr. Ramage," she said, sharply, "I have to make it
214

DISCORDS

plain to you. I don't think you understand. I don't
love you. I don't. I can't love you. I love some
one else. It is repulsive. It disgusts me that you
should touch me."

He stared in amazement at this new aspect of the
situation. "You love some one else?" he repeated.

"I love some one else. I could not dream of loving
you."

And then he flashed his whole conception of the rela-
tions of men and women upon her in one astonishing
question. His hand went with an almost instinctive in-
quiry to his jawbone again. "Then why the devil,"
he demanded, "do you let me stand you dinners and
the opera — and why do you come to a cabinet particulier
with me?"

He became radiant with anger. "You mean to tell
me," he said, "that you have a lover? While I have
been keeping you! Yes — keeping you!"

This view of life he hurled at her as if it were an of-
fensive missile. It stunned her. She felt she must fly
before it and could no longer do so. She did not think
for one moment what interpretation he might put upon
the word "lover."

"Mr. Ramage," she said, clinging to her one point,
" I want to get out of this horrible little room. It has
all been a mistake. I have been stupid and foolish.
Will you unlock that door?"

"Never!" he said. "Confound your lover! Look
here! Do you really think I am going to run you while
he makes love to you ? No fear! I never heard of any-
thing so cool. If he wants you, let him get you. You're
mine. I've paid for you and helped you, and I'm going

215

ANN VERONICA

to conquer you somehow — if I have to break you to do
it. Hitherto you've seen only my easy, kindly side.
But now — confound it! how can you prevent it ? I will
kiss you."

"You won't!" said Ann Veronica, with the clearest
note of determination.

He seemed to be about to move toward her. She
stepped back quickly, and her hand knocked a wine-
glass from the table to smash noisily on the floor. She
caught at the idea. "If you come a step nearer to
me," she said, "I will smash every glass on this ta-
ble."

"Then, by God!" he said, "you'll be locked up!"

Ann Veronica was disconcerted for a moment. She
had a vision of policemen, reproving magistrates, a
crowded court, public disgrace. She saw her aunt in
tears, her father white-faced and hard hit. "Don't
come nearer!" she said.

There was a discreet knocking at the door, and Ram-
age's face changed.

"No," she said, under her breath, "you can't face
it." And she knew that she was safe.

He went to the door. "It's all right," he said, re-
assuringly to the inquirer without.

Ann Veronica glanced at the mirror to discover'a
flushed and dishevelled disorder. She began at once
a hasty readjustment of her hair, while Ramage parleyed
with inaudible interrogations. "A glass slipped from

the table," he explained "Non. Fas du tout. Non.

. . . Niente. . . . Bittef . . . Oui, dans la note. . . . Present-
ly. Presently." That conversation ended and he turned
to her again.

216

DISCORDS

"I am going," she said grimly, with three hairpins in
her mouth.

She- took her hat from the peg in the corner and
began to put it on. He regarded that perennial miracle
of pinning with wrathful eyes.

"Look here, Ann Veronica," he began. "I want
a plain word with you about all this. Do you mean
to tell me you didn't understand why I wanted you
to come here?"

" Not a bit of it," said Ann Veronica stoutly.

"You didn't expect that I should kiss you?"

"How was I to know that a man would — would
think it was possible — when there was nothing — no
love?"

"How did I know there wasn't love?"

That silenced her for a moment. "And what on
earth," he said, "do you think the world is made of?
Why do you think I have been doing things for
you? The abstract pleasure of goodness? Are you
one of the members of that great white sisterhood
that takes and does not give? The good accepting
woman! Do you really suppose a girl is entitled to
live at free quarters on any man she meets without
giving any return?"

" I thought," said Ann Veronica, " you were my friend."

"Friend! What have a man and a girl in common
to make them friends ? Ask that lover of yours ! And
even with friends, would you have it all Give on one side
and all Take on the other? . . . Does he know I keep
you? . . . You won't have a man's lips near you, but
you'll eat out of his hand fast enough."

Ann Veronica was stung to helpless anger.
217

ANN VERONICA

"Mr. Ramage," she cried, "you are outrageous!
You understand nothing. You are — horrible. Will
you let me go out of this room?"

"No," cried Ramage; "hear me out! I'll have
that satisfaction, anyhow. You women, with your
tricks of evasion, you're a sex of swindlers. You have
all the instinctive dexterity of parasites. You make
yourself charming for help. You climb by disappoint-
ing men. This lover of yours —

"He doesn't know!" cried Ann Veronica.

"Well, you know."

Ann Veronica could have wept with vexation. In-
deed, a note of weeping broke her voice for a moment
as she burst out, " You know as well as I do that money
was a loan!"

"Loan!"

"You yourself called it a loan!"

"Euphuism. We both understood that."

"You shall have every penny of it back."

"I'll frame it — when I get it."

" I'll pay you if I have to work at shirt-making at
threepence an hour."

" You'll never pay me. You think you will. It's
your way of glossing over the ethical position. It's
the sort of way a woman always does gloss over her
ethical positions. You're all dependents — all of you.
By instinct. Only you good ones — shirk. You shirk
a straightforward and decent return for what you get
from us — taking refuge in purity and delicacy and such-
like when it comes to payment."

"Mr. Ramage," said Ann Veronica, "I want to
go — now!"

218

DISCORDS

§ 5

But she did not get away just then.

Ramage's bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggres-
sion. "Oh, Ann Veronica!" he cried, "I cannot let
you go like this! You don't understand. You can't
possibly understand!"

He began a confused explanation, a perplexing con-
tradictory apology for his urgency and wrath. He
loved Ann Veronica, he said; he was so mad to have
her that he defeated himself, and did crude and alarming
and senseless things. His vicious abusiveness vanished.
He suddenly became eloquent and plausible. He did
make her perceive something of the acute, tormenting
desire for her that had arisen in him and possessed him.
She stood, as it were, directed doorward, with her eyes
watching every movement, listening to him, repelled
by him and yet dimly understanding.

At any rate he made it very clear that night that
there was an ineradicable discord in life, a jarring
something that must shatter all her dreams of a way
of living for women that would enable them to be free
and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the
passionate predisposition of men to believe that the
love of women can be earned and won and controlled and
compelled. He flung aside all his talk of help and
disinterested friendship as though it had never been
even a disguise between them, as though from the first
it was no more than a fancy dress they had put quite
understandingly upon their relationship. He had set
out to win her, and she had let him start. And at the
thought of that other lover — he was convinced that
is 219

ANN VERONICA

that beloved person was a lover, and she found herself
unable to say a word to explain to him that this other per-
son, the person she loved, did not even know of her love
— Ramage grew angry and savage once more, and re-
turned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men do services
for the love of women, and the woman who takes must
pay. Such was the simple code that displayed itself
in all his thoughts. He left that arid rule clear of the
least mist of refinement or delicacy. That he should
pay forty pounds to help this girl who preferred another
man was no less in his eyes than a fraud and mockery
that made her denial a maddening and outrageous
disgrace to him. And this though he was evidently
passionately in love with her.

For a while he threatened her. "You have put all
your life in my hands," he declared. "Think of that
check you endorsed. There it is — against you. I
defy you to explain it away. What do you think people
will make of that ? What will this lover of yours make
of that?"

At intervals Ann Veronica demanded to go, declaring
her undying resolve to repay him at any cost, and
made short movements doorward.

But at last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened
the door. She emerged with a white face and wide-
open eyes upon a little, red-lit landing. She went past
three keenly observant and ostentatiously preoccupied
waiters down the thick-carpeted staircase and out of
the H6tel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory of
relationships, past a tall porter in blue and crimson,
into a cool, clear night.

DISCORDS

§ 6

When Ann Veronica reached her little bed-sitting-
room again, every nerve in her body was quivering
with shame and self-disgust.

She threw hat and coat on the bed and sat down before
the fire.

"And now," she said, splintering the surviving piece
of coal into indignant flame-spurting fragments with one
dexterous blow, " what am I to do ?

"I'm in a hole! — mess is a better word, expresses it
better. I'm in a mess — a nasty mess! a filthy mess!
Oh, no end of a mess! Do you hear, Ann Veronica? —
you're in a nasty, filthy, unforgivable mess!

" Haven't I just made a silly mess of things ?

" Forty pounds ! I haven't got twenty !"

She got up, stamped with her foot, and then, suddenly
remembering the lodger below, sat down and wrenched
off her boots.

" This is what comes of being a young woman up to
date. By Jove! I'm beginning to have my doubts
about freedom!

"You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly
young woman! The smeariness of the thing!

"The smeariness of this sort of thing! . . . Mauled
about!"

She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the
back of her hand. "Ugh!" she said.

" The young women of Jane Austen's time didn't get
into this sort of scrape! At least — one thinks so. ... I
wonder if some of them did — and it didn't get reported.
Aunt Jane had her quiet moments. Most of them didn't,

221

ANN VERONICA

anyhow. They were properly brought up, and sat still
and straight, and took the luck fate brought them as
gentlewomen should. And they had an idea of what men
were like behind all their nicety. They knew they were
all Bogey in disguise. I didn't! I didn't! After all —

For a time her mind ran on daintiness and its de-
fensive restraints as though it was the one desirable
thing. That world of fine printed cambrics and escorted
maidens, of delicate secondary meanings and refined
allusiveness, presented itself to her imagination with the
brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed for many women
it is a lost paradise.

" I wonder if there is anything wrong with my
manners," she said. " I wonder if I've been properly
brought up. If I had been quite quiet and white and
dignified, wouldn't it have been different? Would he
have dared? ..."

For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica
was utterly disgusted with herself; she was wrung with
a passionate and belated desire to move gently, to speak
softly and ambiguously — to be, in effect, prim.

Horrible details recurred to her.

" Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in
his neck — deliberately to hurt him?"

She tried to sound the humorous note.

"Are you aware, Ann Veronica, you nearly throttled
that gentleman?"

Then she reviled her own foolish way of putting it.

"You ass and imbecile, Ann Veronica! You female
cad! Cad! Cad! . . . Why aren't you folded up clean
in lavender — as every young woman ought to be ? What
have you been doing with yourself? . . ,"

222

DISCORDS

She raked into the fire with the poker.

" All of which doesn't help me in the slightest degree
to pay back that money."

That night was the most intolerable one that Ann
Veronica had ever spent. She washed her face with un-
wonted elaboration before she went to bed. This time,
there was no doubt, she did not sleep. The more she
disentangled the lines of her situation the deeper grew
her self-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of lying in
bed became unendurable, and she rolled out and marched
about her room and whispered abuse of herself — usually
until she hit against some article of furniture.

Then she would have quiet times, in which she would
say to herself, " Now look here ! Let me think it all
out!"

For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts
of a woman's position in the world — the meagre realities
of such freedom as it permitted her, the almost un-
avoidable obligation to some individual man under
which she must labor for even a foothold in the world.
She had flung away from her father's support with
the finest assumption of personal independence. And
here she was — in a mess because it had been impossible
for her to avoid leaning upon another man. She had
thought — What had she thought ? That this depend-
ence of women was but an illusion which needed only
to be denied to vanish. She had denied it with vigor,
and here she was !

She did not so much exhaust this general question as
pass from it to her insoluble individual problem again:
"What am I to do?"

She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back

223

ANN VERONICA

into Ramage's face. But she had spent nearly half of it,
and had no conception of how such a sum could be made
good again. She thought of all sorts of odd and des-
perate expedients, and with passionate petulance re-
jected them all.

She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing
insulting epithets for herself. She got up, drew up her
blind, and stared out of window at a dawn-cold vision
of chimneys for a time, and then went and sat on the
edge of her bed. What was the alternative to going
home? No alternative appeared in that darkness.

It seemed intolerable that she should go home and
admit herself beaten. She did most urgently desire to
save her face in Morningside Park, and for long hours
she could think of no way of putting it that would not be
in the nature of unconditional admission of defeat.

" I'd rather go as a chorus-girl," she said.

She was not very clear about the position and duties
of a chorus-girl, but it certainly had the air of being a
last desperate resort. There sprang from that a vague
hope that perhaps she might extort a capitulation from
her father by a threat to seek that position, and then
with overwhelming clearness it came to her that what-
ever happened she would never be able to tell her father
about her debt. The completest capitulation would not
wipe out that trouble. And she felt that if she went
home it was imperative to pay. She would always be
going to and fro up the Avenue, getting glimpses of
Ramage, seeing him in trains. . . .

For a time she promenaded the room.

" Why did I ever take that loan ? An idiot girl in an
asylum would have known better than that!

224

DISCORDS

" Vulgarity of soul and innocence of mind — the worst
of all conceivable combinations. I wish some one would
kill Ramage by accident! . . .

" But then they would find that check endorsed in his
bureau. . . .

"I wonder what he will do?" She tried to imagine
situations that might arise out of Ramage's antagonism,
for he had been so bitter and savage that she could not
believe that he would leave things as they were.

The next morning she went out with her post-office
savings bank-book, and telegraphed for a warrant to
draw out all the money she had in the world. It amount-
ed to two-and-twenty pounds. She addressed an en-
velope to Ramage, and scrawled on a half-sheet of paper,
" The rest shall follow." The money would be available
in the afternoon, and she would send him four five-
pound notes. The rest she meant to keep for her im-
mediate necessities. A little relieved by this step tow-
ard reinstatement, she went on to the Imperial College
to forget her muddle of problems for a time, if she could,
in the presence of Capes.

§7

For a time the biological laboratory was full of heal-
ing virtue. Her sleepless night had left her languid
but not stupefied, and for an hour or so the work dis-
tracted her altogether from her troubles.

Then, after Capes had been through her work and
had gone on, it came to her that the fabric of this life
of hers was doomed to almost immediate collapse; that
in a little while these studies would cease, and perhaps

225

ANN VERONICA

she would never set eyes on him again. After that
consolations fled.

The overnight nervous strain began to tell; she be-
came inattentive to the work before her, and it did not
get on. She felt sleepy and unusually irritable. She
lunched at a creamery in Great Portland Street, and as
the day was full of wintry sunshine, spent the rest of
the lunch-hour in a drowsy gloom, which she imagined
to be thought upon the problems of her position, on a
seat in Regent's Park. A girl of fifteen or sixteen gave
her a handbill that she regarded as a tract until she saw
"Votes for Women" at the top. That turned her mind
to the more generalized aspects of her perplexities again.
She had never been so disposed to agree that the position
of women in the modern world is intolerable.

Capes joined the students at tea, and displayed him-
self in an impish mood that sometimes possessed him.
He did not notice that Ann Veronica was preoccupied
and heavy-eyed. Miss Klegg raised the question of
women's suffrage, and he set himself to provoke a duel
between her and Miss Garvice. The youth with the hair
brushed back and the spectacled Scotchman joined in
the fray for and against the women's vote.

Ever and again Capes appealed to Ann Veronica. He
liked to draw her in, and she did her best to talk. But
she did not talk readily, and in order to say something
she plunged a little, and felt she plunged. Capes scored
back with an uncompromising vigor that was his way of
complimenting her intelligence. But this afternoon it
discovered an unusual vein of irritability in her. He
had been reading Belfort Bax, and declared himself a
convert. He contrasted the lot of women in general

2?6

DISCORDS

with the lot of men, presented men as patient, self-
immolating martyrs, and women as the pampered
favorites of Nature. A vein of conviction mingled with
his burlesque.

For a time he and Miss Klegg contradicted one an-
other.

The question ceased to be a tea-table talk, and be-
came suddenly tragically real for Ann Veronica. There
he sat, cheerfully friendly in his sex's freedom — the man
she loved, the one man she cared should unlock the way
to the wide world for her imprisoned feminine possi-
bilities, and he seemed regardless that she stifled under
his eyes; he made a jest of all this passionate insurgence
of the souls of women against the fate of their conditions.

Miss Garvice repeated again, and almost in the same
words she used at every discussion, her contribution to
the great question. She thought that women were not
made for the struggle and turmoil of life — their place
was the little world, the home; that their power lay
not in votes but in influence over men and in making
the minds of their children fine and splendid.

"Women should understand men's affairs, perhaps,"
said Miss Garvice, "but to mingle in them is just to
sacrifice that power of influencing they can exercise
now."

"There is something sound in that position," said
Capes, intervening as if to defend Miss Garvice against
a possible attack from Ann Veronica. "It may not be
just and so forth, but, after all, it is how things are.
Women are not in the world in the same sense that men
are — fighting individuals in a scramble. I don't see
how they can be. Every home is a little recess, a niche,

227

ANN VERONICA

out of the world of business and competition, in which
women and the future shelter."

"A little pit!" said Ann Veronica; "a little prison!"

"It's just as often a little refuge. Anyhow, that is
how things are."

"And the man stands as the master at the mouth of
the den.'*

"As sentinel. You forget all the mass of training
and tradition and instinct that go to make him a toler-
able master. Nature is a mother; her sympathies have
always been feminist, and she has tempered the man to
the shorn woman."

"I wish," said Ann Veronica, with sudden anger,
"that you could know what it is to live in a pit!"

She stood up as she spoke, and put down her cup be-
side Miss Garvice's. She addressed Capes as though
she spoke to him alone.

"I can't endure it," she said.

Every one turned to her in astonishment.

She felt she had to go on. "No man can realize," she
said, "what that pit can be. The way — the way we
are led on! We are taught to believe we are free in the
world, to think we are queens. . . . Then we find out.
We find out no man will treat a woman fairly as man
to man — no man. He wants you — or he doesn't; and
then he helps some other woman against you. . . . What
you say is probably all true and necessary. . . . But
think of the disillusionment! Except for our sex we
have minds like men, desires like men. We come out
into the world, some of us — "

She paused. Her words, as she said them, seemed
to her to mean nothing, and there was so much that

228

DISCORDS

struggled for expression. "Women are mocked," she
said. "Whenever they try to take hold of life a man
intervenes."

She felt, with a sudden horror, that she might weep.
She wished she had not stood up. She wondered wildly
why she had stood up. No one spoke, and she was im-
pelled to flounder on. "Think of the mockery!" she
said. "Think how dumb we find ourselves and stifled!
I know we seem to have a sort of freedom. . . . Have you
ever tried to run and jump in petticoats, Mr. Capes?
Well, think what it must be to live in them — soul and
mind and body! It's fun for a man to jest at our
position."

"I wasn't jesting," said Capes, abruptly.

She stood face to face with him, and his voice cut
across her speech and made her stop abruptly. She was
sore and overstrung, and it was intolerable to her that
he should stand within three yards of her unsuspectingly,
with an incalculably vast power over her happiness.
She was sore with the perplexities of her preposterous
position. She was sick of herself, of her life, of every-
thing but him; and for him all her masked and hidden
being was crying out.

She stopped abruptly at the sound -of his voice, and
lost the thread of what she was saying. In the pause
she realized the attention of the others converged upon
her, and that the tears were brimming over her eyes.
She felt a storm of emotion surging up within her. She
became aware of the Scotch student regarding her with
stupendous amazement, a tea-cup poised in one hairy
hand and his faceted glasses showing a various enlarge-
ment of segments of his eye.

229

ANN VERONICA

The door into the passage offered itself with an irre-
sistible invitation — the one alternative to a public, in-
explicable passion of weeping.

Capes flashed to an understanding of her intention,
sprang to his feet, and opened the door for her retreat.

§ 8

"Why should I ever come back?" she said to herself,
as she went down the staircase.

She went to the post-office and drew out and sent off
her money to Ramage. And then she came out into the
street, sure only of one thing — that she could not return
directly to her lodgings. She wanted air — and the
distraction of having moving and changing things about
her. The evenings were beginning to draw out, and it
would not be dark for an hour. She resolved to walk
across the Park to the Zoological gardens, and so on
by way of Primrose Hill to Hampstead Heath. There
she would wander about in the kindly darkness. And
think things out. . . .

Presently she became aware of footsteps hurrying after
her, and glanced back to find Miss Klegg, a little out of
breath, in pursuit.

Ann Veronica halted a pace, and Miss Klegg came
alongside.

"Do you go across the Park?"

"Not usually. But I'm going to-day. I want a
walk."

"I'm not surprised at it. I thought Mr. Capes most
trying."

230

DISCORDS

" Oh, it wasn't that. I've had a headache all day."

"I thought Mr. Capes most unfair," Miss Klegg went
on in a small, even voice; "most unfair! I'm glad you
spoke out as you did."

"I didn't mind that little argument."

"You gave it him well. What you said wanted say-
ing. After you went he got up and took refuge in the
preparation-room. Or else / would have finished him."

Ann Veronica said nothing, and Miss Klegg went on:
"He very often is — most unfair. He has a way of
sitting on people. He wouldn't like it if people did it to
him. He jumps the words out of your mouth ; he takes
hold of what you have to say before you have had time
to express it properly."

Pause.

"I suppose he's frightfully clever," said Miss Klegg.

" He's a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he can't be
much over thirty," said Miss Klegg.

"He writes very well," said Ann Veronica.

"He can't be more than thirty. He must have
married when he was quite a young man."

"Married?" said Ann Veronica.

" Didn't you know he was married ?" asked Miss Klegg,
and was struck by a thought that made her glance
quickly at her companion.

Ann Veronica had no answer for a moment. She
turned her head away sharply. Some automaton within
her produced in a quite unfamiliar voice the remark,
"They're playing football."

"It's too far for the ball to reach us," said Miss
Klegg.

"I didn't know Mr. Capes was married," said Ann
231

ANN VERONICA

Veronica, resuming the conversation with an entire dis-
appearance of her former lassitude.

"Oh yes," said Miss Klegg; "I thought every one
knew."

"No," said Ann Veronica, offhandedly. "Never
heard anything of it."

" I thought every one knew. I thought every one had
heard about it."

"But why?"

" He's married — and, I believe, living separated from his
wife. There was a case, or something, some years ago."

"What case?"

"A divorce — or something — I don't know. But I
have heard that he almost had to leave the schools. If
it hadn't been for Professor Russell standing up for him,
they say he would have had to leave."

"Was he divorced, do you mean?"

"No, but he got himself mixed up in a divorce case.
I forget the particulars, but I know it was something
very disagreeable. It was among artistic people."

Ann Veronica was silent for a while.

"I thought every one had heard," said Miss Klegg.
"Or I wouldn't have said anything about it."

"I suppose all men," said Ann Veronica, in a tone of
detached criticism, "get some such entanglement. And,
anyhow, it doesn't matter to us." She turned abruptly
at right angles to the path they followed. "This is my
way back to my side of the Park," she said.

"I thought you were coming right across the Park."

"Oh no," said Ann Veronica; "I have some work to
do. I just wanted a breath of air. And they'll shut the
gates presently. It's not far from twilight."

232

DISCORDS

§ 9

She was sitting brooding over her fire about ten o'clock
that night when a sealed and registered envelope was
brought up to her.

She opened it and drew out a letter, and folded within
it were the notes she had sent off to Ramage that day.
The letter began:

"Mv DEAREST GIRL, — I cannot let you do this foolish
thing — "

She crumpled notes and letter together in her hand, and
then with a passionate gesture flung them into the fire.
Instantly she seized the poker and made a desperate
effort to get them out again. But she was only able to
save a corner of the letter. The twenty pounds burned
with avidity.

She remained for some seconds crouching at the fender,
poker in hand.

"By Jove!" she said, standing up at last, "that about
finishes it, Ann Veronica!"

CHAPTER THE TENTH

THE SUFFRAGETTES
§ I

"r INHERE is only one way out of all this," said Ann

1 Veronica, sitting up in her little bed in the dark-
ness and biting at her nails.

"I thought I was just up against Morningside Park
and father, but it's the whole order of things — the
whole blessed order of things. ..."

She shivered. She frowned and gripped her hands
about her knees very tightly. Her mind developed
into savage wrath at the present conditions of a woman's
life.

"I suppose all life is an affair of chances. But a
woman's life is all chance. It's artificially chance.
Find your man, that's the rule. All the rest is humbug
and delicacy. He's the handle of life for you. He will
let you live if it pleases him. . . .

"Can't it be altered?

"I suppose an actress is free? . . ."

She tried to think of some altered state of affairs
in which these monstrous limitations would be alle-
viated, in which women would stand on their own feet
in equal citizenship with men. For a time she brooded

234

THE SUFFRAGETTES

on the ideals and suggestions of the Socialists, on the
vague intimations of an Endowment of Motherhood,
of a complete relaxation of that intense individual
dependence for women which is woven into the existing
social order. At the back of her mind there seemed
always one irrelevant qualifying spectator whose
presence she sought to disregard. She would not look
at him, would not think of him ; when her mind wavered,
then she muttered to herself in the darkness so as to keep
hold of her generalizations.

"It is true. It is no good waiving the thing; it is
true. Unless women are never to be free, never to be
even respected, there must be a generation of martyrs.
. . . Why shouldn't we be martyrs? There's nothing
else for most of us, anyhow. It's a sort of blacklegging
to want to have a life of one's own. ..."

She repeated, as if she answered an objector: "A
sort of blacklegging.

"A sex of blacklegging clients."

Her mind diverged to other aspects, and another
type of womanhood.

"Poor little Miniver! What can she be but what she
is? ... Because she states her case in a tangle, drags
it through swamps of nonsense, it doesn't alter the fact
that she is right."

That phrase about dragging the truth through swamps
of nonsense she remembered from Capes. At the recol-
lection that it was his, she seemed to fall through a thin
surface, as one might fall through the crust of a lava
into glowing depths. She wallowed for a time in the
thought of Capes, unable to escape from his image
and the idea of his presence in her life.
16 235

ANN VERONICA

She let her mind run into dreams of that cloud paradise
of an altered world in which the Goopes and Minivers,
the Fabians and reforming people believed. Across
that world was written in letters of light, "Endowment
of Motherhood." Suppose in some complex yet con-
ceivable way women were endowed, were no longer
economically and socially dependent on men. "If one
was free," she said, "one could go to him. . . . This vile
hovering to catch a man's eye! . . . One could go to him
and tell him one loved him. I want to love him. A
little love from him would be enough. It would hurt
no one. It would not burden him with any obligation."

She groaned aloud and bowed her forehead to her
knees. She floundered deep. She wanted to kiss his
feet. His feet would have the firm texture of his hands.

Then suddenly her spirit rose in revolt. "I will
not have this slavery," she said. "I will not have this
slavery."

She shook her fist ceilingward. "Do you hear!" she
said, "whatever you are, wherever you are! I will not
be slave to the thought of any man, slave to the customs
of any time. Confound this slavery of sex! I am a
man! I will get this under if I am killed in doing it!"

She scowled into the cold blacknesses about her.

"Manning," she said, and contemplated a figure of
inaggressive persistence. "No!" Her thoughts had
turned in a new direction.

"It doesn't matter," she said, after a long interval,
"if they are absurd. They mean something. They
mean everything that women can mean — except sub-
mission. The vote is only the beginning, the necessary
beginning. If we do not begin — "

236

THE SUFFRAGETTES

She had come to a resolution. Abruptly she got
out of bed, smoothed her sheet and straightened her
pillow and lay down, and fell almost instantly asleep.

§ 2

The next morning was as dark and foggy as if it
was mid-November instead of early March. Ann
Veronica woke rather later than usual, and lay awake
for some minutes before she remembered a certain
resolution she had taken in the small hours. Then
instantly she got out of bed and proceeded to dress.

She did not start for the Imperial College. She
spent the morning up to ten in writing a series of un-
successful letters to Ramage, which she tore up un-
finished; and finally she desisted and put on her jacket
and went out into the lamp-lit obscurity and slimy
streets. She turned a resolute face southward.

She followed Oxford Street into Holborn, and then
she inquired for Chancery Lane. There she sought
and at last found 107 A, one of those heterogeneous
piles of offices which occupy the eastern side of the
lane. She studied the painted names of firms and
persons and enterprises on the wall, and discovered
that the Women's Bond of Freedom occupied several
contiguous suites on the first floor. She went up-stairs
and hesitated between four doors with ground-glass
panes, each of which professed "The Women's Bond
of Freedom" in neat black letters. She opened one
and found herself in a large untidy room set with chairs
that were a little disarranged as if by an overnight

237

ANN VERONICA

meeting. On the walls were notice-boards bearing
clusters of newspaper slips, three or four big posters
of monster meetings, one of which Ann Veronica had
attended with Miss Miniver, and a series of announce-
ments in purple copying-ink, and in one corner was a
pile of banners. There was no one at all in this room,
but through the half-open door of one of the small
apartments that gave upon it she had a glimpse of
two very young girls sitting at a littered table and
writing briskly.

She walked across to this apartment and, opening
the door a little wider, discovered a press section of
the movement at work.

"I want to inquire," said Ann Veronica.

" Next door," said a spectacled young person of sev-
enteen or eighteen, with an impatient indication of the
direction.

In the adjacent apartment Ann Veronica found a
middle-aged woman with a tired face under the tired
hat she wore, sitting at a desk opening letters while a
dusky, untidy girl of eight- or nine-and-twenty ham-
mered industriously at a typewriter. The tired woman
looked up in inquiring silence at Ann Veronica's diffi-
dent entry.

"I want to know more about this movement," said
Ann Veronica.

"Are you with us?" said the tired woman.

"I don't know," said Ann Veronica; "I think I am.
I want very much to do something for women. But I
want to know what you are doing."

The tired woman sat still for a moment. " You haven't
come here to make a lot of difficulties?" she asked.

THE SUFFRAGETTES

"No," said Ann Veronica, "but I want to know."

The tired woman shut her eyes tightly for a moment,
and then looked with them at Ann Veronica. "What
can you do?" she asked.

"Do?"

"Are you prepared to do things for us? Distribute
bills? Write letters? Interrupt meetings? Canvass
at elections? Face dangers?"

" If I am satisfied—"

"If we satisfy you?"

"Then, if possible, I would like to go to prison."

"It isn't nice going to prison."

"It would suit me."

" It isn't nice getting there."

"That's a question of detail," said Ann Veronica.

The tired woman looked quietly at her. "What are
your objections?" she said.

" It isn't objections exactly. I want to know what
you are doing; how you think this work of yours really
does serve women."

"We are working for the equal citizenship of men
and women," said the tired woman. "Women have
been and are treated as the inferiors of men; we want
to make them their equals."

"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "I agree to that. But — "

The tired woman raised her eyebrows in mild protest.

"Isn't the question more complicated than that?"
said Ann Veronica.

"You could have a talk to Miss Kitty Brett this
afternoon, if you liked. Shall I make an appointment
for you?"

Miss Kitty Brett was one of the most conspicuous

239

ANN VERONICA

leaders of the movement. Ann Veronica snatched at
the opportunity, and spent most .of the intervening
time in the Assyrian Court of the British Museum, read-
ing and thinking over a little book upon the feminist
movement the tired woman had made her buy. She
got a bun and some cocoa in the little refreshment-
room, and then wandered through the galleries up-stairs,
crowded with Polynesian idols and Polynesian dancing-
garments, and all the simple immodest accessories to
life in Polynesia, to a seat among the mummies. She
was trying to bring her problems to a head, and her mind
insisted upon being even more discursive and atmos-
pheric than usual. It generalized everything she put
to it.

"Why should women be dependent on men?" she
asked; and the question was at once converted into a
system of variations upon the theme of "Why are
things as they are?" — "Why are human beings vivi-
parous?"— "Why are people hungry thrice a day?" —
"Why does one faint at danger?"

She stood for a time looking at the dry limbs and still
human face of that desiccated unwrapped mummy from
the very beginnings of social life. It looked very pa-
tient, she thought, and a little self-satisfied. It looked
as if it had taken its world for granted and prospered
on that assumption — a world in which children were
trained to obey their elders and the wills of women over-
ruled as a matter of course. It was wonderful to think
this thing had lived, had felt and suffered. Perhaps
once it had desired some other human being intolerably.
Perhaps some one had kissed the brow that was now so
cadaverous, rubbed that sunken cheek with loving

240

THE SUFFRAGETTES

fingers, held that stringy neck with passionately living
hands. But all of that was forgotten. "In the end,"
it seemed to be thinking, " they embalmed me with the
utmost respect — sound spices chosen to endure — the
best! I took my world as I found it. Things are so!"

§3

Ann Veronica's first impression of Kitty Brett was
that she was aggressive and disagreeable; her next that
she was a person of amazing persuasive power. She
was perhaps three-and-twenty, and very pink and
healthy-looking, showing a great deal of white and
rounded neck above her business-like but altogether
feminine blouse, and a good deal of plump, gesticulat-
ing forearm out of her short sleeve. She had animated
dark blue-gray eyes under her fine eyebrows, and dark
brown hair that rolled back simply and effectively from
her broad low forehead. And she was about as capable
of intelligent argument as a runaway steam-roller.
She was a trained being — trained by an implacable
mother to one end.

She spoke with fluent enthusiasm. She did not so
much deal with Ann Veronica's interpolations as dis-
pose of them with quick and use-hardened repartee,
and then she went on with a fine directness to sketch
the case for her agitation, for that remarkable rebellion
of the women that was then agitating the whole world
of politics and discussion. She assumed with a kind of
mesmeric force all the propositions that Ann Veronica
wanted her to define.

241

ANN VERONICA

"What do we want? What is the goal?" asked Ann
Veronica.

"Freedom! Citizenship! And the way to that —
the way to everything — is the Vote."

Ann Veronica said something about a general change
of ideas.

" How can you change people's ideas if you have no
power?" said Kitty Brett.

Ann Veronica was not ready enough to deal with that
counter-stroke.

"One doesn't want to turn the whole thing into a
mere sex antagonism."

" When women get justice," said Kitty Brett, " there
will be no sex antagonism. None at all. Until then
we mean to keep on hammering away."

" It seems to me that much of a woman's difficulties
are economic."

" That will follow," said Kitty Brett— " that will follow. "

She interrupted as Ann Veronica was about to speak
again, with a bright contagious hopefulness. "Every-
thing will follow," she said.

"Yes," said Ann Veronica, trying to think where
they were, trying to get things plain again that had
seemed plain enough in the quiet of the night.

" Nothing was ever done," Miss Brett asserted, "with-
out a certain element of Faith. After we have got the
Vote and are recognized as citizens, then we can come
to all these other things."

Even in the glamour of Miss Brett's assurance it
seemed to Ann Veronica that this was, after all, no more
than the gospel of Miss Miniver with a new set of res-
onances. And like that gospel it meant something,

242

THE SUFFRAGETTES

something different from its phrases, something elusive,
and yet something that in spite of the superficial inco-
herence of its phrasing, was largely essentially true.
There was something holding women down, holding
women back, and if it wasn't exactly man-made law,
man-made law was an aspect of it. There was some-
thing indeed holding the whole species back from the
imaginable largeness of life. . . .
' " The Vote is the symbol of everything," saidMiss Brett.

She made an abrupt personal appeal.

"Oh! please don't lose yourself in a wilderness of
secondary considerations," she said. "Don't ask me
to tell you all that women can do, all that women can
be. There is a new life, different from the old life of
dependence, possible. If only we are not divided. If
only we work together. This is the one movement that
brings women of different classes together for a com-
mon purpose. If you could see how it gives them souls,
women who have taken things for granted, who have
given themselves up altogether to pettiness and vanity "

"Give me something to do," said Ann Veronica, in-
terrupting her persuasions at last. "It has been very
kind of you to see me, but I don't want to sit and talk
and use your time any longer. I want to do something.
I want to hammer myself against all this that pens
women in. I feel that I shall stifle unless I can do
something — and do something soon."

§ 4

It was not Ann Veronica's fault that the night's work
should have taken upon itself the forms of wild bur-

243

ANN VERONICA

lesque. She was in deadly earnest in everything she
did. It seemed to her the last desperate attack upon the
universe that would not let her live as she desired to
live, that penned her in and controlled her and directed
her and disapproved of her, the same invincible wrap-
pering, the same leaden tyranny of a universe that she
had vowed to overcome after that memorable conflict
with her father at Morningside Park.

She was listed for the raid — she was informed it was
to be a raid upon the House of Commons, though no
particulars were given her — and told to go alone to 14,
Dexter Street, Westminster, and not to ask any police-
man to direct her. 14, Dexter Street, Westminster, she
found was not a house but a yard in an obscure street,
with big gates and the name of Podgers & Carlo, Carriers
and Furniture Removers, thereon. She was perplexed
by this, and stood for some seconds in the empty street
hesitating, until the appearance of another circumspect
woman under the street lamp at the corner reassured
her. In one of the big gates was a little door, and she
rapped at this. It was immediately opened by a man
with light eyelashes and a manner suggestive of re-
strained passion. "Come right in," he hissed under
his breath, with the true conspirator's note, closed the
door very softly and pointed, "Through there!"

By the meagre light of a gas lamp she perceived
a cobbled yard with four large furniture vans stand-
ing with horses and lamps alight. A slender young
man, wearing glasses, appeared from the shadow of
the nearest van. "Are you A, B, C, or D?" he
asked.

"They told me D," said Ann Veronica.

244

THE SUFFRAGETTES

"Through there," he said, and pointed with the pam-
phlet he was carrying.

Ann Veronica found herself in a little stirring crowd
of excited women, whispering and tittering and speak-
ing in undertones.

The light was poor, so that she saw their gleaming
faces dimly and indistinctly. No one spoke to her.
She stood among them, watching them and feeling
curiously alien to them. The oblique ruddy lighting
distorted them oddly, made queer bars and patches of
shadow upon their clothes. "It's Kitty's idea," said
one, "we are to go in the vans."

"Kitty is wonderful," said another.

"Wonderful!"

"I have always longed for prison service," said a
voice, "always. From the beginning. But it's only
now I'm able to do it."

A little blond creature close at hand suddenly gave
way to a fit of hysterical laughter, and caught up the
end of it with a sob.

"Before I took up the Suffrage," a firm, flat voice
remarked, "I could scarcely walk up-stairs without
palpitations."

Some one hidden from Ann Veronica appeared to be
marshalling the assembly. "We have to get in, I
think," said a nice little old lady in a bonnet to Ann
Veronica, speaking with a voice that quavered a little.
"My dear, can you see in this light? I think I would
like to get in. Which is C?"

Ann Veronica, with a curious sinking of the heart,
regarded the black cavities of the vans. Their doors
stood open, and placards with big letters indicated the

245

ANN VERONICA

section assigned to each. She directed the little old
woman and then made her way to van D. A young
woman with a white badge on her arm stood and counted
the sections as they entered their vans.

"When they tap the roof," she said, in a voice of
authority, "you are to come out. You will be opposite
the big entrance in Old Palace Yard. It's the public
entrance. You are to make for that and get into the
lobby if you can, and so try and reach the floor of the
House, crying 'Votes for Women!' as you go."

She spoke like a mistress addressing school-children.

"Don't bunch too much as you come out," she added.

"All right?" asked the man with the light eyelashes,
suddenly appearing in the doorway. He waited for an
instant, wasting an encouraging smile in the imperfect
light, and then shut the doors of the van, leaving the
women in darkness. . . .

The van started with a jerk and rumbled on its way.

"It's like Troy!" said a voice of rapture. "It's
exactly like Troy!"

§ 5

So Ann Veronica, enterprising and a little dubious as
ever, mingled with the stream of history and wrote her
Christian name upon the police-court records of the
land.

But out of a belated regard for her father she wrote
the surname of some one else.

Some day, when the rewards of literature permit the
arduous research required, the Campaign of the Women
will find its Carlyle, and the particulars of that mar-

246

THE SUFFRAGETTES

vellous series of exploits by which Miss Brett and her
colleagues nagged the whole Western world into the
discussion of women's position become the material for
the most delightful and amazing descriptions. At pres-
ent the world waits for that writer, and the confused
record of the newspapers remains the only resource of
the curious. When he comes he will do that raid of
the pantechnicons the justice it deserves; he will picture
the orderly evening scene about the Imperial Legislature
in convincing detail ; the coming and going of cabs and
motor-cabs and broughams through the chill, damp
evening into New Palace Yard, the reinforced but un-
troubled and unsuspecting police about the entries of
those great buildings whose square and panelled Vic-
torian Gothic streams up from the glare of the lamps
into the murkiness of the night; Big Ben shining over-
head, an unassailable beacon, and the incidental traffic
of Westminster, cabs, carts, and glowing omnibuses
going to and from the bridge. About the Abbey and
Abingdon Street stood the outer pickets and detach-
ments of the police, their attention all directed west-
ward to where the women in Caxton Hall, Westminster,
hummed like an angry hive. Squads reached to the
very portal of that centre of disturbance. And through
all these defences and into Old Palace Yard, into the
very vitals of the defenders' position, lumbered the un-
suspected vans.

They travelled past the few idle sightseers who had
braved the uninviting evening to see what the Suffra-
gettes might be doing; they pulled up unchallenged
within thirty yards of those coveted portals.

And then they disgorged.

247

ANN VERONICA

Were I a painter of subject pictures, I would exhaust
all my skill in proportion and perspective and atmosphere
upon the august seat of empire, I would present it gray
and dignified and immense and respectable beyond any
mere verbal description, and then, in vivid black and
very small, I would put in those valiantly impertinent
vans, squatting at the base of its altitudes and pouring
out a swift, straggling rush of ominous little black ob-
jects, minute figures of determined women at war with
the universe.

Ann Veronica was in their very forefront.

In an instant the expectant calm of Westminster was
ended, and the very Speaker in the chair blenched at the
sound of the policemen's whistles. The bolder members
in the House left their places to go lobbyward, grinning.
Others pulled hats over their noses, cowered in their seats,
and feigned that all was right with the world. In Old
Palace Yard everybody ran. They either ran to see or
ran for shelter. Even two Cabinet Ministers took to
their heels, grinning insincerely. At the opening of the
van doors and the emergence into the fresh air Ann
Veronica's doubt and depression gave place to the wildest
exhilaration. That same adventurousness that had
already buoyed her through crises that would have over-
whelmed any normally feminine girl with shame and
horror now became uppermost again. Before her was a
great Gothic portal. Through that she had to go.

Past her shot the little old lady in the bonnet, running
incredibly fast, but otherwise still alertly respectable,
and she was making a strange threatening sound as she
ran, such as one would use in driving ducks out of a
garden — " B-r-r-r-r-r — !" and pawing with black-gloved

248

THE SUFFRAGETTES

hands. The policemen were closing in fiom the sides to
intervene. The little old lady struck like a projectile
upon the resounding chest of the foremost of these, and
then Ann Veronica had got past and was ascending the
steps.

Then most horribly she was clasped about the waist
from behind and lifted from the ground.

At that a new element poured into her excitement, an
element of wild disgust and terror. She had never ex-
perienced anything so disagreeable in her life as the sense
of being held helplessly off her feet. She screamed in-
voluntarily— she had never in her life screamed before
• — and then she began to wriggle and fight like a fright-
ened animal against the men who were holding her.

The affair passed at one leap from a spree to a night-
mare of violence and disgust. Her hair got loose, her
hat came over one eye, and she had no arm free to replace
it. She felt she must suffocate if these men did not put
her down, and for a time they would not put her
down. Then with an indescribable relief her feet
were on the pavement, and she was being urged along
by two policemen, who were gripping her wrists in an
irresistible expert manner. She was writhing to get her
hands loose and found herself gasping with passionate
violence, "It's damnable! — damnable!" to the manifest
disgust of the fatherly policeman on her right.

Then they had released her arms and were trying
to push her away. " You be off, missie," said the father-
ly policeman. "This ain't no place for you."

He pushed her a dozen yards along the greasy pave-
ment with flat, well-trained hands that there seemed to
be no opposing. Before her stretched blank spaces,

249

ANN VERONICA

dotted with running people coming toward her, and
below them railings and a statue. She almost sub-
mitted to this ending of her adventure. But at the word
"home" she turned again.

" I won't go home," she said; " I won't!" and she evad-
ed the clutch of the fatherly policeman and tried to thrust
herself past him in the direction of that big portal.
"Steady on!" he cried.

A diversion was created by the violent struggles of the
little old lady. She seemed to be endowed with super-
human strength. A knot of three policemen in conflict
with her staggered toward Ann Veronica's attendants
and distracted their attention. " I will be arrested !
I won't go home!" the little old lady was screaming over
and over again. They put her down, and she leaped at
them; she smote a helmet to the ground.

"You'll have to take her!" shouted an inspector on
horseback, and she echoed his cry : " You'll have to take
me!" They seized upon her and lifted her, and she
screamed. Ann Veronica became violently excited at
the sight. " You cowards!" said Ann Veronica, " put her
down!" and tore herself from a detaining hand and
battered with her fists upon the big red ear and blue
shoulder of the policeman who held the little old lady.

So Ann Veronica also was arrested.

And then came the vile experience of being forced and
borne along the street to the police-station. Whatever
anticipation Ann Veronica had formed of this vanished
in the reality. Presently she was going through a sway-
ing, noisy crowd, whose faces grinned and stared pitiless-
ly in the light of the electric standards. "Go it, miss!"
cried one. "Kick aht at 'em!" though, indeed, she

250

THE SUFFRAGETTES

went now with Christian meekness, resenting only the
thrusting policemen's hands. Several people in the
crowd seemed to be fighting. Insulting cries became
frequent and various, but for the most part she could
not understand what was said. " Who'll mind the baby
nar?" was one of the night's inspirations, and very fre-
quent. A lean young man in spectacles pursued her
for some time, crying "Couage! Courage!" Somebody
threw a dab of mud at her, and some of it got down her
neck. Immeasurable disgust possessed her. She felt
draggled and insulted beyond redemption. She could
not hide her face. She attempted by a sheer act of will
to end the scene, to will herself out of it anywhere. She
had a horrible glimpse of the once nice little old lady
being also borne stationward, still faintly battling and
very muddy — one lock of grayish hair straggling over
her neck, her face scared, white, but triumphant. Her
bonnet dropped off and was trampled into the gutter.
A little Cockney recovered it, and made ridiculous at-
tempts to get to her and replace it.

"You must arrest me!" she gasped, breathlessly, in-
sisting insanely on a point already carried; "you shall!"

The police-station at the end seemed to Ann Veronica
like a refuge from unnamable disgraces. She hesitated
about her name, and, being prompted, gave it at last
as Ann Veronica Smith, 107 A, Chancery Lane. . . .

Indignation carried her through that night, that
men and the world could so entreat her. The arrested
women were herded in a passage of the Panton Street
Police-station that opened upon a cell too unclean for
occupation, and most of them spent the night standing.
Hot coffee and cakes were sent in to them in the morning

'7 251

ANN VERONICA

by some intelligent sympathizer, or she would have
starved all day. Submission to the inevitable carried
her through the circumstances of her appearance before
the magistrate.

He was no doubt doing ':\is best to express the atti-
tude of society toward these wearily heroic defendants,
but he seemed to be merely rude and unfair to Ann
Veronica. He was not, it seemed, the proper stipendiary
at all, and there had been some demur to his juris-
diction that had ruffled him. He resented being re-
garded as irregular. He felt he was human wisdom
prudentially interpolated. . . . "You silly wimmin,"
he said over and over again throughout the hearing,
plucking at his blotting-pad with busy hands. "You
silly creatures! Ugh! Fie upon you!" The court was
crowded with people, for the most part supporters and
admirers of the defendants, and the man with the light
eyelashes was conspicuously active and omnipresent.

Ann Veronica's appearance was brief and undis-
tinguished. She had nothing to say for herself. She
was guided into the dock and prompted by a helpful
police inspector. She was aware of the body of the court,
of clerks seated at a black table littered with papers,
of policemen standing about stiffly with expressions of
conscious integrity, and a murmuring background of
the heads and shoulders of spectators close behind her.
On a high chair behind a raised counter the stipendiary's
substitute regarded her malevolently over his glasses.
A disagreeable young man, with red hair and a loose
mouth, seated at the reporter's table, was only too
manifestly sketching her.

She was interested by the swearing of the witnesses,

252

THE SUFFRAGETTES

the kissing of the book struck her as particularly odd,
and then the policemen gave their evidence in staccato
jerks and stereotyped phrases.

"Have you anything to ask the witness?" asked the
helpful inspector.

The ribald demons that infested the back of Ann
Veronica's mind urged various facetious interrogations
upon her, as, for example, where the witness had acquired
his prose style. She controlled herself, and answered
meekly, "No."

"Well, Ann Veronica Smith," the magistrate re-
marked when the case was all before him, "you're
a good-looking, strong, respectable gell, and it's a
pity you silly young wimmin can't find something
better to do with your exuberance. Two-and-twenty !
I can't imagine what your parents can be thinking
about to let you get into these scrapes."

Ann Veronica's mind was filled with confused un-
utterable replies.

"You are persuaded to come and take part in these
outrageous proceedings — many of you I am convinced
have no idea whatever of their nature. I don't suppose
you could tell me even the derivation of suffrage if I
asked you. No! not even the derivation! But the
fashion's been set and in it you must be."

The men at the reporter's table lifted their eye-
brows, smiled faintly, and leaned back to watch how
she took her scolding. One with the appearance of
a bald little gnome yawned agonizingly. They had
got all this down already — they heard the substance
of it now for the fourteenth time. The stipendiary
would have done it all very differently.

253

ANN VERONICA

She found presently she was out of the dock and
confronted with the alternative of being bound over
in one surety for the sum of forty pounds — whatever
that might mean — or a month's imprisonment. "Second
class," said some one, but first and second were all
alike to her. She elected to go to prison.

At last, after a long rumbling journey in a stuffy
windowless van, she reached Canongate Prison — for
Holloway had its quota already. It was bad luck to
go to Canongate.

Prison was beastly. Prison was bleak without
spaciousness, and pervaded by a faint, oppressive smell ;
and she had to wait two hours in the sullenly defiant
company of two unclean women thieves before a cell
could be assigned to her. Its dreariness, like the
filthiness of the police cell, was a discovery for her.
She had imagined that prisons were white-tiled places,
reeking of lime-wash and immaculately sanitary.
Instead, they appeared to be at the hygienic level of
tramps' lodging-houses. She was bathed in turbid
water that had already been used. She was not allowed
to bathe herself: another prisoner, with a privileged
manner, washed her. Conscientious objectors to that
process are not permitted, she found, in Canongate.
Her hair was washed for her also. Then they dressed
her in a dirty dress of coarse serge and a cap, and took
away her own clothes. The dress came to her only too
manifestly unwashed from its former wearer; even the
under-linen they gave her seemed unclean. Horrible
memories of things seen beneath the microscope of
the baser forms of life crawled across her mind and
set her shuddering with imagined irritations. She

254

THE SUFFRAGETTES

sat on the edge of the bed — the wardress was too busy
with the flood of arrivals that day to discover that she
had it down — and her skin was shivering from the con-
tact of these garments. She surveyed accommodation
that seemed at first merely austere, and became more
and more manifestly inadequate as the moments fled by.
She meditated profoundly through several enormous
cold hours on all that had happened and all that she
had done since the swirl of the suffrage movement had
submerged her personal affairs. . . .

Very slowly emerging out of a phase of stupefaction,
these personal affairs and her personal problem resumed
possession of her mind. She had imagined she had
drowned them altogether.

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

THOUGHTS IN PRISON
§ I

THE first night in prison she found it impossible to
sleep. The bed was hard beyond any experience
of hers, the bed-clothes coarse and insufficient, the cell
at once cold and stuffy. The little grating in the door,
the sense of constant inspection, worried her. She kept
opening her eyes and looking at it. She was fatigued
physically and mentally, and neither mind nor body
could rest. She became aware that at regular intervals
a light flashed upon her face and a bodiless eye regarded
her, and this, as the night wore on, became a torment. . . .
Capes came back into her mind. He haunted a state
between hectic dreaming and mild delirium, and she
found herself talking aloud to him. All through the
night an entirely impossible and monumental Capes con-
fronted her, and she argued with him about men and
women. She visualized him as in a policeman's uni-
form and quite impassive. On some insane score she
fancied she had to state her case in verse. "We are
the music and you are the instrument," she said; "we
are verse and you are prose.

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THOUGHTS IN PRISON

" For men have reason, women rhyme;
A man scores always, all the time."

This couplet sprang into her mind from nowhere, and
immediately begot an endless series of similar couplets
that she began to compose and address to Capes. They
came teeming distressfully through her aching brain:

"A man can kick, his skirts don't tear;
A man scores always, everywhere.

" His dress for no man lays a snare;
A man scores always, everywhere.

" For hats that fail and hats that flare;
Toppers their universal wear;
A man scores always, everywhere.

" Men's waists are neither here nor there;
A man scores always, everywhere.

" A man can manage without hair;
A man scores always, everywhere.

"There are no males at men to stare;
A man scores always, everywhere.

"And children must we women bear —

"Oh, damn!" she cried, as the hundred-and-first
couplet or so presented itself in her unwilling brain.

For a time she worried about that compulsory bath
and cutaneous diseases.

Then she fell into a fever of remorse for the habit of
bad language she had acquired.

" A man can smoke, a man can swear;
A man scores always, everywhere."

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ANN VERONICA

She rolled over on her face, and stuffed her fingers in
her ears to shut out the rhythm from her mind. She
lay still for a long time, and her mind resumed at a more
tolerable pace. She found herself talking to Capes in
an undertone of rational admission.

" There is something to be said for the lady-like theory
after all," she admitted. "Women ought to be gentle
and submissive persons, strong only in virtue and in
resistance to evil compulsion. My dear — I can call you
that here, anyhow — I know that. The Victorians over-
did it a little, I admit. Their idea of maidenly inno-
cence was just a blank white — the sort of flat white
that doesn't shine. But that doesn't alter the fact that
there is innocence. And I've read, and thought, and
guessed, and looked — until my innocence — it's smirched.

"Smirched! . . .

" You see, dear, one is passionately anxious for some-
thing— what is it? One wants to be clean. You want
me to be clean. You would want me to be clean, if you
gave me a thought, that is. ...

" I wonder if you give me a thought. . . .

" I'm not a good woman. I don't mean I'm not a
good woman — I mean that I'm not a good woman. My
poor brain is so mixed, dear, I hardly know what I am
saying. I mean I'm not a good specimen of a woman.
I've got a streak of male. Things happen to women —
proper women — and all they have to do is to take them
well. They've just got to keep white. But I'm always
trying to make things happen. And I get myself
dirty . . .

" It's all dirt that washes off, dear, but it's dirt.

"The white unaggressive woman who corrects and

258

THOUGHTS IN PRISON

nurses and serves, and is worshipped and betrayed —
the martyr-queen of men, the white mother. . . . You
can't do that sort of thing unless you do it over religion,
and there's no religion in me — of that sort — worth a rap.

" I'm not gentle. Certainly not a gentlewoman.

"I'm not coarse — no! But I've got no purity of
mind — no real purity of mind. A good woman's mind
has angels with flaming swords at the portals to keep
out fallen thoughts. . . .

" I wonder if there are any good women really.

" I wish I didn't swear. I do swear. It began as a
joke. ... It developed into a sort of secret and private
bad manners. It's got to be at last like tobacco-ash
over all my sayings and doings. . . .

"'Go it, missie,' they said; 'kick aht!'

"I swore at that policeman — and disgusted him.
Disgusted him!

"For men policemen never blush;
A man in all things scores so much. . . .

"Damn! Things are getting plainer. It must be
the dawn creeping in.

" Now here hath been dawning another blue day;
I'm just a poor woman, please take it away.

"Oh, sleep! Sleep! Sleep! Sleep!"

§ 2

"Now," said Ann Veronica, after the half-hour of
exercise, and sitting on the uncomfortable wooden seat

259

ANN VERONICA

without a back that was her perch by day, "it's no
good staying here in a sort of maze. I've got nothing
to do for a month but think. I may as well think. I
ought to be able to think things out.

" How shall I put the question ? What am I ? What
have I got to do with myself? . . .

"I wonder if many people have thought things out?

"Are we all just seizing hold of phrases and obeying
moods?"

"It wasn't so with old-fashioned people, they knew
right from wrong; they had a clear-cut, religious faith
that seemed to explain everything and give a rule for
everything. We haven't. I haven't, anyhow. And
it's no good pretending there is one when there isn't. . . .
I suppose I believe in God. . . . Never really thought about
Him — people don't. ... I suppose my creed is, ' I believe
rather indistinctly in God the Father Almighty, sub-
stratum of the evolutionary process, and, in a vein of
vague sentimentality that doesn't give a datum for any-
thing at all, in Jesus Christ, His Son.' . . .

"It's no sort of good, Ann Veronica, pretending one
does believe when one doesn't. . . .

"And as for praying for faith — this sort of monologue
is about as near as any one of my sort ever gets to prayer.
Aren't I asking — asking plainly now? . . .

"We've all been mixing our ideas, and we've got in-
tellectual hot coppers — every blessed one of us. ...

"A confusion of motives — that's what I am! . . .

"There is this absurd craving for Mr. Capes — the
'Capes crave,' they would call it in America. Why do I
want him so badly? Why do I want him, and think
about him, and fail to get away from him ?

260

THOUGHTS IN PRISON

"It isn't all of me.

"The first person you love, Ann Veronica, is yourself
— get hold of that! The soul you have to save is Ann
Veronica's soul. ..."

She knelt upon the floor of her cell and clasped her
hands, and remained for a long time in silence.

"Oh, God!" she said at last; "how I wish I had been
taught to pray!"

§3

She had some idea of putting these subtle and difficult
issues to the chaplain when she was warned of his advent.
But she had not reckoned with the etiquette of Canon-
gate. She got up, as she had been told to do, at his
appearance, and he amazed her by sitting down, accord-
ing to custom, on her stool. He still wore his hat, to
show that the days of miracles and Christ being civil to
sinners are over forever. She perceived that his coun-
tenance was only composed by a great effort, his features
severely compressed. He was ruffled, and his ears were
red, no doubt from some adjacent controversy. He
classified her as he seated himself.

"Another young woman, I suppose," he said, "who
knows better than her Maker about her place in the
world. Have you anything to ask me?"

Ann Veronica readjusted her mind hastily. Her back
stiffened. She produced from the depths of her pride the
ugly investigatory note of the modern district visitor.
"Are you a special sort of clergyman," she said, after a
pause, and looking down her nose at him, "or do you go
to the Universities?"

261

ANN VERONICA

"Oh!" he said, profoundly.

He panted for a moment with unuttered replies, and
then, with a scornful gesture, got up and left the cell.

So that Ann Veronica was not able to get the expert
advice she certainly needed upon her spiritual state.

§ 4

After a day or so she thought more steadily. She
found herself in a phase of violent reaction against the
suffrage movement, a phase greatly promoted by one of
those unreasonable objections people of Ann Veronica's
temperament take at times — to the girl in the next cell
to her own. She was a large, resilient girl, with a foolish
smile, a still more foolish expression of earnestness, and
a throaty contralto voice. She was noisy and hilarious
and enthusiastic, and her hair was always abominably
done. In the chapel she sang with an open-lunged gusto
that silenced Ann Veronica altogether, and in the
exercising-yard slouched round with carelessly dispersed
feet. Ann Veronica decided that "hoydenish ragger"
was the only phrase to express her. She was always
breaking rules, whispering asides, intimating signals.
She became at times an embodiment for Ann Veronica
of all that made the suffrage movement defective and
unsatisfying.

She was always initiating petty breaches of discipline.
Her greatest exploit was the howling before the mid-day
meal. This was an imitation of the noises made by the
carnivora at the Zoological Gardens at feeding-time;
the idea was taken up by prisoner after prisoner until the

262

THOUGHTS IN PRISON

whole place was alive with barkings, yappings, roarings,
pelican chatterings, and feline yowlings, interspersed
with shrieks of hysterical laughter. To many in that
crowded solitude it came as an extraordinary relief.
It was better even than the hymn-singing. But it
annoyed Ann Veronica.

"Idiots!" she said, when she heard this pandemonium,
and with particular reference to this young lady with the
throaty contralto next door. "Intolerable idiots! ..."

It took some days for this phase to pass, and it left
some scars and something like a decision. "Violence
won't do it," said Ann Veronica. "Begin violence, and
the woman goes under. . . .

"But all the rest of our case is right. . . . Yes."

As the long, solitary days wore on, Ann Veronica found
a number of definite attitudes and conclusions in her
mind.

One of these was a classification of women into women
who are and women who are not hostile to men. "The
real reason why I am out of place here," she said, "is
because I like men. I can talk with them. I've never
found them hostile. I've got no feminine class feeling.
I don't want any laws or freedoms to protect me from a
man like Mr. Capes. I know that in my heart I would
take whatever he gave. . . .

"A woman wants a proper alliance with a man, a man
who is better stuff than herself. She wants that and
needs it more than anything else in the world. It may
not be just, it may not be fair, but things are so. It isn't
law, nor custom, nor masculine violence settled that.
It is just how things happen to be. She wants to be
free — she wants to be legally and economically free, so as

263

ANN VERONICA

not to be subject to the wrong man; but only God, who
made the world, can alter things to prevent her being
slave to the right one.

"And if she can't have the right one?
"We've developed such a quality of preference!"
She rubbed her knuckles into her forehead. "Oh,
but life is difficult !" she groaned. " When you loosen the
tangle in one place you tie a knot in another. . . . Before
there is any change, any real change, I shall be dead —
dead — dead and finished — two hundred years! ..."

§5

One afternoon, while everything was still, the ward-
ress heard her cry out suddenly and alarmingly, and
with great and unmistakable passion, " Why in the
name of goodness did I burn that twenty pounds?"

§ 6

She sat regarding her dinner. The meat was coarse
and disagreeably served.

"I suppose some one makes a bit on the food," she
said. . . .

" One has such ridiculous ideas of the wicked common
people and the beautiful machinery of order that ropes
them in. And here are these places, full of contagion!

"Of course, this is the real texture of life; this is
what we refined secure people forget. We think the
whole thing is straight and noble at bottom, and it

264

THOUGHTS IN PRISON

isn't. We think if we just defy the friends we have
and go out into the world everything will become easy
and splendid. One doesn't realize that even the sort
of civilization one has at Morningside Park is held
together with difficulty. By policemen one mustn't
shock. . . .

" This isn't a world for an innocent girl to walk about
in. It's a world of dirt and skin diseases and parasites.
It's a world in which the law can be a stupid pig and
the police-stations dirty dens. One wants helpers and
protectors — and clean water.

" Am I becoming reasonable or am I being tamed ?

" I'm simply discovering that life is many-sided and
complex and puzzling. I thought one had only to take
it by the throat.

"It hasn't got a throat!"

§ 7

One day the idea of self-sacrifice came into her head,
and she made, she thought, some important moral dis-
coveries.

It came with an extreme effect of re-discovery, a re-
markable novelty. "What have I been all this time?"
she asked herself, and answered, "Just stark egotism,
crude assertion of Ann Veronica, without a modest rag
of religion or discipline or respect for authority to cover
me!"

It seemed to her as though she had at last found the
touchstone of conduct. She perceived she had never
really thought of any one but herself in all her acts and
plans. Even Capes had been for her merely an excitant

265

ANN VERONICA

to passionate love — a mere idol at whose feet one could
enjoy imaginative wallowings. She had set out to get
a beautiful life, a free, untrammelled life, self-develop-
ment, without counting the cost either for herself or
others.

"I have hurt my father," she said; "I have hurt my
aunt. I have hurt and snubbed poor Teddy. I've
made no one happy. I deserve pretty much what I've
got. . . .

"If only because of the way one hurts others if one
kicks loose and free, one has to submit. . . .

"Broken-in people! I suppose the world is just all
egotistical children and broken-in people.

" Your little flag of pride must flutter down with the
rest of them, Ann Veronica. . . .

" Compromise — and kindness.

"Compromise and kindness.

" Who are you that the world should lie down at your
feet?

"You've got to be a decent citizen, Ann Veronica.
Take your half loaf with the others. You mustn't go
clawing after a man that doesn't belong to you — that
isn't even interested in you. That's one thing clear.

"You've got to take the decent reasonable way.
You've got to adjust yourself to the people God has set
about you. Every one else does."

She thought more and more along that line. There
was no reason why she shouldn't be Capes' friend. He
did like her, anyhow; he was always pleased to be
with her. There was no reason why she shouldn't
be his restrained and dignified friend. After all, that
was life. Nothing was given away, and no one came

266

THOUGHTS IN PRISON

so rich to the stall as to command all that it had to offer.
Every one has to make a deal with the world.

It would be very good to be Capes' friend.

She might be able to go on with biology, possibly
even work upon the same questions that he dealt
with. . . .

Perhaps her granddaughter might marry his grand-
son. . . .

It grew clear to her that throughout all her wild raid
for independence she had done nothing for anybody,
and many people had done things for her. She thought
of her aunt and that purse that was dropped on the
table, and of many troublesome and ill-requited kind-
nesses; she thought of the help of the Widgetts, of
Teddy's admiration; she thought, with a new-born
charity, of her father, of Manning's conscientious un-
selfishness, of Miss Miniver's devotion.

"And for me it has been Pride and Pride and Pride!

" I am the prodigal daughter. I will arise and go to
my father, and will say unto him —

" I suppose pride and self-assertion are sin ? Sinned
against heaven — Yes, I have sinned against heaven
and before thee. . . .

"Poor old daddy! I wonder if he'll spend much on
the fatted calf? . . .

"The wrappered life — discipline! One comes to that
at last. I begin to understand Jane Austen and chintz
covers and decency and refinement and all the rest of
it. One puts gloves on one's gieedy fingers. One
learns to sit up. . . .

" And somehow or other," she added, after a long in-
terval, " I must pay Mr. Ramage back his forty pounds."
is 267

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

ANN VERONICA PUTS THINGS IN ORDER
§ T

A^N VERONICA made a strenuous attempt to
carry out her good resolutions. She meditated
long and carefully upon her letter to her father before
she wrote it, and gravely and deliberately again before
she despatched it.

"Mv DEAR FATHER," she wrote, — "/ have been think-
ing hard about everything since I was sent to this prison.
All these experiences have taught me a great deal about
life and realities. I see that compromise is more neces-
sary to life than I ignorantly supposed it to be, and I have
been trying to get Lord Morley's book on that subject, but
it does not appear to be available in the prison library,
and the chaplain seems to regard him as an undesirable
writer."

At this point she had perceived that she was drifting
from her subject.

"/ must read him when I come out. But I see very
clearly that as things are a daughter is necessarily depend-

268

ANN PUTS THINGS IN ORDER

ent on her father and bound while she is in that position
to live harmoniously with his ideals"

"Bit starchy," said Ann Veronica, and altered the
key abruptly. Her concluding paragraph was, on the
whole, perhaps, hardly starchy enough.

"Really, daddy, I am sorry for all I have done to put
you out. May I come home and try to be a better daughter
to you?

"ANN VERONICA."

§ 2

Her aunt came to meet her outside Canongate, and,
being a little confused between what was official and
what was merely a rebellious slight upon our national
justice, found herself involved in a triumphal procession
to the Vindicator Vegetarian Restaurant, and was specifi-
cally and personally cheered by a small, shabby crowd
outside that rendezvous. They decided quite audibly,
" She's an Old Dear, anyhow. Voting wouldn't do no
'arm to 'er." She was on the very verge of a vege-
tarian meal before she recovered her head again. Obey-
ing some fine instinct, she had come to the prison in a
dark veil, but she had pushed this up to kiss Ann Ve-
ronica and never drawn it down again. Eggs were
procured for her, and she sat out the subsequent emo-
tions and eloquence with the dignity becoming an in-
jured lady of good family. The quiet encounter and
home-coming Ann Veronica and she had contemplated
was entirely disorganized by this misadventure; there

269

ANN VERONICA

were no adequate explanations, and after they had
settled things at Ann Veronica's lodgings, they reached
home in the early afternoon estranged and depressed,
with headaches and the trumpet voice of the indomitable
Kitty Brett still ringing in their ears.

"Dreadful women, my dear!" said Miss Stanley.
" And some of them quite pretty and well dressed. No
need to do such things. We must never let your father
know we went. Why ever did you let me get into that
wagonette?"

" I thought we had to," said Ann Veronica, who had
also been a little under the compulsion of the marshals
of the occasion. "It was very tiring."

" We will have some tea in the drawing-room as soon
as ever we can — and I will take my things off. I don't
think I shall ever care for this bonnet again. We'll
have some buttered toast. Your poor cheeks are quite
sunken and hollow. ..."

§ 3

When Ann Veronica found herself in her father's study
that evening it seemed to her for a moment as though
all the events of the past six months had been a dream.
The big gray spaces of London, the shop-lit, greasy,
shining streets, had become very remote; the biological
laboratory with its work and emotions, the meetings
and discussions, the rides in hansoms with Ramage,
were like things in a book read and closed. The study
seemed absolutely unaltered; there was still the same
lamp with a little chip out of the shade, still the same
gas fire, still the same bundle of blue and white papers,

270

PUTS THINGS IN ORDER

it seemed, with the same pink tape about them, at the
elbow of the arm-chair, still the same father. He sat in
much the same attitude, and she stood just as she had
stood when he told her she could not go to the Fadden
Dance. Both had dropped the rather elaborate polite-
ness of the dining-room, and in their faces an impartial
observer would have discovered little lines of obstinate
wilfulness in common; a certain hardness — sharp, in-
deed, in the father and softly rounded in the daughter
— but hardness nevertheless, that made every com-
promise a bargain and every charity a discount.

"And so you have been thinking?" her father began,
quoting her letter and looking over his slanting glasses
at her. " Well, my girl, I wish you had thought about
all these things before these bothers began."

Ann Veronica perceived that she must not forget to
remain eminently reasonable.

"One has to live and learn," she remarked, with a
passable imitation of her father's manner.

"So long as you learn," said Mr. Stanley.

Their conversation hung.

" I suppose, daddy, you've no objection to my going
on with my work at the Imperial College ?" she
asked.

"If it will keep you busy," he said, with a faintly
ironical smile.

"The fees are paid to the end of the session."

He nodded twice, with his eyes on the fire, as though
that was a formal statement.

"You may go on with that work," he said, "so long
as you keep in harmony with things at home. I'm
convinced that much of Russell's investigations are

271

ANN VERONICA

on wrong lines, unsound lines. Still — you must learn
for yourself. You're of age — you're of age."

"The work's almost essential for the B.Sc. exam."

" It's scandalous, but I suppose i*. is."

Their agreement so far seemed remarkable, and yet
as a home-coming the thing was a little lacking in
warmth. But Ann Veronica had still to get to her
chief topic. They were silent for a time. " It's a period
of crude views and crude work," said Mr. Stanley.
"Still, these Mendelian fellows seem likely to give Mr.
Russell trouble, a good lot of trouble. Some of their
specimens — wonderfully selected, wonderfully got up."

"Daddy," said Ann Veronica, "these affairs — being
away from home has — cost money."

"I thought you would find that out."

"As a matter of fact, I happen to have got a little into
debt."

"Never!"

Her heart sank at the change in his expression.

"Well, lodgings and things! And I paid my fees at
the College."

' ' Yes. But how could you get — Who gave you credit ? ' '

"You see," said Ann Veronica, "my landlady kept
on my room while I was in Holloway, and the fees for the
College mounted up pretty considerably." She spoke
rather quickly, because she found her father's question
the most awkward she had ever had to answer in her
life.

"Molly and you settled about the rooms. She said
you had some money."

"I borrowed it," said Ann Veronica in a casual tone,
with white despair in her heart.

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"But who could have lent you money?"

"I pawned my pearl necklace. I got three pounds,
and there's three on my watch."

"Six pounds. H'm. Got the tickets? Yes, but
then — you said you borrowed?"

"I did, too," said Ann Veronica.

"Who from?"

She met his eye for a second and her heart failed her.
The truth was impossible, indecent. If she mentioned
Ramage he might have a fit — anything might happen.
She lied. "The Widgetts," she said.

"Tut, tut!" he said. "Really, Vee, you seem to have
advertised our relations pretty generally!"

" They — they knew, of course. Because of the
Dance."

"How much do you owe them?"

She knew forty pounds was a quite impossible sum
for their neighbors. She knew, too, she must not hesi-
tate. "Eight pounds," she plunged, and added foolish-
ly, "fifteen pounds will see me clear of everything."
She muttered some unlady-like comment upon herself
under her breath and engaged in secret additions.

Mr. Stanley determined to improve the occasion. He
seemed to deliberate. "Well," he said at last slowly,
" I'll pay it. I'll pay it. But I do hope, Vee, I do hope
— this is the end of these adventures. I hope you have
learned your lesson now and come to see — come to realize
— how things are. People, nobody, can do as they like
in this world. Everywhere there are limitations."

"I know," said Ann Veronica (fifteen pounds!). "I
have learned that. I mean — I mean to do what I can."
(Fifteen pounds. Fifteen from forty is twenty-five.)

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ANN VERONICA

He hesitated. She could think of nothing more to
say.

" Well," she achieved at last. " Here goes for the new
life!"

"Here goes for the new life!" he echoed and stood up.
Father and daughter regarded each other warily, each
more than a little insecure with the other. He made a
movement toward her, and then recalled the circum-
stances of their last conversation in that study. She
saw his purpose and his doubt, hesitated also, and then
went to him, took his coat lapels, and kissed him on the
cheek.

"Ah, Vee," he said, "that's better!" and kissed her
back rather clumsily. "We're going to be sensible."

She disengaged herself from him and went out of the
room with a grave, preoccupied expression. (Fifteen
pounds! And she wanted forty!)

§4

It was, perhaps, the natural consequence of a long
and tiring and exciting day that Ann Veronica should
pass a broken and distressful night, a night in which the
noble and self-subduing resolutions of Canongate dis-
played themselves for the first time in an atmosphere of
almost lurid dismay. Her father's peculiar stiffness of
soul presented itself now as something altogether left
out of the calculations upon which her plans were based,
and, in particular, she had not anticipated the dif-
ficulty she would find in borrowing the forty pounds she
needed for Ramage. That had taken her by surprise,

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PUTS THINGS IN ORDER

and her tired wits had failed her. She was to have fifteen
pounds, and no more. She knew that to expect more
now was like anticipating a gold-mine in the garden.
The chance had gone. It became suddenly glaringly
apparent to her that it was impossible to return fifteen
pounds or any sum less than twenty pounds to Ramage
— absolutely impossible. She realized that with a pang
of disgust and horror.

Already she had sent him twenty pounds, and never
written to explain to him why it was she had not sent it
back sharply directly he returned it. She ought to have
written at once and told him exactly what had happened.
Now if she sent fifteen pounds the suggestion that she
had spent a five-pound note in the meanwhile would be
irresistible. No! That was impossible. She would
have just to keep the fifteen pounds until she could make
it twenty. That might happen on her birthday — in
August.

She turned about, and was persecuted by visions, half
memories, half dreams, of Ramage. He became ugly
and monstrous, dunning her, threatening her, assailing
her.

"Confound sex from first to last!" said Ann Veronica.
"Why can't we propagate by sexless spores, as the ferns
do? We restrict each other, we badger each other,
friendship is poisoned and buried under it! ... I must pay
off that forty pounds. I must."

For a time there seemed no comfort for her even in
Capes. She was to see Capes to-morrow, but now, in
this state of misery she had achieved, she felt assured he
would turn his back upon her, take no notice of her at
all. And if he didn't, what was the good of seeing him ?

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ANN VERONICA

"I wish he was a woman," she said, "then I could make
him my friend. I want him as my friend. I want to talk
to him and go about with him. Just go about with him."

She was silent for a time, with her nose on the pillow,
and that brought her to: "What's the good of pretend-
ing?

"I love him," she said aloud to the dim forms of her
room, and repeated it, and went on to imagine herself
doing acts of tragically dog-like devotion to the biologist,
who, for the purposes of the drama, remained entirely
unconscious of and indifferent to her proceedings.

At last some anodyne formed itself from these exercises,
and, with eyelashes wet with such feeble tears as only
three-o'clock-in-the-morning pathos can distil, she fell
asleep.

§5

Pursuant to some altogether private calculations she
did not go up to the Imperial College until after mid-day,
and she found the laboratory deserted, even as she
desired. She went to the table under the end window
at which she had been accustomed to work, and found it
swept and garnished with full bottles of re-agents.
Everything was very neat ; it had evidently been straight-
ened up and kept for her. She put down the sketch-
books and apparatus she had brought with her, pulled
out her stool, and sat down. As she did so the prep-
aration-room door opened behind her. She heard it
open, but as she felt tmable to look round in a careless
manner she pretended not to hear it. Then Capes'
footsteps approached. She turned with an effort.

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PUTS THINGS IN ORDER

"I expected you this morning," he said. "I saw —
they knocked off your fetters yesterday."

" I think it is very good of me to come this afternoon."

"I began to be afraid you might not come at all."

"Afraid!"

" Yes. I'm glad you're back for all sorts of reasons."
He spoke a little nervously. "Among other things,
you know, I didn't understand quite — I didn't under-
stand that you were so keenly interested in this suffrage
question. I have it on my conscience that I offended
you—"

"Offended me when?"

" I've been haunted by the memory of you. I was
rude and stupid. We were talking about the suffrage —
and I rather scoffed."

"You weren't rude," she said.

"I didn't know you were so keen on this suffrage
business."

"Nor I. You haven't had it on your mind all this
time?"

" I have rather. I felt somehow I'd hurt you."

"You didn't. I— I hurt myself."

"I mean— "

" I behaved like an idiot, that's all. My nerves
were in rags. I was worried. We're the hysterical
animal, Mr. Capes. I got myself locked up to cool
off. By a sort of instinct. As a dog eats grass. I'm
right again now."

"Because your nerves were exposed, that was no
excuse for my touching them. I ought to have seen — "

"It doesn't matter a rap — if you're not disposed to
resent the — the way I behaved."

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ANN VERONICA

"/resent!"

" I was only sorry I'd been so stupid."

"Well, I take it we're straight again," said Capes
with a note of relief, and assumed an easier position
on the edge of her table. "But if you weren't keen
on the suffrage business, why on earth did you go to
prison?"

Ann Veronica reflected. "It was a phase," she said.

He smiled. "It's a new phase in the life history,"
he remarked. "Everybody seems to have it now.
Everybody who's going to develop into a woman."

"There's Miss Garvice."

"She's coming on," said Capes. "And, you know,
you're altering us all. I'm shaken. The campaign's
a success." He met her questioning eye, and repeated,
"Oh! it is a success. A man is so apt to — to take
women a little too lightly. Unless they remind him now
and then not to. ... You did."

"Then I didn't waste my time in prison altogether?"

"It wasn't the prison impressed me. But I liked
the things you said here. I felt suddenly I understood
you — as an intelligent person. If you'll forgive my
saying that, and implying what goes with it. There's
something — puppyish in a man's usual attitude to
women. That is what I've had on my conscience. . . .
I don't think we're altogether to blame if we don't
take some of your lot seriously. Some of your sex,
I mean. But we smirk a little, I'm afraid, habitually
when we talk to you. We smirk, and we're a bit —
furtive."

He paused, with his eyes studying her gravely.
"You, anyhow, don't deserve it," he said.

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PUTS THINGS IN ORDER

Their colloquy was ended abruptly by the apparition
of Miss Klegg at the further door. When she saw
Ann Veronica she stood for a moment as if entranced,
and then advanced with outstretched hands. "Ve'ron-
ique!" she cried with a rising intonation, though never
before had she called Ann Veronica anything but Miss
Stanley, and seized her and squeezed her and kissed
her with profound emotion. "To think that you were
going to do it — and never said a word ! You are a little
thin, but except for that you look — you look better than
ever. Was it very horrible? I tried to get into the
police-court, but the crowd was ever so much too big,
push as I would. . . .

"I mean to go to prison directly the session is over,"
said Miss Klegg. "Wild horses — not if they have all
the mounted police in London — shan't keep me out."

§ 6

Capes lit things wonderfully for Ann Veronica all
that afternoon, he was so friendly, so palpably in-
terested in her, and glad to have her back with him.
Tea in the laboratory was a sort of suffragette reception.
Miss Garvice assumed a quality of neutrality, pro-
fessed herself almost won over by Ann Veronica's
example, and the Scotchman decided that if women
had a distinctive sphere it was, at any rate, an enlarging
sphere, and no one who believed in the doctrine of
evolution could logically deny the vote to women
"ultimately," however much they might be disposed
to doubt the advisability of its immediate concession.

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ANN VERONICA

It was a refusal of expediency, he said, and not an ab-
solute refusal. The youth with his hair like Russell
cleared his throat and said rather irrelevantly that he
knew a man who knew Thomas Bayard Simmons,
who had rioted in the Strangers' Gallery, and then Capes,
finding them all distinctly pro-Ann Veronica, if not
pro-feminist, ventured to be perverse, and started a
vein of speculation upon the Scotchman's idea — that
there were still hopes of women evolving into some-
thing higher.

He was unusually absurd and ready, and all the
time it seemed to Ann Veronica as a delightful possibility,
as a thing not indeed to be entertained seriously, but
to be half furtively felt, that he was being so agreeable
because she had come back again. She returned home
through a world that was as roseate as it had been
gray overnight.

But as she got out of the train at Morningside Park
Station she had a shock. She saw, twenty yards down
the platform, the shiny hat and broad back and in-
imitable swagger of Ramage. She dived at once behind
the cover of the lamp-room and affected serious trouble
with her shoe-lace until he was out of the station,
and then she followed slowly and with extreme discre-
tion until the bifurcation of the Avenue from the field
way insured her escape. Ramage went up the Avenue,
and she hurried along the path with a beating heart and
a disagreeable sense of unsolved problems in her mind.

"That thing's going on," she told herself. "Every-
thing goes on, confound it! One doesn't change any-
thing one has set going by making good resolutions."

And then ahead of her she saw the radiant and

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PUTS THINGS IN ORDER

welcoming figure of Manning. He came as an agreeable
diversion from an insoluble perplexity. She smiled
at the sight of him, and thereat his radiation increased.

"I missed the hour of your release," he said, "but
I was at the Vindicator Restaurant. You did not see
me, I know. I was among the common herd in the
place below, but I took good care to see you."

"Of course you're converted?" she said.

"To the view that all those Splendid Women in the
movement ought to have votes. Rather! Who could
help it?"

He towered up over her and smiled down at her in
his fatherly way.

"To the view that all women ought to have votes
whether they like it or not."

He shook his head, and his eyes and the mouth under
the black mustache wrinkled with his smile. And as
he walked by her side they began a wrangle that was
none the less pleasant to Ann Veronica because it served
to banish a disagreeable preoccupation. It seemed to
her in her restored geniality that she liked Manning
extremely. The brightness Capes had diffused over
the world glorified even his rival.

§ 7

The steps by which Ann Veronica determined to en-
gage herself to marry Manning were never very clear
to her. A medley of motives warred in her, and it was
certainly not one of the least of these that she knew
herself to be passionately in love with Capes ; at moments

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ANN VERONICA

she had a giddy intimation that he was beginning to
feel keenly interested in her. She realized more and
more the quality of the brink upon which she stood —
the dreadful readiness with which in certain moods she
might plunge, the unmitigated wrongness and reckless-
ness of such a self-abandonment. "He must never
know," she would whisper to herself, "he must never
know. Or else — Else it will be impossible that I can
be his friend."

That simple statement of the case was by no means
all that went on in Ann Veronica's mind. But it was
the form of her ruling determination; it was the only
form that she ever allowed to see daylight. What else
was there lurked in shadows and deep places; if in some
mood of reverie it came out into the light, it was pres-
ently overwhelmed and hustled back again into hiding.
She would never look squarely at these dream forms
that mocked the social order in which she lived, never
admit she listened to the soft whisperings in her ear.
But Manning seemed more and more clearly indicated
as a refuge, as security. Certain simple purposes
emerged from the disingenuous muddle of her feelings
and desires. Seeing Capes from day to day made a
bright eventfulness that hampered her in the course
she had resolved to follow. She vanished from the
laboratory for a week, a week of oddly interesting
days. . . .

When she renewed her attendance at the Imperial
College the third finger of her left hand was adorned
with a very fine old ring with dark blue sapphires that
had once belonged to a great-aunt of Manning's.

That ring manifestly occupied her thoughts a great

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PUTS THINGS IN ORDER

deal. She kept pausing in her work and regarding it,
and when Capes came round to her, she first put her
hand in her lap and then rather awkwardly in front of
him. But men are often blind to rings. He seemed
to be.

In the afternoon she had considered certain doubts
very carefully, and decided on a more emphatic course
of action. "Are these ordinary sapphires?" she said.
He bent to her hand, and she slipped off the ring and
gave it to him to examine.

"Very good," he said. "Rather darker than most
of them. But I'm generously ignorant of gems. Is it
an old ring?" he asked, returning it.

"I believe it is. It's an engagement ring. ..." She
slipped it on her finger, and added, in a voice she tried
to make matter-of-fact: " It was given to me last week."

"Oh!" he said, in a colorless tone, and with his eyes
on her face.

"Yes. Last week."

She glanced at him, and it was suddenly apparent for
one instant of illumination that this ring upon her finger
was the crowning blunder of her life. It was appar-
ent, and then it faded into the quality of an inevitable
necessity.

"Odd!" he remarked, rather surprisingly, after a
little interval.

There was a brief pause, a crowded pause, between
them.

She sat very still, and his eyes rested on that orna-
ment for a moment, and then travelled slowly to her
wrist and the soft lines of her forearm.

"I suppose I ought to congratulate you," he said.
19 283

ANN VERONICA

Their eyes met, and his expressed perplexity and curi-
osity. "The fact is — I don't know why — this takes me
by surprise. Somehow I haven't connected the idea
with you. You seemed complete — without that."

"Did I?" she said.

" I don't know why. But this is like — like walking
round a house that looks square and complete and find-
ing an unexpected long wing running out behind."

She looked up at him, and found he was watching
her closely. For some seconds of voluminous thinking
they looked at the ring between them, and neither
spoke. Then Capes shifted his eyes to her microscope
and the little trays of unmounted sections beside it.
" How is that carmine working?" he asked, with a forced
interest.

"Better," said Ann Veronica, with an unreal alacrity.
"But it still misses the nucleolus."

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

THE SAPPHIRE RING
§ I

FOR a time that ring set with sapphires seemed to
be, after all, the satisfactory solution of Ann
Veronica's difficulties. It was like pouring a strong
acid over dulled metal. A tarnish of constraint that
had recently spread over her intercourse with Capes
vanished again. They embarked upon an open and
declared friendship. They even talked about friend-
ship. They went to the Zoological Gardens together
one Saturday to see for themselves a point of morpholog-
ical interest about the toucan's bill — that friendly and
entertaining bird — and they spent the rest of the after-
noon walking about and elaborating in general terms
this theme and the superiority of intellectual fellowship
to all merely passionate relationships. Upon this topic
Capes was heavy and conscientious, but that seemed to
her to be just exactly what he ought to be. He was also,
had she known it, more than a little insincere. " We
are only in the dawn of the Age of Friendship," he said,
" when interest, I suppose, will take the place of passions.
Either you have had to love people or hate them — which
is a sort of love, too, in its way — to get anything out of
them. Now, more and more, we're going to be interested

285

ANN VERONICA

in them, to be curious about them and — quite mildly —
experimental with them." He seemed to be elaborating
ideas as he talked. They watched the chimpanzees in
the new apes' house, and admired the gentle humanity of
their eyes — " so much more human than human beings"
— and they watched the Agile Gibbon in the next apart-
ment doing wonderful leaps and aerial somersaults.

" I wonder which of us enjoys that most," said Capes —
"does he, or do we?"

" He seems to get a zest — "

" He does it and forgets it. We remember it. These
joyful bounds just lace into the stuff of my memories
and stay there forever. Living's just material."

"It's very good to be alive."

"It's better to know life than be life."

"One may do both," said Ann Veronica.

She was in a very uncritical state that afternoon.
When he said, "Let's go and see the wart-hog," she
thought no one ever had had so quick a flow of good ideas
as he; and when he explained that sugar and not buns
was the talisman of popularity among the animals, she
marvelled at his practical omniscience.

Finally, at the exit into Regent's Park, they ran against
Miss Klegg. It was the expression of Miss Klegg's face
that put the idea into Ann Veronica's head of showing
Manning at the College one day, an idea which she didn't
for some reason or other carry out for a fortnight.

§ 2

When at last she did so, the sapphire ring took on a
new quality in the imagination of Capes. It ceased to

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THE SAPPHIRE RING

be the symbol of liberty and a remote and quite ab-
stracted person, and became suddenly and very dis-
agreeably the token of a large and portentous body
visible and tangible.

Manning appeared just at the end of the afternoon's
work, and the biologist was going through some per-
plexities the Scotchman had created by a metaphysical
treatment of the skulls of Hyrax and a young African
elephant. He was clearing up these difficulties by
tracing a partially obliterated suture the Scotchman
had overlooked when the door from the passage opened,
and Manning came into his universe.

Seen down the length of the laboratory, Manning looked
a very handsome and shapely gentleman indeed, and, at
the sight of his eager advance to his fiancee, Miss Klegg
replaced one long-cherished romance about Ann Veronica
by one more normal and simple. He carried a cane and
a silk hat with a mourning-band in one gray-gloved hand ;
his frock-coat and trousers were admirable ; his handsome
face, his black mustache, his prominent brow conveyed
an eager solicitude.

"I want," he said, with a white hand outstretched,
" to take you out to tea."

" I've been clearing up," said Ann Veronica, brightly.

"All your dreadful scientific things?" he said, with a
smile that Miss Klegg thought extraordinarily kindly.

" All my dreadful scientific things," said Ann Veronica.

He stood back, smiling with an air of proprietorship,
and looking about him at the business-like equipment of
the room. The low ceiling made him seem abnormally
tall. Ann Veronica wiped a scalpel, put a card over a
watch-glass containing thin shreds of embryonic guinea-

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ANN VERONICA

pig swimming in mauve stain, and dismantled her
microscope.

" I wish I understood more of biology," said Manning.

"I'm ready," said Ann Veronica, closing her micro-
scope-box with a click, and looking for one brief instant
up the laboratory. "We have no airs and graces here,
and my hat hangs from a peg in the passage."

She led the way to the door, and Manning passed
behind her and round her and opened the door for her.
When Capes glanced up at them for a moment, Manning
seemed to be holding his arms all about her, and there
was nothing but quiet acquiescence in her bearing.

After Capes had finished the Scotchman's troubles
he went back into the preparation-room. He sat down
on the sill of the open window, folded his arms, and
stared straight before him for a long time over the
wilderness of tiles and chimney-pots into a sky that was
blue and empty. He was not addicted to monologue,
and the only audible comment he permitted himself at
first upon a universe that was evidently anything but
satisfactory to him that afternoon, was one compact
and entirely unassigned "Damn!"

The word must have had some gratifying quality,
because he repeated it. Then he stood up and repeated
it again. "The fool I have been!" he cried; and now
speech was coming to him. He tried this sentence with
expletives. " Ass!" he went on, still warming. " Muck-
headed moral ass! I ought to have done anything. I
ought to have done anything!

" What's a man for ?

"Friendship!"

He doubled up his fist, and seemed to contemplate

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THE SAPPHIRE RING

thrusting it through the window. He turned his back
on that temptation. Then suddenly he seized a new
preparation bottle that stood upon his table and con-
tained the better part of a week's work — a displayed
dissection of a snail, beautifully done — and hurled it
across the room, to smash resoundingly upon the
cemented floor under the bookcase; then, without either
haste or pause, he swept his arm along a shelf of re-
agents and sent them to mingle with the debris on the
floor. They fell in a diapason of smashes. "H'm!" he
said, regarding the wreckage with a calmer visage.
"Silly!" he remarked after a pause. "One hardly
knows — all the time."

He put his hands in his pockets, his mouth puck-
ered to a whistle, and he went to the door of the outer
preparation-room and stood there, looking, save for
the faintest intensification of his natural ruddiness,
the embodiment of blond serenity.

"Gellett," he called, "just come and clear up a mess,
will you? I've smashed some things."

§3

There was one serious flaw in Ann Veronica's arrange-
ments for self -rehabilitation, and that was Ramage.
He hung over her — he and his loan to her and his con-
nection with her and that terrible evening — a vague,
disconcerting possibility of annoyance and exposure.
She could not see any relief from this anxiety except
repayment, and repayment seemed impossible. The
raising of twenty-five pounds was a task altogether be-

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ANN VERONICA

yond her powers. Her birthday was four months away,
and that, at its extremist point, might give her another
five pounds.

The thing rankled in her mind night and day. She
would wake in the night to repeat her bitter cry: "Oh,
why did I burn those notes?"

It added greatly to the annoyance of the situation
that she had twice seen Ramage in the Avenue since
her return to the shelter of her father's roof. He had
saluted her with elaborate civility, his eyes distended
with indecipherable meanings.

She felt she was bound in honor to tell the whole
affair to Manning sooner or later. Indeed, it seemed
inevitable that she must clear it up with his assistance,
or not at all. And when Manning was not about the
thing seemed simple enough. She would compose ex-
tremely lucid and honorable explanations. But when
it came to broaching them, it proved to be much more
difficult than she had supposed.

They went down the great staircase of the building,
and, while she sought in her mind for a beginning, he
broke into appreciation of her simple dress and self-
congratulations upon their engagement.

"It makes me feel," he said, "that nothing is im-
possible— to have you here beside me. I said, that day
at Surbiton, ' There's many good things in life, but there's
only one best, and that's the wild-haired girl who's pull-
ing away at that oar. I will make her my Grail, and
some day, perhaps, if God wills, she shall become my
wife!'"

He looked very hard before him as he said this, and
his voice was full of deep feeling.

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THE SAPPHIRE RING

"Grail!" said Ann Veronica; and then: "Oh, yes —
of course! Anything but a holy one, I'm afraid."

"Altogether holy, Ann Veronica. Ah! but you can't
imagine what you are to me and what you mean to me !
I suppose there is something mystical and wonderful
about all women."

"There is something mystical and wonderful about
all human beings. I don't see that men need bank it
with the women."

"A man does," said Manning — "a true man, anyhow.
And for me there is only one treasure-house. By Jove!
When I think of it I want to leap and shout!"

"It would astonish that man with the barrow."

"It astonishes me that I don't," said Manning, in a
tone of intense self-enjoyment.

"I think," began Ann Veronica, "that you don't
realize — "

He disregarded her entirely. He waved an arm and
spoke with a peculiar resonance. "I feel like a giant!
I believe now I shall do great things. Gods! what it
must be to pour out strong, splendid verse — mighty
lines! mighty lines! If I do, Ann Veronica, it will be
you. It will be altogether you. I will dedicate my
books to you. I will lay them all at your feet."

He beamed upon her.

" I don't think you realize," Ann Veronica began
again, "that I am rather a defective human being."

"I don't want to," said Manning. "They say there
are spots on the sun. Not for me. It warms me, and
lights me, and fills my world with flowers. Why should
I peep at it through smoked glass to see things that don't
affect me?" He smiled his delight at his companion.

291

ANN VERONICA

"I've got bad faults."

He shook his head slowly, smiling mysteriously.

"But perhaps I want to confess them."

"I grant you absolution."

" I don't want absolution. I want to make myself
visible to you."

" I wish I could make you visible to yourself. I
don't believe in the faults. They're just a joyous
softening of the outline — more beautiful than perfec-
tion. Like the flaws of an old marble' If you talk of
your faults, I shall talk of your splendors."

"I do want to tell you things, nevertheless."

"We'll have, thank God! ten myriad days to tell
each other things. When I think of it — "

"But these are things I want to tell you now!"

"I made a little song of it. Let me say it to you.
I've no name for it yet. Epithalamy might do.

" Like him who stood on Darien,

I view uncharted sea,
Ten thousand days, ten thousand nights
Before my Queen and me.

"And that only brings me up to about sixty-five!

" A glittering wilderness of time,

That to the sunset reaches;
No keel as yet its waves has ploughed,
Or gritted on its beaches.

" And we will sail that splendor wide,

From day to day together,
From isle to isle of happiness,

Through year's of God's own weather."

"Yes," said his prospective fellow-sailor, "that's
very pretty." She stopped short, full of things un-

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said. Pretty ! Ten thousand days, ten thousand
nights!

"You shall tell me your faults," said Manning. "If
they matter to you, they matter."

"It isn't precisely faults," said Ann Veronica. "It's
something that bothers me." Ten thousand! Put that
way it seemed so different.

"Then assuredly!" said Manning.

She found a little difficulty in beginning. She was
glad when he went on: "I want to be your city of
refuge from every sort of bother. I want to stand
between you and all the force and vileness of the world.
I want to make you feel that here is a place where the
crowd does not clamor nor ill-winds blow."

"That is all very well," said Ann Veronica, unheeded.

"That is my dream of you," said Manning, warming.
"I want my life to be beaten gold just in order to make
it a fitting setting for yours. There you will be, in an
inner temple. I want to enrich it with hangings and
gladden it with verses. I want to fill it with fine and
precious things. And by degrees, perhaps, that maiden
distrust of yours that makes you shrink from my kisses,
will vanish. . . . Forgive me if a certain warmth creeps
into my words! The Park is green and gray to-day,
but I am glowing pink and gold. ... It is difficult to
express these things."

§ 4

They sat with tea and strawberries and cream before
them at a little table in front of the pavilion in Regent's
Park. Her confession was still unmade. Manning

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ANN VERONICA

leaned forward on the table, talking discursively on the
probable brilliance of their married life. Ann Veronica
sat back in an attitude of inattention, her eyes on a
distant game of cricket, her mind perplexed and busy.
She was recalling the circumstances under which she had
engaged herself to Manning, and trying to understand a
curious development of the quality of this relationship.

The particulars of her engagement were very clear
in her memory. She had taken care he should have
this momentous talk with her on a garden-seat com-
manded by the windows of the house. They had
been playing tennis, with his manifest intention looming
over her.

"Let us sit down for a moment," he had said. He
made his speech a little elaborately. She plucked
at the knots of her racket and heard him to the end,
then spoke in a restrained undertone.

"You ask me to be engaged to you, Mr. Manning,"
she began.

"I want to lay all my life at your feet."

"Mr. Manning, I do not think I love you. ... I want
to be very plain with you. I have nothing, nothing
that can possibly be passion for you. I am sure.
Nothing at all."

He was silent for some moments.

"Perhaps that is only sleeping," he said. "How
can you know?"

" I think — perhaps I am rather a cold-blooded person."

She stopped. He remained listening attentively.

"You have been very kind to me," she said.

"I would give my life for you."

Her heart had wanned toward him. It had seemed

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to her that life might be very good indeed with his
kindliness and sacrifice about her. She thought of
him as always courteous and helpful, as realizing, indeed,
his ideal of protection and service, as chivalrously
leaving her free to live her own life, rejoicing with an
infinite generosity in every detail of her irresponsive
being. She twanged the catgut under her fingers.

"It seems so unfair," she said, "to take all you offer
me and give so little in return."

"It is all the world to me. And we are not traders
looking at equivalents."

"You know, Mr. Manning, I do not really want to
marry."

"No."

"It seems so — so unworthy" — she picked among
her phrases — "of the noble love you give — "

She stopped, through the difficulty she found in ex-
pressing herself.

"But I am judge of that," said Manning.

"Would you wait for me?"

Manning was silent for a space. "As my lady wills."

"Would you let me go on studying for a time?"

"If you order patience."

"I think, Mr. Manning ... I do not know. It is so
difficult. When I think of the love you give me —
One ought to give you back love."

"You like me?"

"Yes. And I am grateful to you. ..."

Manning tapped with his racket on the turf through
some moments of silence. "You are the most perfect,
the most glorious of created things — tender, frank,
intellectual, brave, beautiful. I am your servitor.

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ANN VERONICA

I am ready to wait for you, to wait your pleasure, to
give all my life to winning it. Let me only wear your
livery. Give me but leave to try. You want to think
for a time, to be free for a time. That is so like you,
Diana — Pallas Athene! (Pallas Athene is better.)
You are all the slender goddesses. I understand. Let
me engage myself. That is all I ask."

She looked at him; his face, downcast and in profile,
was handsome and strong. Her gratitude swelled
within her.

"You are too good for me," she said in a low voice.

' ' Then you — you will ? ' '

A long pause.

"It isn't fair. . . ."

"But will you?"

"Yes."

For some seconds he had remained quite still.

" If I sit here," he said, standing up before her abruptly,
"I shall have to shout. Let us walk about. Turn,
turn, tiiray, turn, turn, turn, te-tum — that thing of
Mendelssohn's! If making one human being absolutely
happy is any satisfaction to you — "

He held out his hands, and she also stood up.

He drew her close up to him with a strong, steady
pull. Then suddenly, in front of all those windows,
he folded her in his arms and pressed her to him, and
kissed her unresisting face.

"Don't!" cried Ann Veronica, struggling faintly,
and he released her.

"Forgive me," he said. "But I am at singing-
pitch."

She had a moment of sheer panic at the thing she
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THE SAPPHIRE RING

had done. "Mr. Manning," she said, "for a time —
Will you tell no one? Will you keep this — our secret?
I'm doubtful— Will you please not even tell my aunt ? ' '
"As you will," he said. "But if my manner tells!
I cannot help it if that shows. You only mean a secret —
for a little time?"

"Just for a little time," she said; "yes. ..."
But the ring, and her aunt's triumphant eye, and
a note of approval in her father's manner, and a novel
disposition in him to praise Manning in a just, impartial
voice had soon placed very definite qualifications upon
that covenanted secrecy.

§5

At first the quality of her relationship to Manning
seemed moving and beautiful to Ann Veronica. She
admired and rather pitied him, and she was unfeignedly
grateful to him. She even thought that perhaps she
might come to love him, in spite of that faint inde-
finable flavor of absurdity that pervaded his courtly
bearing. She would never love him as she loved Capes,
of course, but there are grades and qualities of love. For
Manning it would be a more temperate love altogether.
Much more temperate; the discreet and joyless love of a
virtuous, reluctant, condescending wife. She had been
quite convinced that an engagement with him and at
last a marriage had exactly that quality of compromise
which distinguishes the ways of the wise. It would be
the wrappered world almost at its best. She saw herself
building up a life upon that — a life restrained, kindly,
beautiful, a little pathetic and altogether dignified; a

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ANN VERONICA

life of great disciplines and suppressions and extensive
reserves. . . .

But the Ramage affair needed clearing up, of course;
it was a flaw upon that project. She had to explain
about and pay off that forty pounds. . . .

Then, quite insensibly, her queenliness had declined.
She was never able to trace the changes her attitude
had undergone, from the time when she believed her-
self to be the pampered Queen of Fortune, the crown
of a good man's love (and secretly, but nobly, worship-
ping some one else), to the time when she realized she
was in fact just a mannequin for her lover's imagina-
tion, and that he cared no more for the realities of her
being, for the things she felt and desired, for the passions
and dreams that might move her, than a child cares for
the sawdust in its doll. She was the actress his whim
had chosen to play a passive part. . . .

It was one of the most educational disillusionments
in Ann Veronica's career.

But did many women get anything better?

This afternoon, when she was urgent to explain her
hampering and tainting complication with Ramage, the
realization of this alien quality in her relationship with
Manning became acute. Hitherto it had been qualified
by her conception of all life as a compromise, by her
new effort to be unexacting of life. But she perceived
that to tell Manning of her Ramage adventures as they
had happened would be like tarring figures upon a water-
color. They were in different key, they had a different
timbre. How could she tell him what indeed already
began to puzzle herself, why she had borrowed that
money at all ? The plain fact was that she had grabbed

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THE SAPPHIRE RING

a bait. She had grabbed! She became less and less
attentive to his meditative, self-complacent fragments
of talk as she told herself this. Her secret thoughts
made some hasty, half-hearted excursions into the pos-
sibility of telling the thing in romantic tones — Ramage
was as a black villain, she as a white, fantastically
white, maiden. . . . She doubted if Manning would even
listen to that. He would refuse to listen and absolve
hei unshriven.

Then it came to her with a shock, as an extraordinary
oversight, that she could never tell Manning about
Ramage — never.

She dismissed the idea of doing so. But that still
left the forty pounds! . . .

Her mind went on generalizing. So it would always
be between herself and Manning. She saw her life
before her robbed of all generous illusions, the wrap-
pered life unwrappered forever, vistas of dull responses,
crises of make-believe, years of exacting mutual disre-
gard in a misty garden of fine sentiments.

But did any woman get anything better from a man ?
Perhaps every woman conceals herself from a man per-
force! . . .

She thought of Capes. She could not help thinking
of Capes. Surely Capes was different. Capes looked
at one and not over one, spoke to one, treated one as a
visible concrete fact. Capes saw her, felt for her, cared
for her greatly, even if he did not love her. Anyhow,
he did not sentimentalize her. And she had been
doubting since that walk in the Zoological Gardens
whether, indeed, he did simply care for her. Little
things, almost impalpable, had happened to justify that
ao 299

ANN VERONICA

doubt; something in his manner had belied his words.
Did he not look for her in the morning when she entered
— come very quickly to her? She thought of him as
she had last seen him looking down the length of the
laboratory to see her go. Why had he glanced up —
quite in that way? . . .

The thought of Capes flooded her being like long-
veiled sunlight breaking again through clouds. It came
to her like a dear thing rediscovered, that she loved
Capes. It came to her that to marry any one but Capes
was impossible. If she could not marry him, she would
not marry any one. She would end this sham with
Manning. It ought never to have begun. It was
cheating, pitiful cheating. And then if some day Capes
wanted her — saw fit to alter his views upon friendship. . . .

Dim possibilities that she would not seem to look at
even to herself gesticulated in the twilight background
of her mind.

She leaped suddenly at a desperate resolution, and
in one moment had made it into a new self. She flung
aside every plan she had in life, every discretion. Of
course, why not? She would be honest, anyhow!

She turned her eyes to Manning.

He was sitting back from the table now, with one
arm over the back of his green chair and the other rest-
ing on the little table. He was smiling under his heavy
mustache, and his head was a little on one side as he
looked at her.

" And what was that dreadful confession you had to
make?" he was saying. His quiet, kindly smile implied
his serene disbelief in any confessible thing. Ann Ve-
ronica pushed aside a tea-cup and the vestiges of her

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THE SAPPHIRE RING

strawberries and cream, and put her elbows before her
on the table. "Mr. Manning," she said, "I have a con-
fession to make."

"I wish you would use my Christian name," he said.

She attended to that, and then dismissed it as unim-
portant.

Something in her voice and manner conveyed an ef-
fect of unwonted gravity to him. For the first time he
seemed to wonder what it might be that she had to
confess. His smile faded.

" I don't think our engagement can go on," she
plunged, and felt exactly that loss of breath that comes
with a dive into icy water.

" But, how," he said, sitting up astonished beyond
measure, "not go on?"

" I have been thinking while you have been talking.
You see — I didn't understand."

She stared hard at her finger-nails. "It is hard to
express one's self, but I do want to be honest with you.
When I promised to marry you I thought I could; I
thought it was a possible arrangement. I did think it
could be done. I admired your chivalry. I was grate-
ful."

She paused.

"Go on," he said.

She moved her elbow nearer to him and spoke in a
still lower tone. " I told you I did not love you."

"I know," said Manning, nodding gravely. "It was
fine and brave of you."

"But there is something more."

She paused again.

"I — I am sorry — I didn't explain. These things
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ANN VERONICA

are difficult. It wasn't clear to me that I had to ex-
plain. ... I love some one else."

They remained looking at each other for three or
four seconds. Then Manning flopped back in his chair
and dropped his chin like a man shot. There was a
long silence between them.

"My God!" he said at last, with tremendous feeling,
and then again, "My God!"

Now that this thing was said her mind was clear and
calm. She heard this standard expression of a strong
soul wrung with a critical coldness that astonished her-
self. She realized dimly that there was no personal
thing behind his cry, that countless myriads of Man-
nings had "My God!"-ed with an equal gusto at situa-
tions as flatly apprehended. This mitigated her re-
morse enormously. He rested his brow on his hand and
conveyed magnificent tragedy by his pose.

"But why," he said in the gasping voice of one sub-
duing an agony, and looked at her from under a pain-
wrinkled brow, "why did you not tell me this before?"

" I didn't know — I thought I might be able to con-
trol myself."

"And you can't?"

" I don't think I ought to control myself."

" And I have been dreaming and thinking — "

"I am frightfully sorry. ..."

"But— This bolt from the blue! My God! Ann
Veronica, you don't understand. This — this shatters a
world!"

She tried to feel sorry, but her sense of his immense
egotism was strong and clear.

He went on with intense urgency.
30?

THE SAPPHIRE RING

"Why did you ever let me love you? Why did you
ever let me peep through the gates of Paradise? Oh!
my God! I don't begin to feel and realize this yet. It
seems to me just talk ; it seems to me like the fancy of a
dream. Tell me I haven't heard. This is a joke of
yours." He made his voice very low and full, and looked
closely into her face.

She twisted her fingers tightly. " It isn't a joke," she
said. " I feel shabby and disgraced. ... I ought never
to have thought of it. Of you, I mean. ..."

He fell back in his chair with an expression of tre-
mendous desolation. "My God!" he said again. . . .

They became aware of the waitress standing over
them with book and pencil ready for their bill. " Never
mind the bill," said Manning tragically, standing up
and thrusting a four-shilling piece into her hand, and
turning a broad back on her astonishment. " Let us
walk across the Park at least," he said to Ann Veronica.
" Just at present my mind simply won't take hold of this
at all. ... I tell you — never mind the bill. Keep it!
Keep it!"

§ 6

They walked a long way that afternoon. They crossed
the Park to the westward, and then turned back and
walked round the circle about the Royal Botanical
Gardens and then southwardly toward Waterloo. They
trudged and talked, and Manning struggled, as he said,
to "get the hang of it all."

It was a long, meandering talk, stupid, shameful, and
unavoidable. Ann Veronica was apologetic to the

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ANN VERONICA

bottom of her soul. At the same time she was wildly
exultant at the resolution she had taken, the end she
had made to her blunder. She had only to get through
this, to solace Manning as much as she could, to put such
clumsy plasterings on his wounds as were possible, and
then, anyhow, she would be free — free to put her fate
to the test. She made a few protests, a few excuses for
her action in accepting him, a few lame explanations,
but he did not heed them or care for them. Then she
realized that it was her business to let Manning talk and
impose his own interpretations upon the situation so far
as he was concerned. She did her best to do this. But
about his unknown rival he was acutely curious.

He made her tell him the core of the difficulty.

"I cannot say who he is," said Ann Veronica, "but
he is a married man. ... No ! I do not even know that
he cares for me. It is no good going into that. Only
I just want him. I just want him, and no one else will
do. It is no good arguing about a thing like that."

"But you thought you could forget him."

" I suppose I must have thought so. I didn't under-
stand. Now I do."

"By God!" said Manning, making the most of the
word, "I suppose it's fate. Fate! You are so frank,
so splendid!

" I'm taking this calmly now," he said, almost as if he
apologized, "because I'm a little stunned."

Then he asked, " Tell me! has this man, has he dared to
make love to you?"

Ann Veronica had a vicious moment. "I wish he
had," she said.

"But—"

3°4

THE SAPPHIRE RING

The long inconsecutive conversation by that time was
getting on her nerves. " When one wants a thing more
than anything else in the world," she said with outrageous
frankness, "one naturally wishes one had it."

She shocked him by that. She shattered the edifice
he was building up of himself as a devoted lover, waiting
only his chance to win her from a hopeless and con-
suming passion.

"Mr. Manning," she said, "I warned you not to
idealize me. Men ought not to idealize any woman.
We aren't worth it. We've done nothing to deserve it.
And it hampers us. You don't know the thoughts we
have ; the things we can do and say. You are a sister-
less man; you have never heard the ordinary talk that
goes on at a girls' boarding-school."

"Oh! but you are splendid and open and fearless!
As if I couldn't allow! What are all these little things?
Nothing! Nothing! You can't sully yourself. You
can't! I tell you frankly you may break off your en-
gagement to me — I shall hold myself still engaged to you,
yours just the same. As for this infatuation — it's like
some obsession, some magic thing laid upon you. It's
not you — not a bit. It's a thing that's happened to
you. It is like some accident. I don't care. In a sense
I don't care. It makes no difference. . . . All the same,
I wish I had that fellow by the throat! Just the virile,
unregenerate man in me wishes that. . . .

" I suppose I should let go if I had.

"You know," he went on, "this doesn't seem to me
to end anything. I'm rather a persistent person. I'm
the sort of dog, if you turn it out of the room it lies down
on the mat at the door. I'm not a lovesick boy. I'm

3°S

ANN VERONICA

a man, and I know what I mean. It's a tremendous
blow, of course — but it doesn't kill me. And the situa-
tion it makes! — the situation!"

Thus Manning, egotistical, inconsecutive, unreal.
And Ann Veronica walked beside him, trying in vain to
soften her heart to him by the thought of how she had
ill-used him, and all the time, as her feet and mind grew
weary together, rejoicing more and more that at the cost
of this one interminable walk she escaped the prospect
of — what was it? — "Ten thousand days, ten thousand
nights" in his company. Whatever happened she need
never return to that possibility.

"For me," Manning went on, "this isn't final. In a
sense it alters nothing. I shall still wear your favor —
even if it is a stolen and forbidden favor — in my casque.
... I shall still believe in you. Trust you."

He repeated several times that he would trust her,
though it remained obscure just exactly where the trust
came in.

"Look here," he cried out of a silence, with a sud-
den flash of understanding, " did you mean to throw
me over when you came out with me this afternoon?"

Ann Veronica hesitated, and with a startled mind
realized the truth. "No," she answered, reluctantly.

"Very well," said Manning. "Then I don't take this
as final. That's all. I've bored you or something. . . .
You think you love this other man! No doubt you do
love him. Before you have lived — "

He became darkly prophetic. He thrust out a
rhetorical hand.

"I will make you love me! Until he has faded —
faded into a memory. ..."

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THE SAPPHIRE RING

He saw her into the train at Waterloo, and stood, a
tall, grave figure, with hat upraised, as the carriage
moved forward slowly and hid him. Ann Veronica sat
back with a sigh of relief. Manning might go on now
idealizing her as much as he liked. She was no longer
a confederate in that. He might go on as the devoted
lover until he tired. She had done forever with the
Age of Chivalry, and her own base adaptations of its
traditions to the compromising life. She was honest
again.

But when she turned her thoughts to Morningside
Park she perceived the tangled skein of life was now to
be further complicated by his romantic importunity.

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT
§ I

OPRING had held back that year until the dawn of
O May, and then spring and summer came with a
rush together. Two days after this conversation be-
tween Manning and Ann Veronica, Capes came into the
laboratory at lunch-time and found her alone there,
standing by the open window, and not even pretending
to be doing anything. He came in with his hands in his
trousers pockets and a general air of depression in his
bearing. He was engaged in detesting Manning and
himself in almost equal measure. His face brightened
at the sight of her, and he came toward her.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Nothing," said Ann Veronica, and stared over her
shoulder out of the window.

"So am I. ... Lassitude?"

" I suppose so."

"7 can't work."

" Nor I," said Ann Veronica.

Pause.

"It's the spring," he said. "It's the warming up of
the year, the coming of the light mornings, the way in

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THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

which everything begins to run about and begin new
things. Work becomes distasteful; one thinks of holi-
days. This year — I've got it badly. I want to get
away. I've never wanted to get away so much."

"Where do you go?"

"Oh!— Alps."

"Climbing?"

"Yes."

"That's rather a fine sort of holiday!"

He made no answer for three or four seconds.

"Yes," he said, "I want to get away. I feel at mo-
ments as though I could bolt for it. ... Silly, isn't it?
Undisciplined."

He went to the window and fidgeted with the blind,
looking out to where the tree-tops of Regent's Park
showed distantly over the houses. He turned round
toward her and found her looking at him and standing
very still.

" It's the stir of spring," he said.

"I believe it is."

She glanced out of the window, and the distant trees
were a froth of hard spring green and almond blossom.
She formed a wild resolution, and, lest she should waver
from it, she set about at once to realize it. " I've broken
off my engagement," she said, in a matter-of-fact tone,
and found her heart thumping in her neck. He moved
slightly, and she went on, with a slight catching of her
breath: " It's a bother and disturbance, but you see —
She had to go through with it now, because she could
think of nothing but her preconceived words. Her
voice was weak and flat. "I've fallen in love."

He never helped her by a sound.
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ANN VERONICA

" I — I didn't love the man I was engaged to," she said.

She met his eyes for a moment, and could not inter-
pret their expression. They struck her as cold and in-
different.

Her heart failed her and her resolution became water.
She remained standing stiffly, unable even to move.
She could not look at him through an interval that
seemed to her a vast gulf of time. But she felt his lax
figure become rigid.

At last his voice came to release her tension.

"I thought you weren't keeping up to the mark.
You — It's jolly of you to confide in me. Still — "
Then, with incredible and obviously deliberate stupidity,
and a voice as flat as her own, he asked, "Who is the
man?"

Her spirit raged within her at the dumbness, the
paralysis that had fallen upon her. Grace, confidence,
the power of movement even, seemed gone from her.
A fever of shame ran through her being. Horrible
doubts assailed her. She sat down awkwardly and help-
lessly on one of the little stools by her table and cov-
ered her face with her hands.

"Can't you see how things are?" she said.

§ 2

Before Capes could answer her in any way the door
at the end of the laboratory opened noisily and Miss
Klegg appeared. She went to her own table and sat
down. At the sound of the door Ann Veronica uncov-
ered a tearless face, and with one swift movement as-

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THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

sumed a conversational attitude. Things hung for a
moment in an awkward silence.

"You see," said Ann Veronica, staring before her at
the window-sash, "that's the form my question takes
at the present time."

Capes had not quite the same power of recovery. He
stood with his hands in his pockets looking at Miss
Klegg's back. His face was white. "It's — it's a dif-
ficult question." He appeared to be paralyzed by
abstruse acoustic calculations. Then, very awkwardly,
he took a stool and placed it at the end of Ann Veronica's
table, and sat down. He glanced at Miss Klegg again,
and spoke quickly and furtively, with eager eyes on
Ann Veronica's face.

"I had a faint idea once that things were as you say
they are, but the affair of the ring — of the unexpected
ring — puzzled me. Wish she" — he indicated Miss
Klegg's back with a nod — "was at the bottom of the
sea. ... I would like to talk to you about this — soon.
If you don't think it would be a social outrage, perhaps
I might walk with you to your railway station."

"I will wait," said Ann Veronica, still not looking
at him, "and we will go into Regent's Park. No — you
shall come with me to Waterloo."

"Right!" he said, and hesitated, and then got up and
went into the preparation-room.

§3

For a time they walked in silence through the back
streets that lead southward from the College. Capes
bore a face of infinite perplexity.

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ANN VERONICA

"The thing I feel most disposed to say, Miss Stanley,"
he began at last, "is that this is very sudden."

"It's been coming on since first I came into the
laboratory."

"What do you want?" he asked, bluntly.

"You!" said Ann Veronica.

The sense of publicity, of people coming and going
about them, kept them both unemotional. And neither
had any of that theatricality which demands gestures and
facial expression.

"I suppose you know I like you tremendously?" he
pursued.

"You told me that in the Zoological Gardens."

She found her muscles a-tremble. But there was
nothing in her bearing that a passer-by would have noted,
to tell of the excitement that possessed her.

"I" — he seemed to have a difficulty with the word —
"I love you. I've told you that practically already.
But I can give it its name now. You needn't be in any
doubt about it. I tell you that because it puts us on a
footing. ..."

They went on for a time without another word.

" But don't you know about me?" he said at last.

"Something. Not much."

"I'm a married man. And my wife won't live with
me for reasons that I think most women would consider
sound. ... Or I should have made love to you long
ago."

There came a silence again.

"I don't care," said Ann Veronica.

"But if you knew anything of that — "

"I did. It doesn't matter."

312

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

"Why did you tell me? I thought — I thought we
were going to be friends."

He was suddenly resentful. He seemed to charge
her with the ruin of their situation. "Why on earth
did you tell me?" he cried.

"I couldn't help it. It was an impulse. I had to."

"But it changes things. I thought you understood."

"I had to," she repeated. "I was sick of the make-
believe. I don't care! I'm glad I did. I'm glad I did."

"Look here!" said Capes, "what on earth do you
want ? What do you think we can do ? Don't you know
what men are, and what life is ? — to come to me and talk
to me like this!"

"I know — something, anyhow. But I don't care;
I haven't a spark of shame. I don't see any good in
life if it hasn't got you in it. I wanted you to know.
And now you know. And the fences are down for good.
You can't look me in the eyes and say you don't care for
me."

"I've told you," he said.

"Very well," said Ann Veronica, with an air of con-
cluding the discussion.

They walked side by side for a time.

"In that laboratory one gets to disregard these pas-
sions," began Capes. "Men are curious animals, with
a trick of falling in love readily with girls about your
age. One has to train one's self not to. I've accus-
tomed myself to think of you — as if you were like every
other girl who works at the schools — as something quite
outside these possibilities. If only out of loyalty to co-
education one has to do that. Apart from everything
else, this meeting of ours is a breach of a good rule."

ANN VERONICA

" Rules are for every day," said Ann Veronica. "This
is not every day. This is something above all
rules."

"For you."

"Not for you?"

"No. No; I'm going to stick to the rules. . . . It's
odd, but nothing but cliche seems to meet this case.
You've placed me in a very exceptional position, Miss
Stanley." The note of his own voice exasperated him.
"Oh, damn!" he said.

She made no answer, and for a time he debated some
problems with himself.

"No!" he said aloud at last.

"The plain common-sense of the case," he said, "is
that we can't possibly be lovers in the ordinary sense.
That, I think, is manifest. You know, I've done no
work at all this afternoon. I've been smoking cigarettes
in the preparation-room and thinking this out. We
can't be lovers in the ordinary sense, but we can be great
and intimate friends."

"We are," said Ann Veronica.

" You've interested me enormously. . . ."

He paused with a sense of ineptitude. " I want to be
your friend," he said. "I said that at the Zoo, and I
mean it. Let us be friends — as near and close as friends
can be."

Ann Veronica gave him a pallid profile.

"What is the good of pretending?" she said.

"We don't pretend."

"We do. Love is one thing and friendship quite an-
other. Because I'm younger than you. . . . I've got
imagination. ... I know what I am talking about. Mr.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

Capes, do you think ... do you think I don't know the
meaning of love?"

§ 4

Capes made no answer for a time.

"My mind is full of confused stuff," he said at length.
"I've been thinking — all the afternoon. Oh, and
weeks and months of thought and feeling there are
bottled up too. ... I feel a mixture of beast and uncle.
I feel like a fraudulent trustee. Every rule is against
me — Why did I let you begin this? I might have
told—"

"I don't see that you could help — "

"I might have helped — "

"You couldn't."

"I ought to have — all the same.

"I wonder," he said, and went off at a tangent.
"You know about my scandalous past?"

"Very little. It doesn't seem to matter. Does it?"

"I think it does. Profoundly."

"How?"

"It prevents our marrying. It forbids — all sorts
of things."

"It can't prevent our loving."

"I'm afraid it can't. But, by Jove! it's going to
make our loving a fiercely abstract thing."

"You are separated from your wife?"

"Yes, but do you know how?"

"Not exactly."

"Why on earth — ? A man ought to be labelled.
You see, I'm separated from my wife. But she doesn't

ANN VERONICA

and won't divorce me. You don't understand the fix
I am in. And you don't know what led to our separa-
tion. And, in fact, all round the problem you don't
know and I don't see how I could possibly have told you
before. I wanted to, that day in the Zoo. But I trusted
to that ring of yours."

"Poor old ring!" said Ann Veronica.

"I ought never have gone to the Zoo, I suppose.
I asked you to go. But a man is a mixed creature. . . .
I wanted the time with you. I wanted it badly."

"Tell me about yourself," said Ann Veronica.

"To begin with, I was — I was in the divorce court.
I was — I was a co-respondent. You understand that
term?"

Ann Veronica smiled faintly. "A modern girl does
understand these terms. She reads novels — and history
— and all sorts of things. Did you really doubt if I knew ? ' '

"No. But I don't suppose you can understand."

" I don't see why I shouldn't."

"To know things by name is one thing; to know
them by seeing them and feeling them and being them
quite another. That is where life takes advantage
of youth. You don't understand."

"Perhaps I don't."

" You don't. That's the difficulty. If I told you the
facts, I expect, since you are in love with me, you'd
explain the whole business as being very fine and
honorable for me — the Higher Morality, or something
of that sort. ... It wasn't."

"I don't deal very much," said Ann Veronica, "in
the Higher Morality, or the Higher Truth, or any of
those things."

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

"Perhaps you don't. But a human being who is
young and clean, as you are, is apt to ennoble — or
explain away."

"I've had a biological training. I'm a hard young
woman."

"Nice clean hardness, anyhow. I think you are
hard. There's something — something adult about you.
I'm talking to you now as though you had all the
wisdom and charity in the world. I'm going to tell
you things plainly. Plainly. It's best. And then you
can go home and think things over before we talk again.
I want you to be clear what you're really and truly up
to, anyhow."

"I don't mind knowing," said Ann Veronica.

" It's precious unromantic."

"Well, tell me."

"I married pretty young," said Capes. "I've got —
I have to tell you this to make myself clear — a streak
of ardent animal in my composition. I married — I
married a woman whom I still think one of the most
beautiful persons in the world. She is a year or so older
than I am, and she is, well, of a very serene and proud
and dignified temperament. If you met her you would,
I am certain, think her as fine as I do. She has never
done a really ignoble thing that I know of — never.
I met her when we were both very young, as young as
you are. I loved her and made love to her, and I don't
think she quite loved me back in the same way."

He paused for a time. Ann Veronica said nothing.

"These are the sort of things that aren't supposed
to happen. They leave them out of novels — these
incompatibilities. Young people ignore them until

ANN VERONICA

they find themselves up against them. My wife doesn't
understand, doesn't understand now. She despises me,
I suppose. . . . We married, and for a time we were happy.
vShe was fine and tender. I worshipped her and sub-
dued myself."

He left off abruptly. "Do you understand what 1
am talking about? It's no good if you don't."

"I think so," said Ann Veronica, and colored. "In
fact, yes, I do."

"Do you think of these things — these matters — as
belonging to our Higher Nature or our Lower?"

"I don't deal in Higher Things, I tell you," said
Ann Veronica, "or Lower, for the matter of that. I
don't classify." She hesitated. "Flesh and flowers are
all alike to me."

"That's the comfort of you. Well, after a time
there came a fever in my blood. Don't think it was
anything better than fever — or a bit beautiful. It
wasn't. Quite soon, after we were married — it was just
within a year — I formed a friendship with the wife of
a friend, a woman eight years older than myself. . . .
It wasn't anything splendid, you know. It was just
a shabby, stupid, furtive business that began between
us. Like stealing. We dressed it in a little music. . . .
I want you to understand clearly that I was indebted
to the man in many small ways. I was mean to him. . . .
It was the gratification of an immense necessity. We
were two people with a craving. We felt like thieves.
We were thieves. . . . We liked each other well enough.
Well, my friend found us out, and would give no
quarter. He divorced her. How do you like the
story?"

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

"Go on," said Ann Veronica, a little hoarsely; "tell
me all of it."

" My wife was astounded — wounded beyond measure.
She thought me — filthy. All her pride raged at me.
One particularly humiliating thing came out — humiliat-
ing for me. There was a second co-respondent. I
hadn't heard of him before the trial. I don't know why
that should be so acutely humiliating. There's no
logic in these things. It was."

"Poor you!" said Ann Veronica.

"My wife refused absolutely to have anything more
to do with me. She could hardly speak to me; she in-
sisted relentlessly upon a separation. She had money
of her own — much more than I have — and there was
no need to squabble about that. She has given herself
up to social work."

"Well—"

"That's all. Practically all. And yet— Wait a
little, you'd better have every bit of it. One doesn't
go about with these passions allayed simply because
they have made wreckage and a scandal. There one is!
The same stuff still! One has a craving in one's blood,
a craving roused, cut off from its redeeming and guiding
emotional side. A man has more freedom to do evil
than a woman. Irregularly, in a quite inglorious and
unromantic way, you know, I am a vicious man. That's
— that's my private life. Until the last few months.
It isn't what I have been but what I am. I haven't
taken much account of it until now. My honor has been
in my scientific work and public discussion and the
things I write. Lots of us are like that. But, you see,
I'm smirched. For the sort of love-making you think

ANN VERONICA

about. I've muddled all this business. I've had my
time and lost my chances. I'm damaged goods. And
you're as clean as fire. You come with those clear eyes
of yours, as valiant as an angel. ..."

He stopped abruptly.

"Well?" she said.

"That's all."

" It's so strange to think of you — troubled by such
things. I didn't think — I don't know what I thought.
Suddenly all this makes you human. Makes you
real."

" But don't you see how I must stand to you ? Don't
you see how it bars us from being lovers — You can't
— at first. You must think it over. It's all outside
the world of your experience."

" I don't think it makes a rap of difference, except
for one thing. I love you more. I've wanted you —
always. I didn't dream, not even in my wildest dream-
ing, that — you might have any need of me."

He made a little noise in his throat as if something
had cried out within him, and for a time they were both
too full for speech.

They were going up the slope into Waterloo Station.

"You go home and think of all this," he said, "and
talk about it to-morrow. Don't, don't say anything
now, not anything. As for loving you, I do. I do —
with all my heart. It's no good hiding it any more. I
could nevei have talked to you like this, forgetting
everything that parts us, forgetting even your age, if
I did not love you utterly. If I were a clean, free man —
We'll have to talk of all these things. Thank goodness
there's plenty of opportunity! And we two can talk.

320

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

Anyhow, now you've begun it, there's nothing to keep
us in all this from being the best friends in the world.
And talking of every conceivable thing. Is there?"

"Nothing," said Ann Veronica, with a radiant face.

"Before this there was a sort of restraint — a make-
believe. It's gone."

" It's gone."

"Friendship and love being separate things. And
that confounded engagement!"

"Gone!"

They came upon a platform, and stood before her
Compartment.

He took her hand and looked into her eyes and spoke,
divided against himself, in a voice that was forced and
insincere.

" I shall be very glad to have you for a friend," he
said, "loving friend. I had never dreamed of such a
friend as you/'

She smiled, sure of herself beyond any pretending,
into his troubled eyes. Hadn't they settled that
already ?

" I want you as a friend," he persisted, almost as if he
disputed something.

§ 5

The next morning she waited in the laboratory at
the lunch-hour in the reasonable certainty that he
would come to her.

"Well, you have thought it over?" he said, sitting
down beside her.

"I've been thinking of you all night," she answered.
321

ANN VERONICA

"Well?"

" I don't care a rap for all these things."

He said nothing for a space.

" I don't see there's any getting away from the fact
that you and I love each other," he said, slowly. " So
far you've got me and I you. . . . You've got me. I'm
like a creature just wakened up. My eyes are open to
you. I keep on thinking of you. I keep on thinking
of little details and aspects of your voice, your eyes,
the way you walk, the way your hair goes back from
the side of your forehead. I believe I have always been
in love with you. Always. Before ever I knew you."

She sat motionless, with her hand tightening over the
edge of the table, and he, too, said no more. She be-
gan to tremble violently.

He stood up abruptly and went to the window.

"We have," he said, "to be the utmost friends."

She stood up and held her arms toward him. "I
want you to kiss me," she said.

He gripped the window-sill behind him.

"If I do," he said. ... "No! I want to do without
that. I want to do without that for a time. I want
to give you time to think. I am a man — of a sort of
experience. You are a girl with very little. Just sit
down on that stool again and let's talk of this in cold
blood. People of your sort — I don't want the in-
stincts to — to rush our situation. Are you sure what
it is you want of me ?"

"I want you. I want you to be my lover. I want
to give myself to you. I want to be whatever I can
to you." She paused for a moment. " Is that plain ?"
she asked.

322

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

"If I didn't love you better than myself," said Capes,
"I wouldn't fence like this with you.

"I am convinced you haven't thought this out," he
went on. "You do not know what such a relation
means. We are in love. Our heads swim with the
thought of being together. But what can we do?
Here am I, fixed to respectability and this laboratory;
you're living at home. It means . . . just furtive
meetings."

" I don't care how we meet," she said.

"It will spoil your life."

"It will make it. I want you. I am clear I want
you. You are different from all the world for me.
You can think all round me. You are the one person
I can understand and feel — feel right with. I don't
idealize you. Don't imagine that. It isn't because
you're good, but because I may be rotten bad; and
there's something — something living and understanding
in you. Something that is born anew each time we
meet, and pines when we are separated. You see, I'm
selfish. I'm rather Scornful. I think too much about
myself. You're the only person I've really given good,
straight, unselfish thought to. I'm making a mess of
my life — unless you come in and take it. I am. In
you — if you can love me — there is salvation. Salva-
tion. I know what I am doing better than you do.
Think — think of that engagement!"

Their talk had come to eloquent silences that con-
tradicted all he had to say.

She stood up before him, smiling faintly.

" I think we've exhausted this discussion," she said.

"I think we have," he answered, gravely, and took
323

ANN VERONICA

her in his arms, and smoothed her hair from her fore-
head, and very tenderly kissed her lips.

§ 6

They spent the next Sunday in Richmond Park, and
mingled the happy sensation of being together unin-
terruptedly through the long sunshine of a summer's
day with the ample discussion of their position. " This
has all the clean freshness of spring and youth," said
Capes; "it is love with the down on; it is like the glit-
ter of dew in the sunlight to be lovers such as we are,
with no more than one warm kiss between us. I love
everything to-day, and all of you, but I love this, this —
this innocence upon us most of all."

"You can't imagine," he said, "what a beastly thing
a furtive love affair can be.

" This isn't furtive," said Ann Veronica.

"Not a bit of it. And we won't make it so. ... We
mustn't make it so."

They loitered under trees, they sat on mossy banks,
they gossiped on friendly benches, they came back to
lunch at the "Star and Garter," and talked their after-
noon away in the garden that looks out upon the cres-
cent of the river. They had a universe to talk about
— two universes.

"What are we going to do?" said Capes, with his eyes
on the broad distances beyond the ribbon of the river.

"I will do whatever you want," said Ann Veronica.

"My first love was all blundering," said Capes.

He thought for a moment, and went on: "Love is
324

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

something that has to be taken care of. One has to be
so careful. . . . It's a beautiful plant, but a tender one. . . .
I didn't know. I've a dread of love dropping its petals,
becoming mean and ugly. How can I tell you all I feel ?
I love you beyond measure. And I'm afraid. ... I'm
anxious, joyfully anxious, like a man when he has found
a treasure."

"You know," said Ann Veronica. "I just came to
you and put myself in your hands."

"That's why, in a way, I'm prudish. I've — dreads.
I don't want to tear at you with hot, rough hands."

"As you will, dear lover. But for me it doesn't
matter. Nothing is wrong that you do. Nothing. I
am quite clear about this. I know exactly what I am
doing. I give myself to you."

"God send you may never repent it!" cried Capes.

She put her hand in his to be squeezed.

"You see," she said, "it is doubtful if we can ever
marry. Very doubtful. I have been thinking — I
will go to my wife again. I will do my utmost. But
for a long time, anyhow, we lovers have to be as if we
were no more than friends."

He paused. She answered slowly. "That is as you
will," she said.

"Why should it matter ?" he said.

And then, as she answered nothing, "Seeing that we
are lovers."

§7

It was rather less than a week after that walk that
Capes came and sat down beside Ann Veronica for their

325

ANN VERONICA

customary talk in the lunch hour. He took a handful
of almonds and raisins that she held out to him — for
both these young people had given up the practice of
going out for luncheon — and kept her hand for a mo-
ment to kiss her finger-tips. He did not speak for a
moment.

"Well?" she said.

"I say!" he said, without any movement. "Let's

go-"

"Go!" She did not understand him at first, and
then her heart began to beat very rapidly.

"Stop this — this humbugging," he explained. "It's
like the Picture and the Bust. I can't stand it. Let's
go. Go off and live together — until we can marry.
Dare you?"

"Do you mean now?"

"At the end of the session. It's the only clean way
for us. Are you prepared to do it?"

Her hands clenched. "Yes," she said, very faintly.
And then: "Of course! Always. It is what I have
wanted, what I have meant all along."

She stared before her, trying to keep back a rush
of tears.

Capes kept obstinately stiff, and spoke between his
teeth.

"There's endless reasons, no doubt, why we
shouldn't," he said. "Endless. It's wrong in the eyes
of most people. For many of them it will smirch us
forever. . . . You do understand?"

"Who cares for most people?" she said, not looking
at him.

"I do. It means social isolation — struggle."
326

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

"If you dare — I dare," said Ann Veronica. "I was
never so clear in all my life as I have been in this busi-
ness." She lifted steadfast eyes to him. "Dare!" she
said. The tears were welling over now, but her voice
was steady. "You're not a man for me — not one of a
sex, I mean. You're just a particular being with noth-
ing else in the world to class with you. You are just
necessary to life for me. I've never met any one like
you. To have you is all important. Nothing else
weighs against it. Morals only begin when that is set-
tled. I sha'n't care a rap if we can never marry. I'm
not a bit afraid of anything — scandal, difficulty, strug-
gle. ... I rather want them. I do want them."

"You'll get them," he said. "This means a plunge."

"Are you afraid?"

"Only for you! Most of my income will vanish.
Even unbelieving biological demonstrators must respect
decorum; and besides, you see — you were a student.
We shall have — hardly any money."

"I don't care."

"Hardship and danger."

"With you!"

"And as for your people?"

"They don't count. That is the dreadful truth.
This — all this swamps them. They don't count, and
I don't care."

Capes suddenly abandoned his attitude of medita-
tive restraint. "By Jove!" he broke out, "one tries
to take a serious, sober view. I don't quite know why.
But this is a great lark, Ann Veronica! This turns life
into a glorious adventure!"

"Ah!" she cried in triumph.

327

ANN VERONICA

"I shall have to give up biology, anyhow. I've al-
ways had a sneaking desire for the writing -trade. That
is what I must do. I can."

"Of course you can."

"And biology was beginning to bore me a bit. One
research is very like another. . . . Latterly I've been do-
ing things. . . . Creative work appeals to me wonderfully.
Things seem to come rather easily. . . . But that, and
that sort of thing, is just a day-dream. For a time I
must do journalism and work hard. . . . What isn't a
day-dream is this: that you and I are going to put an
end to flummery — and go!"

"Go!" said Ann Veronica, clenching her hands.

"For better or worse."

"For richer or poorer."

She could not go on, for she was laughing and crying
at the same time. "We were bound to do this when
you kissed me," she sobbed through her tears. "We
have been all this time — Only your queer code of
honor — Honor! Once you begin with love you have
to see it through."

CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH

THE LAST DAYS AT HOME

THEY decided to go to Switzerland at the session's
end. " We'll clean up everything tidy," said
Capes. . . .

For her pride's sake, and to save herself from long
day-dreams and an unappeasable longing for her lover,
Ann Veronica worked hard at her biology during those
closing weeks. She was, as Capes had said, a hard young
woman. She was keenly resolved to do well in the school
examination, and not to be drowned in the seas of emo-
tion that threatened to submerge her intellectual being.

Nevertheless, she could not prevent a rising excite-
ment as the dawn of the new life drew near to her — a
thrilling of the nerves, a secret and delicious exaltation
above the common circumstances of existence. Some-
times her straying mind would become astonishingly
active — embroidering bright and decorative things that
she could say to Capes; sometimes it passed into a state
of passive acquiescence, into a radiant, formless, golden
joy. She was aware of people — her aunt, her father,
her fellow-students, friends, and neighbors — moving
about outside this glowing secret, very much as an actor

329

ANN VERONICA

is aware of the dim audience beyond the barrier of the
footlights. They might applaud, or object, or interfere,
but the drama was her very own. She was going through
with that, anyhow.

The feeling of last days grew stronger with her as their
number diminished. She went about the familiar home
with a clearer and clearer sense of inevitable conclusions.
She became exceptionally considerate and affectionate
with her father and aunt, and more and more concerned
about the coming catastrophe that she was about to
precipitate upon them. Her aunt had a once exasperat-
ing habit of interruptng her work with demands for small
household services, but now Ann Veronica rendered
them with a queer readiness of anticipatory propitiation.
She was greatly exercised by the problem of confiding
in the Widgetts; they were dears, and she talked away
two evenings with Constance without broaching the
topic; she made some vague intimations in letters to
Miss Miniver that Miss Miniver failed to mark. But
she did not bother her head very much about her re-
lations with these sympathizers.

And at length her penultimate day in Morningside
Park dawned for her. She got up early, and walked
about the garden in the dewy June sunshine and re-
vived her childhood. She was saying good-bye to child-
hood and home, and her making; she was going out into
the great, multitudinous world; this time there would
be no returning. She was at the end of girlhood and on
the eve of a woman's crowning experience. She visited
the corner that had been her own little garden — her
forget-me-nots and candytuft had long since been
elbowed into insignificance by weeds; she visited the

33°

THE LAST DAYS AT HOME

raspberry-canes that had sheltered that first love affair
with the little boy in velvet, and the greenhouse where
she had been wont to read her secret letters. Here was
the place behind the shed where she had used to hide
from Roddy's persecutions, and here the border of her-
baceous perennials under whose stems was fairyland. The
back of the house had been the Alps for dimbing, and
the shrubs in front of it a Terai. The knots and broken
pale that made the garden - fence scalable, and gave
access to the fields behind, were still to be traced. And
here against a wall were the plum-trees. In spite of
God and wasps and her father, she had stolen plums ; and
once because of discovered misdeeds, and once because
she had realized that her mother was dead, she had lain
on her face in the unmown grass, beneath the elm-trees
that came beyond the vegetables, and poured out her
soul in weeping.

Remote little Ann Veronica! She would never know
the heart of that child again! That child had loved
fairy princes with velvet suits and golden locks, and she
was in love with a real man named Capes, with little
gleams of gold on his cheek and a pleasant voice and firm
and shapely hands. She was going to him soon and
certainly, going to his strong, embracing arms. She
was going through a new world with him side by side.
She had been so busy with life that, for a vast gulf of
time, as it seemed, she had given no thought to those
ancient, imagined things of her childhood. Now,
abruptly, they were real again, though very distant, and
she had come to say farewell to them across one sunder-
ing year.

She was ususually helpful at breakfast, and unselfish

ANN VERONICA

about the eggs; and then she went off to catch the train
before her father's. She did this to please him. He
hated travelling second-class with her — indeed, he never
did — but he also disliked travelling in the same train
when his daughter was in an inferior class, because of
the look of the thing. So he liked to go by a different
train. And in the Avenue she had an encounter with
Ramage.

It was an odd little encounter, that left vague and
dubitable impressions in her mind. She was aware of
him — a silk-hatted, shiny-black figure on the opposite
side of the Avenue; and then, abruptly and startlingly,
he crossed the road and saluted and spoke to her.

" I must speak to you," he said. " I can't keep away
from you."

She made some inane response. She was struck by
a change in his appearance. His eyes looked a little
bloodshot to her; his face had lost something of its ruddy
freshness.

He began a jerky, broken conversation that lasted
until they reached the station, and left her puzzled at its
drift and meaning. She quickened her pace, and so did
he, talking at her slightly averted ear. She made
lumpish and inadequate interruptions rather than
replies. At times he seemed to be claiming pity from
her; at times he was threatening her with her check and
exposure; at times he was boasting of his inflexible will,
and how, in the end, he always got what he wanted.
He said that his life was boring and stupid without her.
Something or other — she did not catch what — he was
damned if he could stand. He was evidently nervous,
and very anxious to be impressive; his projecting eyes

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sought to dominate. The crowning aspect of the in-
cident, for her mind, was the discovery that he and her
indiscretion with him no longer mattered very much.
Its importance had vanished with her abandonment of
compromise. Even her debt to him was a triviality now.

And of course! She had a brilliant idea. It sur-
prised her she hadn't thought of it before! She tried to
explain that she was going to pay him forty pounds with-
out fail next week. She said as much to him. She
repeated this breathlessly.

" I was glad you did not send it back again," he said.

He touched a long-standing sore, and Ann Veronica
found herself vainly trying to explain — the inexplicable.
"It's because I mean to send it back altogether," she
said.

He ignored her protests in order to pursue some im-
pressive line of his own.

"Here we are, living in the same suburb," he began.
"We have to be — modern."

Her heart leaped within her as she caught that
phrase. That knot also would be cut. Modern, in-
deed ! She was going to be as primordial as chipped
flint.

§ 2

In the late afternoon, as Ann Veronica was gathering
flowers for the dinner-table, her father came strolling
across the lawn toward her with an affectation of great
deliberation.

"I want to speak to you about a little thing, Vee,"
said Mr. Stanley.

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ANN VERONICA

Ann Veronica's tense nerves started, and she stood
still with her eyes upon him, wondering what it might
be that impended.

"You were talking to that fellow Ramage to-day — in
the Avenue. Walking to the station with him."

So that was it!

"He came and talked to me."

"Ye— e— es." Mr. Stanley considered. "Well, I
don't want you to talk to him," he said, very firmly.

Ann Veronica paused before she answered. "Don't
you think I ought to?" she asked, very submissively.

"No." Mr. Stanley coughed and faced toward the
house. "He is not — I don't like him. I think it
inadvisable — I don't want an intimacy to spring up
between you and a man of that type."

Ann Veronica reflected. "I have — had one or two
talks with him, daddy."

"Don't let there be any more. I — In fact, I dis-
like him extremely."

"Suppose he comes and talks to me?"

"A girl can always keep a man at a distance if she
cares to do it. She — She can snub him."

Ann Veronica picked a cornflower.

"I wouldn't make this objection," Mr. Stanley went
on, "but there are things — there are stories about
Ramage. He's — He lives in a world of possibilities
outside your imagination. His treatment of his wife
is most unsatisfactory. Most unsatisfactory. A bad
man, in fact. A dissipated, loose-living man."

"I'll try not to see him again," said Ann Veronica.
"I didn't know you objected to him, daddy."

"Strongly," said Mr. Stanley, " very strongly."

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THE LAST DAYS AT HOME

The conversation hung. Ann Veronica wondered
what her father would do if she were to tell him the
full story of her relations with Ramage.

"A man like that taints a girl by looking at her, by
his mere conversation." 'He adjusted his glasses on his
nose. There was another little thing he had to say.
"One has to be so careful of one's friends and acquaint-
ances," he remarked, by way of transition. "They
mould one insensibly." His voice assumed an easy de-
tached tone. "I suppose, Vee, you don't see much
of those Widgetts now?"

"I go in and talk to Constance sometimes."

"Do you?"

"We were great friends at school."

"No doubt. . . . Still — I don't know whether I
quite like — Something ramshackle about those peo-
ple, Vee. While I am talking about your friends, I
feel — I think you ought to know how I look at it."
His voice conveyed studied moderation. "I don't
mind, of course, your seeing her sometimes, still there
are differences — differences in social atmospheres. One
gets drawn into things. Before you know where you
are you find yourself in a complication. I don't want
to influence you unduly — But — They're artistic
people, Vee. That's the fact about them. We're dif-
ferent."

"I suppose we are," said Vee, rearranging the flowers
in her hand.

"Friendships that are all very well between school-
girls don't always go on into later life. It's — it's a
social difference."

"I like Constance very much."

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ANN VERONICA

"No doubt. Still, one has to be reasonable. As you
admitted to me — one has to square one's self with the
world. You don't know. With people of that sort all
sorts of things may happen. We don't want things to
happen."

Ann Veronica made no answer.

A vague desire to justify himself ruffled her father.
"I may seem unduly — anxious. I can't forget about
your sister. It's that has always made me — She,
you know, was drawn into a set — didn't discriminate.
Private theatricals."

Ann Veronica remained anxious to hear more of her
sister's story from her father's point of view, but he
did not go on. Even so much allusion as this to that
family shadow, she felt, was an immense recognition of
her ripening years. She glanced at him. He stood a
little anxious and fussy, bothered by the responsibility
of her, entirely careless of what her life was or was likely
to be, ignoring her thoughts and feelings, ignorant of
every fact of importance in her life, explaining every-
thing he could not understand in her as nonsense and
perversity, concerned only with a terror of bothers and
undesirable situations. "We don't want things to
happen!" Never had he shown his daughter so clearly
that the womenkind he was persuaded he had to pro-
tect and control could please him in one way, and in
one way only, and that was by doing nothing except
the punctual domestic duties and being nothing except
restful appearances. He had quite enough to see to
and worry about in the City without their doing things.
He had no use for Ann Veronica; he had never had a
use for her since she had been too old to sit upon his

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THE LAST DAYS AT HOME

knee. Nothing but the constraint of social usage now
linked him to her. And the less "anything" happened
the better. The less she lived, in fact, the better. These
realizations rushed into Ann Veronica's mind and hard-
ened her heart against him. She spoke slowly. "I
may not see the Widgetts for some little time, father,"
she said. "I don't think I shall."
"Some little tiff?"

"No; but I don't think I shall see them."
Suppose she were to add, "I am going away!"
"I'm glad to hear you say it," said Mr. Stanley, and
was so evidently pleased that Ann Veronica's heart
smote her.

" I am very glad to hear you say it," he repeated, and
refrained from further inquiry. " I think we are grow-
ing sensible," he said. "I think you are getting to
understand me better."

He hesitated, and walked away from her toward the
house. Her eyes followed him. The curve of his
shoulders, the very angle of his feet, expressed relief at
her apparent obedience. "Thank goodness!" said that
retreating aspect, "that's said and over. Vee's all
right. There's nothing happened at all!" She didn't
mean, he concluded, to give him any more trouble ever,
and he was free to begin a fresh chromatic novel — he
had just finished the Blue Lagoon, which he thought
very beautiful and tender and absolutely irrelevant
to -Morningside Park — or work in peace at his microtome
without bothering about her in the least.

The immense disillusionment that awaited him!
The devastating disillusionment! She had a vague
desire to run after him, to state her case to him, to

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ANN VERONICA

wring some understanding from him of what life was
to her. She felt a cheat and a sneak to his unsuspecting
retreating back.

"But what can one do?" asked Ann Veronica.

§3

She dressed carefully for dinner in a black dress
that her father liked, and that made her look serious
and responsible. Dinner was quite uneventful. Her
father read a draft prospectus warily, and her aunt
dropped fragments of her projects for managing while
the cook had a holiday. After dinner Ann Veronica
went into the drawing-room with Miss Stanley, and
her father went up to his den for his pipe and pensive
petrography. Later in the evening she heard him
whistling, poor man!

She felt very restless and excited. She refused
coffee, though she knew that anyhow she was doomed
to a sleepless night. She took up one of her father's
novels and put it down again, fretted up to her own room
for some work, sat on her bed and meditated upon the
room that she was now really abandoning forever, and
returned at length with a stocking to darn. Her aunt
was making herself cuffs out of little slips of insertion
under the newly lit lamp.

Ann Veronica sat down in the other arm-chair and
darned badly for a minute or so. Then she looked
at her aunt, and traced with a curious eye the careful
arrangement of her hair, her sharp nose, the little
drooping lines of mouth and chin and cheek.

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THE LAST DAYS AT HOME

Her thought spoke aloud. "Were you ever in love,
aunt?" she asked.

Her aunt glanced up startled, and then sat very still,
with hands that had ceased to work. "What makes
you ask such a question, Vee ? " she said.

" I wondered."

Her aunt answered in a low voice : " I was engaged to
him, dear, for seven years, and then he died."

Ann Veronica made a sympathetic little murmur.

" He was in holy orders, and we were to have been
married when he got a living. He was a Wiltshire
Edmondshaw, a very old family."

She sat very still.

Ann Veronica hesitated with a question that had
leaped up in her mind, and that she felt was cruel. " Are
you sorry you waited, aunt?" she said.

Her aunt was a long time before she answered. " His
stipend forbade it," she said, and seemed to fall into a
train of thought. " It would have been rash and un-
wise," she said at the end of a meditation. "What he
had was altogether insufficient."

Ann Veronica looked at the mildly pensive gray eyes
and the comfortable, rather refined face with a penetrat-
ing curiosity. Presently her aunt sighed deeply and
looked at the clock. "Time for my Patience," she
said. She got up, put the neat cuffs she had made into
her work-basket, and went to the bureau for the little
cards in the morocco case. Ann Veronica jumped up
to get her the card-table. "I haven't seen the new
Patience, dear," she said. "May I sit beside you?"

" It's a very difficult one," said her aunt. " Perhaps
you will help me shuffle?"

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ANN VERONICA

Ann Veronica did, and also assisted nimbly with
the arrangements of the rows of eight with which the
struggle began. Then she sat watching the play,
sometimes offering a helpful suggestion, sometimes let-
ting her attention wander to the smoothly shining
arms she had folded across her knees just below the
edge of the table. She was feeling extraordinarily
well that night, so that the sense of her body was a deep
delight, a realization of a gentle warmth and strength
and elastic firmness. Then she glanced at the cards
again, over which her aunt's many-ringed hand played,
and then at the rather weak, rather plump face that
surveyed its operations.

It came to Ann Veronica that life was wonderful
beyond measure. It seemed incredible that she and
her aunt were, indeed, creatures of the same blood,
only by a birth or so different beings, and part of that
same broad interlacing stream of human life that has
invented the fauns and nymphs, Astarte, Aphrodite,
Freya, and all the twining beauty of the gods. The
love-songs of all the ages were singing in her blood,
the scent of night stock from the garden filled the air,
and the moths that beat upon the closed frames of the
window next the lamp set her mind dreaming of kisses
in the dusk. Yet her aunt, with a ringed hand flitting
to her lips and a puzzled, worried look in her eyes, deaf
to all this riot of warmth and flitting desire, was play-
ing Patience — playing Patience, as if Dionysius and her
curate had died together. A faint buzz above the ceiling
witnessed that petrography, too, was active. Gray and
tranquil world! Amazing, passionless world! A world
in which days without meaning, days in which "we

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THE LAST DAYS AT HOME

don't want things to happen" followed days without
meaning — until the last thing happened, the ultimate,
unavoidable, coarse, "disagreeable." It was her last
evening in that wrappered life against which she had
rebelled. Warm reality was now so near her she could
hear it beating in her ears. Away in London even now
Capes was packing and preparing; Capes, the magic
man whose touch turned one to trembling fire. What
was he doing? What was he thinking? It was less
than a day now, less than twenty hours. Seventeen
hours, sixteen hours. She glanced at the soft-ticking
clock with the exposed brass pendulum upon the white
marble mantel, and made a rapid calculation. To
be exact, it was just sixteen hours and twenty minutes.
The slow stars circled on to the moment of their meeting.
The softly glittering summer stars ! She saw them shin-
ing over mountains of snow, over valleys of haze and
warm darkness. . . . There would be no moon.

" I believe after all it's coming out! " said Miss Stanley.
"The aces made it easy."

Ann Veronica started from her reverie, sat up in her
chair, became attentive. "Look, dear," she said
presently, "you can put the ten on the Jack."

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH

IN THE MOUNTAINS
§ I

NEXT day Ann Veronica and Capes felt like new-
born things. It seemed to them they could never
have been really alive before, but only dimly antici-
pating existence. They sat face to face beneath an ex-
perienced-looking rucksack and a brand new port-
manteau and a leather handbag, in the afternoon-boat
train that goes from Charing Cross to Folkestone for
Boulogne. They tried to read illustrated papers in an
unconcerned manner and with forced attention, lest they
should catch the leaping exultation in each other's eyes.
And they admired Kent sedulously from the windows.

They crossed the Channel in sunshine and a breeze
that just ruffled the sea to glittering scales of silver.
Some of the people who watched them standing side by
side thought they must be newly wedded because of
their happy faces, and others that they were an old-
established couple because of their easy confidence in
each other.

At Boulogne they took train to Basle; next morning
they breakfasted together in the buffet of that station,
and thence they caught the Interlaken express, and so

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IN THE MOUNTAINS

went by way of Spies to Frutigen. There was no rail-
way beyond Frutigen in those days; they sent their
baggage by post to Kandersteg, and walked along the
mule path to the left of the stream to that queer hollow
among the precipices, Blau See, where the petrifying
branches of trees lie in the blue deeps of an icy lake, and
pine-trees clamber among gigantic bowlders. A little
inn flying a Swiss flag nestles under a great rock, and
there they put aside their knapsacks and lunched and
rested in the mid-day shadow of the gorge and the scent
of resin. And later they paddled in a boat above the
mysterious deeps of the See, and peered down into the
green-blues and the blue-greens together. By that time
it seemed to them they had lived together twenty years.
Except for one memorable school excursion to Paris,
Ann Veronica had never yet been outside England. So
that it seemed to her the whole world had changed — the
very light of it had changed. Instead of English villas
and cottages there were chalets and Italian-built houses
shining white; there were lakes of emerald and sapphire
and clustering castles, and such sweeps of hill and moun-
tain, such shining uplands of snow, as she had never seen
before. Everything was fresh and bright, from the
kindly manners of the Frutigen cobbler, who hammered
mountain nails into her boots, to the unfamiliar wild
flowers that spangled the wayside. And Capes had
changed into the easiest and jolliest companion in the
world. The mere fact that he was there in the train
alongside her, helping her, sitting opposite to her in the
dining-car, presently sleeping on a seat within a yard of
her, made her heart sing until she was afraid their fel-
low passengers would hear it. It was too good to be

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ANN VERONICA

true. She would not sleep for fear of losing a moment of
that sense of his proximity. To walk beside him,
dressed akin to him, rucksacked and companionable, was
bliss in itself; each step she took was like stepping once
more across the threshold of heaven.

One trouble, however, shot its slanting bolts athwart
the shining warmth of that opening day and marred its
perfection, and that was the thought of her father.

She had treated him badly; she had hurt him and her
aunt; she had done wrong by their standards, and she
would never persuade them that she had done right.
She thought of her father in the garden, and of her aunt
with her Patience, as she had seen them — how many
ages was it ago ? Just one day intervened. She felt as
if she had struck them unawares. The thought of them
distressed her without subtracting at all from the oceans
of happiness in which she swam. But she wished she
could put the thing she had done in some way to them
so that it would not hurt them so much as the truth
would certainly do. The thought of their faces, and
particularly of her aunt's, as it would meet the fact —
disconcerted, unfriendly, condemning, pained — occurred
to her again and again.

"Oh! I wish," she said, "that people thought alike
about these things."

Capes watched the limpid water dripping from his
oar. " I wish they did," he said, "but they don't."

"I feel — All this is the lightest of all conceivable
things. I want to tell every one. I want to boast
myself."

"I know."

" I told them a lie. I told them lies. I wrote three

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IN THE MOUNTAINS

letters yesterday and tore them up. It was so hopeless
to put it to them. At last — I told a story."

"You didn't tell them our position?"

"I implied we had married."

"They'll find out. They'll know."

"Not yet."

"Sooner or later."

" Possibly — bit by bit. . . . But it was hopelessly hard
to put. I said I knew he disliked and distrusted you
and your work — that you shared all Russell's opinions:
he hates Russell beyond measure — and that we couldn't
possibly face a conventional marriage. What else could
one say ? I left him to suppose — a registry perhaps. ..."

Capes let his oar smack on the water.

" Do you mind very much ?"

He shook his head.

" But it makes me feel inhuman," he added.

"And me. . . ."

"It's the perpetual trouble," he said, "of parent and
child. They can't help seeing things in the way they
do. Nor can we. We don't think they're right, but
they don't think we are. A deadlock. In a very
definite sense we are in the wrong — hopelessly in the
wrong. But — It's just this: who was to be hurt?"

" I wish no one had to be hurt," said Ann Veronica.
"When one is happy — I don't like to think of them.
Last time I left home I felt as hard as nails. But this
is all different. It is different."

"There's a sort of instinct of rebellion," said Capes.
" It isn't anything to do with our times particularly.
People think it is, but they are wrong. It's to do with
adolescence. Long before religion and Society heard of

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ANN VERONICA

Doubt, girls were all for midnight coaches and Gretna
Green. It's a sort of home-leaving instinct."

He followed up a line of thought.

"There's another instinct, too," he went on, "in a
state of suppression, unless I'm very much mistaken; a
child-expelling instinct. ... I wonder. . . . There's no
family uniting instinct, anyhow; it's habit and sentiment
and material convenience hold families together after
adolescence. There's always friction, conflict, unwilling
concessions. Always! I don't believe there is any
strong natural affection at all between parents and
growing-up children. There wasn't, I know, between
myself and my father. I didn't allow myself to see things
as they were in those days; now I do. I bored him. I
hated him. I suppose that shocks one's ideas. . . . It's
true. . . . There are sentimental and traditional def-
erences and reverences, I know, between father and son ;
but that's just exactly what prevents the development
of an easy friendship. Father-worshipping sons are
abnormal — and they're no good. No good at all. One's
got to be a better man than one's father, or what is the
good of successive generations? Life is rebellion, or
nothing."

He rowed a stroke and watched the swirl of water
from his oar broaden and die away. At last he took
up his thoughts again: "I wonder if, some day, one
won't need to rebel against customs and laws? If this
discord will have gone? Some day, perhaps — who
knows? — the old won't coddle and hamper the young,
and the young won't need to fly in the faces of the old.
They'll face facts as facts, and understand. Oh, to
face facts! Gods! what a world it might be if people

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IN THE MOUNTAINS

faced facts! Understanding! Understanding! There
is no other salvation. Some day older people, perhaps,
will trouble to understand younger people, and there
won't be these fierce disruptions; there won't be bar-
riers one must defy or perish. . . . That's really our
choice now, defy — or futility. . . . The world, perhaps,
will be educated out of its idea of fixed standards. ... I
wonder, Ann Veronica, if, when our time comes, we
shall be any wiser?"

Ann Veronica watched a water-beetle fussing across
the green depths. "One can't tell. I'm a female thing
at bottom. I like high tone for a flourish and stars
and ideas; but I want my things."

§ 2

Capes thought.

"It's odd — I have no doubt in my mind that what
we are doing is wrong," he said. "And yet I do it
without compunction."

"I never felt so absolutely right," said Ann Veronica.

"You are a female thing at bottom," he admitted.
"I'm not nearly so sure as you. As for me, I look
twice at it. ... Life is two things, that's how I see it;
two things mixed and muddled up together. Life is
morality — life is adventure. Squire and master. Ad-
venture rules, and morality — looks up the trains in the
Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and ad-
venture moves you. If morality means anything it
means keeping bounds, respecting implications, respect-
ing implicit bounds. If individuality means anything
it means breaking bounds — adventure. Will you be
23 347

ANN VERONICA

moral and your species, or immoral and yourself?
We've decided to be immoral. We needn't try and give
ourselves airs. We've deserted the posts in which we
found ourselves, cut our duties, exposed ourselves to
risks that may destroy any sort of social usefulness in
us. ... I don't know. One keeps rules in order to be
one's self. One studies Nature in order not to be blindly
ruled by her. There's no sense in morality, I suppose,
unless you are fundamentally immoral."

She watched his face as he traced his way through
these speculative thickets.

"Look at our affair," he went on, looking up at her.
"No power on earth will persuade me we're not two
rather disreputable persons. You desert your home;
I throw up useful teaching, risk every hope in your
career. Here we are absconding, pretending to be what
we are not; shady, to say the least of it. It's not a
bit of good pretending there's any Higher Truth or
wonderful principle in this business. There isn't. We
never started out in any high-browed manner to scan-
dalize and Shelleyfy. When first you left your home
you had no idea that 7 was the hidden impulse. I
wasn't. You came out like an ant for your nuptial
flight. It was just a chance that we in particular hit
against each other — nothing predestined about it. We
just hit against each other, and here we are flying off
at a tangent, a little surprised at what we are doing, all
our principles abandoned, and tremendously and quite
unreasonably proud of ourselves. Out of all this we
have struck a sort of harmony. . . . And it's gor-
geous!"

"Glorious!" said Ann Veronica.
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IN THE MOUNTAINS

"Would you like us — if some one told you the bare
outline of our story? — and what we are doing?"

"I shouldn't mind," said Ann Veronica.

"But if some one else asked your advice? If some
one else said, 'Here is my teacher, a jaded married man
on the verge of middle age, and he and I have a violent
passion for one another. We propose to disregard all
our ties, all our obligations, all the established prohibi-
tions of society, and begin life together afresh.' What
would you tell her?"

"If she asked advice, I should say she wasn't fit to
do anything of the sort. I should say that having a
doubt was enough to condemn it."

"But waive that point."

"It would be different all the same. It wouldn't be
you."

"It wouldn't be you either. I suppose that's the
gist of the whole thing." He stared at a little eddy.
"The rule's all right, so long as there isn't a case. Rules
are for established things, like the pieces and positions
of a game. Men and women are not established things;
they're experiments, all of them. Every human being
is a new thing, exists to do new things. Find the thing
you want to do most intensely, make sure that's it, and
do it with all your might. If you live, well and good;
if you -die, well and good. Your purpose is done. . . .
Well, this is our thing."

He woke the glassy water to swirling activity again,
and made the deep -blue shapes below writhe and shiver.

"This is my thing," said Ann Veronica, softly, with
thoughtful eyes upon him.

Then she looked up the sweep of pine-trees to the

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ANN VERONICA

towering sunlit cliffs and the high heaven above and
then back to his face. She drew in a deep breath of
the sweet mountain air. Her eyes were soft and grave,
and there was the faintest of smiles upon her resolute
lips.

§3

Later they loitered along a winding path above the
inn, and made love to one another. Their journey had
made them indolent, the afternoon was warm, and it
seemed impossible to breathe a sweeter air. The flow-
ers and turf, a wild strawberry, a rare butterfly, and
suchlike little intimate things had become more interest-
ing than mountains. Their flitting hands were always
touching. Deep silences came between them. . . .

"I had thought to go on to Kandersteg," said Capes,
"but this is a pleasant place. There is not a soul in the
inn but ourselves. Let us stay the night here. Then
we can loiter and gossip to our heart's content."

"Agreed," said Ann Veronica.

"After all, it's our honeymoon."

"All we shall get," said Ann Veronica.

"This place is very beautiful."

"Any place would be beautiful," said Ann Veronica,
in a low voice.

For a time they walked in silence.

"I wonder," she began, presently, "why I love you
— and love you so much ? . . . I know now what it is to
be an abandoned female. I am an abandoned female.
I'm not ashamed — of the things I'm doing. I want to
put myself into your hands. You know — I wish I

IN THE MOUNTAINS

could roll my little body up small and squeeze it into
your hand and grip youi fingers upon it. Tight. I
want you to hold me and have me so. . . . Everything.
Everything. It's a pure joy of giving — giving to you.
I have never spoken of these things to any human being.
Just dreamed — and ran away even from my dreams. It
is as if my lips had been sealed about them. And now
I break the seals — for you. Only I wish — I wish to-day
I was a thousand times, ten thousand times more beau-
tiful."

Capes lifted her hand and kissed it.

" You are a thousand times more beautiful," he said,
"than anything else could be. ... You are you. You
are all the beauty in the world. Beauty doesn't mean,
never has meant, anything — anything at all but you.
It heralded you, promised you. ..."

§4

They lay side by side in a shallow nest of turf and
mosses among bowlders and stunted bushes on a high
rock, and watched the day sky deepen to evening be-
tween the vast precipices overhead and looked over the
tree - tops down the widening gorge. A distant sug-
gestion of chalets and a glimpse of the road set them
talking for a time of the world they had left behind.

Capes spoke casually of their plans for work. " It's
a flabby, loose-willed world we have to face. It won't
even know whether to be scandalized at us or forgiving.
It will hold aloof, a little undecided whether to pelt or
not—"

ANN VERONICA

" That depends whether we carry ourselves as though
we expected pelting," said Ann Veronica.

" We won't."

"No fear!"

"Then, as we succeed, it will begin to sidle back to
us. It will do its best to overlook things — "

" If we let it, poor dear."

"That's if we succeed. If we fail," said Capes,
"then—"

"We aren't going to fail," said Ann Veronica.

Life seemed a very brave and glorious enterprise to
Ann Veronica that day. She was quivering with the
sense of Capes at her side and glowing with heroic love;
it seemed to her that if they put their hands jointly
against the Alps and pushed they would be able to push
them aside. She lay and nibbled at a sprig of dwarf
rhododendron.

"Fail!" she said.

§ 5

Presently it occurred to Ann Veronica to ask about
the journey he had planned. He had his sections of
the Siegfried map folded in his pocket, and he squatted
up with his legs crossed like an Indian idol while she lay
prone beside him and followed every movement of his
indicatory finger.

"Here," he said, "is this Blau See, and here we rest
until to-morrow. I think we rest here until to-mor-
row?"

There was a brief silence.

"It is a very pleasant place," said Ann Veronica,
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IN THE MOUNTAINS

biting a rhododendron stalk through, and with that
faint shadow of a smile returning to her lips. . . .

"And then?" said Ann Veronica.

" Then we go on to this place, the Oeschinensee. It's
a lake among precipices, and there is a little inn where
we can stay, and sit and eat our dinner at a pleasant
table that looks upon the lake. For some days we shall
be very idle there among the trees and rocks. There are
boats on the lake and shady depths and wildernesses of
pine-wood. After a day or so, perhaps, we will go on
one or two little excursions and see how good your head
is — a mild scramble or so ; and then up to a hut on a pass
just here, and out upon the Blumlis-alp glacier that
spreads out so and so."

She roused herself from some dream at the word.
"Glaciers?" she said.

"Under the Wilde Frau — which was named after
you."

He bent and kissed her hair and paused, and then
forced his attention back to the map. "One day," he
resumed, "we will start off early and come down into
Kandersteg and up these zigzags and here £nd here,
and so past this Daubensee to a tiny inn — it won't be
busy yet, though ; we may get it all to ourselves — on the
brim of the steepest zigzag you can imagine, thousands
of feet of zigzag ; and you will sit and eat lunch with me
and look out across the Rhone Valley and over blue dis-
tances beyond blue distances to the Matterhorn and
Monte Rosa and a long regiment of sunny, snowy moun-
tains. And when we see them we shall at once want to
go to them — that's the way with beautiful things — and
down we shall go, like flies down a wall, to Leukerbad,

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ANN VERONICA

and so to Leuk Station, here, and then by train up the
Rhone Valley and this little side valley to Stalden; and
there, in the cool of the afternoon, we shall start off up
a gorge, torrents and cliffs below us and above us, to
sleep in a half-way inn, and go on next day to Saas Fee,
Saas of the Magic, Saas of the Pagan People. And
there, about Saas, are ice and snows again, and some-
times we will loiter among the rocks and trees about
Saas or peep into Samuel Butler's chapels, and some-
times we will climb up out of the way of the other peo-
ple on to the glaciers and snow. And, for one expedi-
tion at least, we will go up this desolate valley here to
Mattmark, and so on to Monte Moro. There indeed
you see Monte Rosa. Almost the best of all."

" Is it very beautiful ?"

"When I saw it there it was very beautiful. It was
wonderful. It was the crowned queen of mountains
in her robes of shining white. It towered up high
above the level of the pass, thousands of feet, still,
shining, and white, and below, thousands of feet below,
was a floor of little woolly clouds. And then presently
these clouds began to wear thin and expose steep, deep
slopes, going down and down, with grass and pine-trees,
down and down, and at last, through a great rent in
the clouds, bare roofs, shining like very minute pin-
heads, and a road like a fibre of white silk — Macugnana,
in Italy. That will be a fine day — it will have to be, when
first you set eyes on Italy. . . . That's as far as we go."

"Can't we go down into Italy?"

" No," he said; "it won't run to that now. We must
wave our hands at the blue hills far away there and go
back to London and work."

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IN THE MOUNTAINS

"But Italy—"

"Italy's for a good girl," he said, and laid his hand
for a moment on her shoulder. "She must look for-
ward to Italy."

"I say," she reflected, "you are rather the master,
you know."

The idea struck him as novel. "Of course I'm
manager for this expedition," he said, after an interval
of self-examination.

She slid her cheek down the tweed sleeve of his
coat. "Nice sleeve," she said, and came to his hand
and kissed it.

"I say!" he cried. "Look here! Aren't you going
a little too far? This — this is degradation— making
a fuss with sleeves. You mustn't do things like that."

"Why not?"

"Free woman — and equal."

"I do it — of my own free will," said Ann Veronica,
kissing his hand again. "It's nothing to what I will
do."

"Oh, well!" he said, a little doubtfully, "it's just
a phase," and bent down and rested his hand on her
shoulder for a moment, with his heart beating and
his nerves a-quiver. Then as she lay very still, with
her hands clinched and her black hair tumbled about
her face, he came still closer and softly kissed the nape
of her neck. . . .

§ 6

Most of the things that he had planned they did. But
they climbed more than he had intended because Ann

355

ANN VERONICA

Veronica proved rather a good climber, steady-headed
and plucky, rather daring, but quite willing to be cautious
at his command.

One of the things that most surprised him in her
was her capacity for blind obedience. She loved to
be told to do things.

He knew the circle of mountains about Saas Fee
fairly well; he had been there twice before, and it was
fine to get away from the straggling pedestrians into
the high, lonely places, and sit and munch sandwiches
and talk together and do things together that were
just a little difficult and dangerous. And they could talk,
they found; and never once, it seemed, did their meaning
and intention hitch. They were enormously pleased
with one another ; they found each other beyond measure
better than they had expected, if only because of the
want of substance in mere expectation. Their conver-
sation degenerated again and again into a strain of self-
congratulation that would have irked an eavesdropper.

"You're — I don't know," said Ann Veronica.
"You're splendid."

"It isn't that you're splendid or I," said Capes.
"But we satisfy one another. Heaven alone knows
why. So completely! The oddest fitness! What is
it made of? Texture of skin and texture of mind?
Complexion and voice. I don't think I've got illusions,
nor you. ... If I had never met anything of you at all
but a scrap of your skin binding a book, Ann Veronica,
I know I would have kept that somewhere near to me.
. . . All your faults are just jolly modelling to make you
real and solid."

" The faults are the best part of it," said Ann Veronica;
356

IN THE MOUNTAINS

"why, even our little vicious strains run the same way.
Even our coarseness."

"Coarse?" said Capes, "We're not coarse."

"But if we were?" said Ann Veronica.

"I can talk to you and you to me without a scrap
of effort," said Capes; "that's the essence of it. It's
made up of things as small as the diameter of hairs and
big as life and death. . . . One always dreamed of this
and never believed it. It's the rarest luck, the wildest,
most impossible accident. Most people, every one I
know else, seem to have mated with foreigners and to
talk uneasily in unfamiliar tongues, to be afraid of the
knowledge the other one has, of the other one's per-
petual misjudgment and misunderstandings.

"Why don't they wait?" he added.

Ann Veronica had one of her flashes of insight.

"One doesn't wait," said Ann Veronica.

She expanded that. "7 shouldn't have waited," she
said. " I might have muddled for a time. But it's as you
say. I've had the rarest luck and fallen on my feet."

"We've both fallen on our feet! We're the rarest of
mortals ! The real thing ! There's not a compromise nor
a sham nor a concession between us. We aren't afraid;
we don't bother. We don't consider each other ; we needn't.
That wrappered life, as you call it — we've burned the
confounded rags! Danced out of it! We're stark!"

"Stark!" echoed Ann Veronica.

§ 7

As they came back from that day's climb — it was
up the Mittaghorn — they had to cross a shining space

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ANN VERONICA

of wet, steep rocks between two grass slopes that needed
a little care. There were a few loose, broken fragments
of rock to reckon with upon the ledges, and one place
where hands did as much work as toes. They used the
rope — not that a rope was at all necessary, but because
Ann Veronica's exalted state of mind made the fact of
the rope agreeably symbolical; and, anyhow, it did
insure a joint death in the event of some remotely
possibly mischance. Capes went first, finding footholds
and, where the drops in the strata-edges came like long,
awkward steps, placing Ann Veronica's feet. About
half-way across this interval, when everything seemed
going well, Capes had a shock.

"Heavens!" exclaimed Ann Veronica, with extraor-
dinary passion. "My God!" and ceased to move.

Capes became rigid and adhesive. Nothing ensued.
"All right?" he asked.

"I'll have to pay it."

"I've forgotten something. Oh, cuss it!"

"Eh?"

"He said I would."

"What?"

"That's the devil of it!"

"Devil of what? . . . You do use vile language!"

"Forget about it like this."

"Forget what?"

"And I said I wouldn't. I said I'd do anything. I
said I'd make shirts."

"Shirts?"

" Shirts at one-and-something a dozen. Oh, goodness !
Bilking! Ann Veronica, you're a bilker!"

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IN THE MOUNTAINS

Pause.

" Will you tell me what all this is about ? " said Capes.

"It's about forty pounds."

Capes waited patiently.

"G. I'm sorry. . . . But you've got to lend me forty
pounds."

"It's some sort of delirium," said Capes. "The rare-
fied air? I thought you had a better head."

"No! I'll explain lower. It's all right. Let's go
on climbing now. It's a thing I've unaccountably
overlooked. All right really. It can wait a bit longer.
I borrowed forty pounds from Mr. Ramage. Thank
goodness you'll understand. That's why I chucked
Manning. . . . All right, I'm coming. But all this business
has driven it clean out of my head. . . . That's why he
was so annoyed, you know."

"Who was annoyed?"

"Mr. Ramage — about the forty pounds." She took
a step. "My dear," she added, by way of afterthought,
"you do obliterate things!"

§ 8

They found themselves next day talking love to one
another high up on some rocks above a steep bank of
snow that overhung a precipice on the eastern side of the
Fee glacier. By this time Capes' hair had bleached
nearly white, and his skin had become a skin of red
copper shot with gold. They were now both in a state
of unprecedented physical fitness. And such skirts as
Ann Veronica had had when she entered the valley of
Saas were safely packed away in the hotel, and she wore

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ANN VERONICA

a leather belt and loose knickerbockers and puttees — a
costume that suited the fine, long lines of her limbs far
better than any feminine walking-dress could do. Her
complexion had resisted the snow-glare wonderfully;
her skin had only deepened its natural warmth a little
under the Alpine sun. She had pushed aside her azure
veil, taken off her snow-glasses, and sat smiling under
her hand at the shining glories — the lit cornices, the blue
shadows, the softly rounded, enormous snow masses, the
deep places full of quivering luminosity — of the Tasch-
horn and Dom. The sky was cloudless, effulgent blue.

Capes sat watching and admiring her, and then he fell
praising the day and fortune and their love for each other.

"Here we are," he said, "shining through each other
like light through a stained-glass window. With this
air in our blood, this sunlight soaking us. ... Life is so
good. Can it ever be so good again?"

Ann Veronica put out a firm hand and squeezed his
arm. " It's very good," she said. " It's glorious good!"

"Suppose now — look at this long snow-slope and then
that blue deep beyond — do you see that round pool of
color in the ice — a thousand feet or more below? Yes?
Well, think — we've got to go but ten steps and lie down
and put our arms about each other. See? Down we
should rush in a foam — in a cloud of snow — to flight and
a dream. All the rest of our lives would be together
then, Ann Veronica. Every moment. And no ill-chances."

"If you tempt me too much," she said, after a silence,
"I shall do it. I need only just jump up and throw
myself upon you. I'm a desperate young woman.
And then as we went down you'd try to explain. And
that would spoil it. ... You know you don't mean it."

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IN THE MOUNTAINS

"No, I don't. But I liked to say it."
"Rather! But I wonder why you don't mean it?"
"Because, I suppose, the other thing is better. What
other reason could there be? It's more complex, but
it's better. This, this glissade, would be damned
scoundrelism. You know that, and I know that, though
we might be put to it to find a reason why. It would
be swindling. Drawing the pay of life and then not
living. And besides — We're going to live, Ann
Veronica! Oh, the things we'll do, the life we'll lead!
There'll be trouble in it at times — you and I aren't going
to run without friction. But we've got the brains to get
over that, and tongues in our heads to talk to each
other. We sha'n't hang up on any misunderstanding.
Not us. And we're going to fight that old world down
there. That old world that had shoved up that silly
old hotel, and all the rest of it. ... If we don't live it
will think we are afraid of it. ... Die, indeed! We're
going to do work; we're going to unfold about each
other; we're going to have children."
"Girls!" cried Ann Veronica.
"Boys!" said Capes.

"Both!" said Ann Veronica. "Lots of 'em!"
Capes chuckled. "You delicate female!"
"Who cares," said Ann Veronica, "seeing it's you?
Warm, soft little wonders! Of course I want them."

§9

"All sorts of things we're going to do," said Capes;
" all sorts of times we're going to' have. Sooner or later

ANN VERONICA

we'll certainly do something to clean those prisons you
told me about — limewash the underside of life. You
and I. We can love on a snow cornice, we can love over
a pail of whitewash. Love anywhere. Anywhere!
Moonlight and music — pleasing, you know, but quite un-
necessary. We met dissecting dogfish. . . . Do you re-
member your first day with me ? . . . Do you indeed re-
member? The smell of decay and cheap methylated
spirit! . . . My dear! we've had so many moments! I used
to go over the times we'd had together, the things we'd
said — like a rosary of beads. But now it's beads by the
cask — like the hold of a West African trader. It feels
like too much gold-dust clutched in one's hand. One
doesn't want to lose a grain. And one must — some of
it must slip through one's fingers."

"I don't care if it does," said Ann Veronica. "I
don't care a rap for remembering. I care for you. This
moment couldn't be better until the next moment comes.
That's how it takes me. Why should we hoard ? We
aren't going out presently, like Japanese lanterns in a
gale. It's the poor dears who do, who know they will,
know they can't keep it up, who need to clutch at way-
side flowers. And put 'em in little books for remem-
brance. Flattened flowers aren't for the likes of us.
Moments, indeed! We like each other fresh and fresh.
It isn't illusions — for us. We two just love each other
— the real, identical other — all the time."

"The real, identical other," said Capes, and took and
bit the tip of her little finger.

"There's no delusions, so far as I know," said Ann
Veronica.

"I don't believe there is one. If there is, it's a mere

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IN THE MOUNTAINS

wrapping — there's better underneath. It's only as if
I'd begun to know you the day before yesterday or there-
abouts. You keep on coming truer, after you have
seemed to come altogether true. You. . . . brick!"

§ 10

"To think," he cried, "you are ten years younger
than I! ... There are times when you make me feel a
little thing at your feet — a young, silly, protected thing.
Do you know, Ann Veronica, it is all a lie about your
birth certificate; a forgery — and fooling at that. You
are one of the Immortals. Immortal! You were in
the beginning, and all the men in the world who have
known what love is have worshipped at your feet. You
have converted me to — Lester Ward! You are my dear
friend, you are a slip of a girl, but there are moments
when my head has been on your breast, when your heart
has been beating close to my ears, when I have known
you for the goddess, when I have wished myself your
slave, when I have wished that you could kill me for the
joy of being killed by you. You are the High Priestess
of Life. . . ."

"Your priestess," whispered Ann Veronica, softly.
" A silly little priestess who knew nothing of life at all
until she came to you."

They sat for a time without speaking a word, in an
enormous shining globe of mutual satisfaction.
»4 363

ANN VERONICA

"Well," said Capes, at length, "we've to go down,
Ann Veronica. Life waits for us."

He stood up and waited for her to move.

"Gods!" cried Ann Veronica, and kept him standing.
"And to think that it's not a full year ago since I was
a black-hearted rebel school-girl, distressed, puzzled,
perplexed, not understanding that this great force of
love was bursting its way through me ! All those name-
less discontents — they were no more than love's birth-
pangs. I felt — I felt living in a masked world. I felt
as though I had bandaged eyes. I felt — wrapped in
thick cobwebs. They blinded me. They got in my
mouth. And now — Dear! Dear! The day spring
from on high hath visited me. I love. I am loved. I
want to shout! I want to sing! I am glad! I am
glad to be alive because you are alive ! I am glad to be
a woman because you are a man! I am glad! I am
glad! I am glad! I thank God for life and you. I
thank God for His sunlight on your face. I thank God
for the beauty you love and the faults you love. I
thank God for the very skin that is peeling from your
nose, for all things great and small that make us what
we are. This is grace I am saying! Oh! my dear!
all the joy and weeping of life are mixed in me now and
all the gratitude. Never a new-born dragon-fly that
spread its wings in the morning has felt as glad as I!"

CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH

IN PERSPECTIVE
§ I

ABOUT four years and a quarter later — to be exact,
it was four years and four months — Mr. and Mrs.
Capes stood side by side upon an old Persian carpet
that did duty as a hearthrug in the dining-room of their
flat and surveyed a shining dinner-table set for four
people, lit by skilfully-shaded electric lights, brightened
by frequent gleams of silver, and carefully and simply
adorned with sweet-pea blossom. Capes had altered
scarcely at all during the interval, except for a new
quality of smartness in the cut of his clothes, but Ann
Veronica was nearly half an inch taller; her face was at
once stronger and softer, her neck firmer and rounder,
and her carriage definitely more womanly than it had
been in the days of her rebellion. She was a woman
now to the tips of her fingers ; she had said good-bye to
her girlhood in the old garden four years and a quarter
ago. She was dressed in a simple evening gown of soft
creamy silk, with a yoke of dark old embroidery that en-
hanced the gentle gravity of her style, and her black
hair flowed off her open forehead to pass under the con-
trol of a simple ribbon of silver. A silver necklace

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ANN VERONICA

enhanced the dusky beauty of her neck. Both husband
and wife affected an unnatural ease of manner for the
benefit of the efficient parlor-maid, who was putting the
finishing touches to the sideboard arrangements.

"It looks all right," said Capes.

" I think everything's right," said Ann Veronica, with
the roaming eye of a capable but not devoted house-
mistress.

" I wonder if they will seem altered," she remarked
for the third time.

"There I can't help," said Capes.

He walked through a wide open archway, curtained
with deep-blue curtains, into the apartment that served
as a reception-room. Ann Veronica, after a last survey
of the dinner appointments, followed him, rustling,
came to his side by the high brass fender, and touched
two or three ornaments on the mantel above the cheerful
fireplace.

" It's still a marvel to me that we are to be forgiven,"
she said, turning.

" My charm of manner, I suppose. But, indeed, he's
very human."

"Did you tell him of the registry office?"

"No — o — certainly not so emphatically as I did
about the play."

"It was an inspiration — your speaking to him?"

"I felt impudent. I believe I am getting impudent.
I had not been near the Royal Society since — since
you disgraced me. What's that?"

They both stood listening. It was not the arrival of
the guests, but merely the maid moving about in the
hall.

366

IN PERSPECTIVE

"Wonderful man!" said Ann Veronica, reassured,
and stroking his cheek with her finger.

Capes made a quick movement as if to bite that ag-
gressive digit, but it withdrew to Ann Veronica's side.

" I was really interested in his stuff. I was talking
to him before I saw his name on the card beside the
row of microscopes. Then, naturally, I went on talk-
ing. He — he has rather a poor opinion of his con-
temporaries. Of course, he had no idea who I was."

"But how did you tell him? You've never told me.
Wasn't it — a little bit of a scene?"

" Oh ! let me see. I said I hadn't been at the Royal
Society soiree for four years, and got him to tell me
about some of the fresh Mendelian work. He loves
the Mendelians because he hates all the big names of
the eighties and nineties. Then I think I remarked
that science was disgracefully under-endowed, and con-
fessed I'd had to take to more profitable courses. 'The
fact of it is,' I said, ' I'm the new playwright, Thomas
More. Perhaps you've heard — ?' Well, you know,
he had."

"Fame!"

"Isn't it? 'I've not seen your play, Mr. More,' he
said, 'but I'm told it's the most amusing thing in Lon-
don at the present time. A friend of mine, Ogilvy' — I
suppose that's Ogilvy & Ogilvy, who do so many
divorces, Vee? — 'was speaking very highly of it — very
highly!'" He smiled into her eyes.

" You are developing far too retentive a memory for
praises," said Ann Veronica.

"I'm still new to them. But after that it was easy.
I told him instantly and shamelessly that the play was

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ANN VERONICA

going to be worth ten thousand pounds. He agreed it
was disgraceful. Then I assumed a rather portentous
manner to prepare him."

"How? Show me."

" I can't be portentous, dear, when you're about.
It's my other side of the moon. But I was portentous,
I can assure you. 'My name's not More, Mr. Stanley,'
I said. 'That's my pet name.'"

"Yes?"

"I think — yes, I went on in a pleasing blend of the
casual and sotto voce, ' The fact of it is, sir, I happen to
be your son-in-law, Capes. I do wish you could come
and dine with us some evening. It would make my
wife very happy.' "

"What did he say?"

" What does any one say to an invitation to dinner
point-blank? One tries to collect one's wits. 'She is
constantly thinking of you,' I said."

"And he accepted meekly?"

"Practically. What else could he do? You can't
kick up a scene on the spur of the moment in the face
of such conflicting values as he had before him. With
me behaving as if everything was infinitely matter-of-
fact, what could he do? And just then Heaven sent
old Manningtree — I didn't tell you before of the fortunate
intervention of Manningtree, did I? He was looking
quite infernally distinguished, with a wide crimson
ribbon across him — what is a wide crimson ribbon?
Some sort of knight, I suppose. He is a knight. ' Well,
young man,' he said, 'we haven't seen you lately,' and
something about 'Bateson & Co.' — he's frightfully anti-
Mendelian — having it all their own way. So I in-

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IN PERSPECTIVE

troduced him to my father-in-law like a shot. I think
that was decision. Yes, it was Manningtree really
secured your father. He — "

"Here they are!" said Ann Veronica as the bell
sounded.

§ 2

They received the guests in their pretty little hall
with genuine effusion. Miss Stanley threw aside a
black cloak to reveal a discreet and dignified arrange-
ment of brown silk, and then embraced Ann Veronica
with warmth. " So very clear and cold," she said.
"I feared we might have a fog." The housemaid's
presence acted as a useful restraint. Ann Veronica
passed from her aunt to her father, and put her arms
about him and kissed his cheek. "Dear old daddy!"
she said, and was amazed to find herself shedding tears.
She veiled her emotion by taking off his overcoat.
"And this is Mr. Capes?" she heard her aunt saying.

All four people moved a little nervously into the
drawing-room, maintaining a sort of fluttered amiability
of sound and movement. Mr. Stanley professed a great
solicitude to warm his hands. "Quite unusually cold
for the time of year," he said. " Everything very nice,
I am sure," Miss Stanley murmured to Capes as he
steered her to a place upon the little sofa before the fire.
Also she made little pussy-like sounds of a reassuring
nature.

" And let's have a look at you, Vee! " said Mr. Stanley,
standing up with a sudden geniality and rubbing his
hands together.

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ANN VERONICA

Ann Veronica, who knew her dress became her,
dropped a curtsy to her father's regard.

Happily they had no one else to wait for, and it
heartened her mightily to think that she had ordered
the promptest possible service of the dinner. Capes
stood beside Miss Stanley, who was beaming unnaturally,
and Mr. Stanley, in his effort to seem at ease, took entire
possession of the hearthrug.

" You found the flat easily ? " said Capes in the pause.
" The numbers are a little difficult to see in the archway.
They ought to put a lamp."

Her father declared there had been no difficulty.

" Dinner is served, m'm," said the efficient parlor-maid
in the archway, and the worst was over.

" Come, daddy," said Ann Veronica, following her
husband and Miss Stanley; and in the fulness of her
heart she gave a friendly squeeze to the parental arm.

"Excellent fellow!" he answered a little irrelevantly.
"I didn't understand, Vee."

"Quite charming apartments," Miss Stanley admired;
"charming! Everything is so pretty and convenient."

The dinner was admirable as a dinner; nothing went
wrong, from the golden and excellent clear soup to the
delightful iced marrons and cream; and Miss Stanley's
praises died away to an appreciative acquiescence.
A brisk talk sprang up between Capes and Mr. Stanley,
to which the two ladies subordinated themselves in-
telligently. The burning topic of the Mendelian con-
troversy was approached on one or two occasions, but
avoided dexterously; and they talked chiefly of letters
and art and the censorship of the English stage. Mr.
Stanley was inclined to think the censorship should be

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extended to the supply of what he styled latter-day
fiction; good wholesome stories were being ousted, he
said, by "vicious, corrupting stuff" that "left a bad
taste in the mouth." He declared that no book could
be satisfactory that left a bad taste in the mouth, how-
ever much it seized and interested the reader at the
time. He did not like it, he said, with a significant
look, to be reminded of either his books or his dinners
after he had done with them. Capes agreed with the
utmost cordiality.

"Life is upsetting enough, without the novels taking
a share," said Mr. Stanley.

For a time Ann Veronica's attention was diverted
by her aunt's interest in the salted almonds.

"Quite particularly nice," said her aunt. "Excep-
tionally so."

When Ann Veronica could attend again she found
the men were discussing the ethics of the depreciation
of house property through the increasing tumult of
traffic in the West End, and agreeing with each other
to a devastating extent. It came into her head with
real emotional force that this must be some particularly
fantastic sort of dream. It seemed to her that her
father was in some inexplicable way meaner-looking
than she had supposed, and yet also, as unaccountably,
appealing. His tie had demanded a struggle; he ought
to have taken a clean one after his first failure. ' Why
was she noting things like this? Capes seemed self-
possessed and elaborately genial and commonplace,
but she knew him to be nervous by a little occasional
clumsiness, by the faintest shadow of vulgarity in the
urgency of his hospitality. She wished he could smoke

ANN VERONICA

and dull his nerves a little. A gust of irrational im-
patience blew through her being. Well, they'd got to
the pheasants, and in a little while he would smoke.
What was it she had expected ? Surely her moods were
getting a little out of hand.

She wished her father and aunt would not enjoy
their dinner with such quiet determination. Her
father and her husband, who had both been a little
pale at their first encounter, were growing now just
faintly flushed. It was a pity people had to eat
food.

" I suppose," said her father, " I have read at least
half the novels that have been at all successful during
the last twenty years. Three a week is my allowance,
and, if I get short ones, four. I change them in the
morning at Cannon Street, and take my book as I come
down."

It occurred to her that she had never seen her father
dining out before, never watched him critically as an
equal. To Capes he was almost deferential, and she
had never seen him deferential in the old time, never.
The dinner was stranger than she had ever anticipated.
It was as if she had grown right past her father into
something older and of infinitely wider outlook, as if
he had always been unsuspectedly a flattened figure,
and now she had discovered him from the other side.

It was a great relief to arrive at last at that pause
when she could say to her aunt, " Now, dear ? " and rise
and hold back the curtain through the archway. Capes
and her father stood up, and her father made a belated
movement toward the curtain. She realized that he
was the sort of man one does not think much about

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IN PERSPECTIVE

at dinners. And Capes was thinking that his wife was
a supremely beautiful woman. He reached a silver
cigar and cigarette box from the sideboard and put it
before his father-in-law, and for a time the preliminaries
of smoking occupied them both. Then Capes flittered
to the hearthrug and poked the fire, stood up, and turned
about. " Ann Veronica is looking very well, don't you
think?" he said, a little awkwardly.

"Very," said Mr. Stanley. "Very," and cracked a
walnut appreciatively.

"Life — things — I don't think her prospects now —
Hopeful outlook."

"You were in a difficult position," Mr. Stanley pro-
nounced, and seemed to hesitate whether he had not
gone too far. He looked at his port wine as though
that tawny ruby contained the solution of the matter.
"All's well that ends well," he said; "and the less one
says about things the better."

"Of course," said Capes, and threw a newly lit cigar
into the fire through sheer nervousness. "Have some
more port wine, sir?"

"It's a very sound wine," said Mr. Stanley, con-
senting with dignity.

" Ann Veronica has never looked quite so well, I think,"
said Capes, clinging, because of a preconceived plan, to
the suppressed topic.

§3

At last the evening was over, and Capes and his wife
had gone down to see Mr. Stanley and his sister into a

373

taxicab, and had waved an amiable farewell from the
pavement steps.

"Great dears!" said Capes, as the vehicle passed out
of sight.

"Yes, aren't they ?" said Ann Veronica, after a thought-
ful pause. And then, "They seem changed."

"Come in out of the cold," said Capes, and took her
arm.

"They seem smaller, you know, even physically
smaller," she said.

"You've grown out of them. . . . Your aunt liked the
pheasant."

"She liked everything. Did you hear us through the
archway, talking cookery?"

They went up by the lift in silence.

"It's odd," said Ann Veronica, re-entering the flat.

"What's odd?"

"Oh, everything!"

She shivered, and went to the fire and poked it. Capes
sat down in the arm-chair beside her.

"Life's so queer," she said, kneeling and looking into
the flames. "I wonder — I wonder if we shall ever get
like that."

She turned a firelit face to her husband. "Did you
tell him?"

Capes smiled faintly. "Yes."

"How?"

"Well— a little clumsily."

"But how?"

"I poured him out some port wine, and I said — let
me see — oh, ' You are going to be a grandfather!' "

"Yes. Was he pleased?"
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IN PERSPECTIVE

" Calmly! He said — you won't mind my telling you ?"

"Not a bit."

"He said, 'Poor Alice has got no end!'"

"Alice's are different," said Ann Veronica, after an
interval. "Quite different. She didn't choose her
man. . . . Well, I told aunt. . . . Husband of mine, I think
we have rather overrated the emotional capacity of
those — those dears."

"What did your aunt say?"

"She didn't even kiss me. 'She said" — Ann Veronica
shivered again — "'I hope it won't make you uncom-
fortable, my dear' — like that — 'and whatever you do,
do be careful of your hair!' I think — I judge from her
manner — that she thought it was just a little indelicate
of us — considering everything; but she tried to be prac-
tical and sympathetic and live down to our standards.''

Capes looked at his wife's unsmiling face.

"Your father," he said, "remarked that all's well that
ends well, and that he was disposed to let bygones be
bygones. He then spoke with a certain fatherly
kindliness of the past. ..."

"And my heart has ached for him!"

" Oh, no doubt it cut him at the time. It must have
cut him."

"We might even have — given it up for them!"

"I wonder if we could."

"I suppose all is well that ends well. Somehow to-
night— I don't know."

"I suppose so. I'm glad the old sore is assuaged.
Very glad. But if we had gone under — !"

They regarded one another silently, and Ann Veronica
had one of her penetrating flashes.

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ANN VERONICA

"We are not the sort that goes under," said Ann
Veronica, holding her hands so that the red reflections
vanished from her eyes. "We settled long ago — we're
hard stuff. We're hard stuff!"

Then she went on: "To think that is my father! Oh,
my dear! He stood over me like a cliff; the thought of
him nearly turned me aside from everything we have
done. He was the social order; he was law and wisdom.
And they come here, and they look at our furniture to
see if it is good; and they are not glad, it does not stir
them, that at last, at last we can dare to have children."

She dropped back into a crouching attitude and began
to weep. "Oh, my dear!" she cried, and suddenly flung
herself, kneeling, into her husband's arms.

"Do you remember the mountains? Do you remem-
ber how we loved one another ? How intensely we loved
one another! Do you remember the light on things and
the glory of things? I'm greedy, I'm greedy! I want
children like the mountains and life like the sky. Oh!
and love — love! We've had so splendid a time, and
fought our fight and won. And it's like the petals fall-
ing from a flower. Oh, I've loved love, dear! I've
loved love and you, and the glory of you; and the great
time is over, and I have to go carefully and bear children,
and — take care of my hair — and when I am done with
that I shall be an old woman. The petals have fallen
— the red petals we loved so. We're hedged about with
discretions — and all this furniture — and successes! We
are successful at last! Successful! But the mountains,
dear! We won't forget the mountains, dear, ever. That
shining slope of snow, and how we talked of death ! We
might have died! Even when we are old, when we are

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IN PERSPECTIVE

rich as we may be, we won't forget the time when we
cared nothing for anything but the joy of one another,
when we risked everything for one another, when all the
wrappings and coverings seemed to have fallen from life
and left it light and fire. Stark and stark! Do you
remember it all? ... Say you will never forget! That
these common things and secondary things sha'n't over-
whelm us. These petals! I've been wanting to cry all
the evening, cry here on your shouldeiv for my petals.
Petals! . . . Silly woman! . . . I've never had these crying
fits before. ..."

"Blood of my heart!" whispered Capes, holding her
close to him. "I know. I understand."

THE END

19°9 SMC

Ann Veronica