Wells H. G.

Ann Veronica

ANN VERONICA

A MODERN LOVE STORY

BY H. G. WELLS

CONTENTS

CHAP.

I.        ANN VERONICA TALKS TO HER FATHER

II.       ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW

III.      THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

IV.       THE CRISIS

V.        THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

VI.       EXPOSTULATIONS

VII.      IDEALS AND A REALITY

VIII.     BIOLOGY

IX.       DISCORDS

X.        THE SUFFRAGETTES

XI.       THOUGHTS IN PRISON

XII.      ANN VERONICA PUTS THINGS IN ORDER

XIII.     THE SAPPHIRE RING

XIV.      THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT

XV.       THE LAST DAYS AT HOME

XVI.      IN THE MOUNTAINS

XVII.     IN PERSPECTIVE

"The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every

well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even

ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge."

ANN VERONICA

CHAPTER THE FIRST

ANN VERONICA TALKS TO HER FATHER

Part 1

One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley

came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite

resolved to have things out with her father that very evening.

She had trembled on the verge of such a resolution before, but

this time quite definitely she made it.  A crisis had been

reached, and she was almost glad it had been reached.  She made

up her mind in the train home that it should be a decisive

crisis.  It is for that reason that this novel begins with her

there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of

this crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.

She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to

Morningside Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in

an attitude that would certainly have distressed her mother to

see, and horrified her grandmother beyond measure; she sat with

her knees up to her chin and her hands clasped before them, and

she was so lost in thought that she discovered with a start, from

a lettered lamp, that she was at Morningside Park, and thought

she was moving out of the station, whereas she was only moving

in.  "Lord!" she said.  She jumped up at once, caught up a

leather clutch containing notebooks, a fat text-book, and a

chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the

carriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and

that she had to traverse the full length of the platform past it

again as the result of her precipitation.  "Sold again," she

remarked.  "Idiot!"  She raged inwardly while she walked along

with that air of self-contained serenity that is proper to a

young lady of nearly two-and-twenty under the eye of the world.

She walked down the station approach, past the neat, obtrusive

offices of the coal merchant and the house agent, and so to the

wicket-gate by the butcher's shop that led to the field path to

her home.  Outside the post-office stood a no-hatted, blond young

man in gray flannels, who was elaborately affixing a stamp to a

letter.  At the sight of her he became rigid and a singularly

bright shade of pink.  She made herself serenely unaware of his

existence, though it may be it was his presence that sent her by

the field detour instead of by the direct path up the Avenue.

"Umph!" he said, and regarded his letter doubtfully before

consigning it to the pillar-box.  "Here goes," he said.  Then he

hovered undecidedly for some seconds with his hands in his

pockets and his mouth puckered to a whistle before he turned to

go home by the Avenue.

Ann Veronica forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and

her face resumed its expression of stern preoccupation.  "It's

either now or never," she said to herself. . . .

Morningside Park was a suburb that had not altogether, as people

say, come off.  It consisted, like pre-Roman Gaul, of three

parts.  There was first the Avenue, which ran in a consciously

elegant curve from the railway station into an undeveloped

wilderness of agriculture, with big, yellow brick villas on

either side, and then there was the pavement, the little clump of

shops about the post-office, and under the railway arch was a

congestion of workmen's dwellings.  The road from Surbiton and

Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in

the ditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of

little red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables

and very brassy window-blinds.  Behind the Avenue was a little

hill, and an iron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a

stile under an elm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going

back into the Avenue again.

"It's either now or never," said Ann Veronica, again ascending

this stile.  "Much as I hate rows, I've either got to make a

stand or give in altogether."

She seated herself in a loose and easy attitude and surveyed the

backs of the Avenue houses; then her eyes wandered to where the

new red-and-white villas peeped among the trees.  She seemed to

be making some sort of inventory.  "Ye Gods!" she said at last.

"WHAT a place!

"Stuffy isn't the word for it.

"I wonder what he takes me for?"

When presently she got down from the stile a certain note of

internal conflict, a touch of doubt, had gone from her

warm-tinted face.  She had now the clear and tranquil expression

of one whose mind is made up. Her back had stiffened, and her

hazel eyes looked steadfastly ahead.

As she approached the corner of the Avenue the blond, no-hatted

man in gray flannels appeared.  There was a certain air of forced

fortuity in his manner.  He saluted awkwardly.  "Hello, Vee!" he

said.

"Hello, Teddy!" she answered.

He hung vaguely for a moment as she passed.

But it was clear she was in no mood for Teddys. He realized that

he was committed to the path across the fields, an uninteresting

walk at the best of times.

"Oh, dammit!" he remarked, "dammit!" with great bitterness as he

faced it.

Part 2

Ann Veronica Stanley was twenty-one and a half years old.  She

had black hair, fine eyebrows, and a clear complexion; and the

forces that had modelled her features had loved and lingered at

their work and made them subtle and fine.  She was slender, and

sometimes she seemed tall, and walked and carried herself lightly

and joyfully as one who commonly and habitually feels well, and

sometimes she stooped a little and was preoccupied.  Her lips

came together with an expression between contentment and the

faintest shadow of a smile, her manner was one of quiet reserve,

and behind this mask she was wildly discontented and eager for

freedom and life.

She wanted to live.  She was vehemently impatient--she did not

clearly know for what--to do, to be, to experience.  And

experience was slow in coming.  All the world about her seemed to

be--how can one put it? --in wrappers, like a house when people

leave it in the summer.  The blinds were all drawn, the sunlight

kept out, one could not tell what colors these gray swathings

hid.  She wanted to know.  And there was no intimation whatever

that the blinds would ever go up or the windows or doors be

opened, or the chandeliers, that seemed to promise such a blaze

of fire, unveiled and furnished and lit.  Dim souls flitted about

her, not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in

undertones. . . .

During her school days, especially her earlier school days, the

world had been very explicit with her, telling her what to do,

what not to do, giving her lessons to learn and games to play and

interests of the most suitable and various kinds.  Presently she

woke up to the fact that there was a considerable group of

interests called being in love and getting married, with certain

attractive and amusing subsidiary developments, such as

flirtation and "being interested" in people of the opposite sex.

She approached this field with her usual liveliness of

apprehension.  But here she met with a check.  These interests

her world promptly, through the agency of schoolmistresses, older

school-mates, her aunt, and a number of other responsible and

authoritative people, assured her she must on no account think

about.  Miss Moffatt, the history and moral instruction mistress,

was particularly explicit upon this score, and they all agreed in

indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds ran on such

matters, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dress or

bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike any

other group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly

ashamed of.  Nevertheless, Ann Veronica found it a difficult

matter not to think of these things.  However having a

considerable amount of pride, she decided she would disavow these

undesirable topics and keep her mind away from them just as far

as she could, but it left her at the end of her school days with

that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at loose ends.

The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no

particular place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a

functionless existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels,

walks, and dusting in her father's house.  She thought study

would be better.  She was a clever girl, the best of her year in

the High School, and she made a valiant fight for Somerville or

Newnham but her father had met and argued with a Somerville girl

at a friend's dinner-table and he thought that sort of thing

unsexed a woman.  He said simply that he wanted her to live at

home.  There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhile

she went on at school. They compromised at length on the science

course at the Tredgold Women's College--she had already

matriculated into London University from school--she came of age,

and she bickered with her aunt for latch-key privileges on the

strength of that and her season ticket. Shamefaced curiosities

began to come back into her mind, thinly disguised as literature

and art.  She read voraciously, and presently, because of her

aunt's censorship, she took to smuggling any books she thought

might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, and she

went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable

friend to accompany her.  She passed her general science

examination with double honors and specialized in science.  She

happened to have an acute sense of form and unusual mental

lucidity, and she found in biology, and particularly in

comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest, albeit the

illumination it cast upon her personal life was not altogether

direct.  She dissected well, and in a year she found herself

chafing at the limitations of the lady B. Sc. who retailed a

store of faded learning in the Tredgold laboratory.  She had

already realized that this instructress was hopelessly wrong and

foggy--it is the test of the good comparative anatomist--upon the

skull.  She discovered a desire to enter as a student in the

Imperial College at Westminster, where Russell taught, and go on

with her work at the fountain-head.

She had asked about that already, and her father had replied,

evasively:  "We'll have to see about that, little Vee; we'll have

to see about that."  In that posture of being seen about the

matter hung until she seemed committed to another session at the

Tredgold College, and in the mean time a small conflict arose and

brought the latch-key question, and in fact the question of Ann

Veronica's position generally, to an acute issue.

In addition to the various business men, solicitors, civil

servants, and widow ladies who lived in the Morningside Park

Avenue, there was a certain family of alien sympathies and

artistic quality, the Widgetts, with which Ann Veronica had

become very friendly.  Mr. Widgett was a journalist and art

critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suit and "art" brown

ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday morning,

travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly

despised golf.  He occupied one of the smaller houses near the

station.  He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three

daughters with peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found

adorable. Two of these had been her particular intimates at the

High School, and had done much to send her mind exploring beyond

the limits of the available literature at home.  It was a

cheerful, irresponsible, shamelessly hard-up family in the key of

faded green and flattened purple, and the girls went on from the

High School to the Fadden Art School and a bright, eventful life

of art student dances, Socialist meetings, theatre galleries,

talking about work, and even, at intervals, work; and ever and

again they drew Ann Veronica from her sound persistent industry

into the circle of these experiences. They had asked her to come

to the first of the two great annual Fadden Dances, the October

one, and Ann Veronica had accepted with enthusiasm.  And now her

father said she must not go.

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

Going involved two things that all Ann Veronica's tact had been

ineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father.  Her usual

dignified reserve had availed her nothing.  One point was that

she was to wear fancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair's bride,

and the other was that she was to spend whatever vestiges of the

night remained after the dance was over in London with the

Widgett girls and a select party in "quite a decent little hotel"

near Fitzroy Square.

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

"You see," said Ann Veronica, with the air of one who shares a

difficulty, "I've promised to go.  I didn't realize-- I don't see

how I can get out of it now."

Then it was her father issued his ultimatum.  He had conveyed it

to her, not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to

her a singularly ignoble method of prohibition.  "He couldn't

look me in the face and say it," said Ann Veronica.

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

And thus it was that as Ann Veronica neared the gates of home,

she said to herself:  "I'll have it out with him somehow.  I'll

have it out with him.  And if he won't--"

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

that time.

Part 3

Ann Veronica's father was a solicitor with a good deal of company

business: a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic,

clean-shaven man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose,

iron-gray hair, gray eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small,

circular baldness at the crown of his head.  His name was Peter.

He had had five children at irregular intervals, of whom Ann

Veronica was the youngest, so that as a parent he came to her

perhaps a little practised and jaded and inattentive; and he

called her his "little Vee," and patted her unexpectedly and

disconcertingly, and treated her promiscuously as of any age

between eleven and eight-and-twenty.  The City worried him a good

deal, and what energy he had left over he spent partly in golf, a

game he treated very seriously, and partly in the practices of

microscopic petrography.

He "went in" for microscopy in the unphilosophical Victorian

manner as his "hobby."  A birthday present of a microscope had

turned his mind to technical microscopy when he was eighteen, and

a chance friendship with a Holborn microscope dealer had

confirmed that bent.  He had remarkably skilful fingers and a

love of detailed processes, and he had become one of the most

dexterous amateur makers of rock sections in the world. He spent

a good deal more money and time than he could afford upon the

little room at the top of the house, in producing new lapidary

apparatus and new microscopic accessories and in rubbing down

slices of rock to a transparent thinness and mounting them in a

beautiful and dignified manner.  He did it, he said, "to distract

his mind."  His chief successes he exhibited to the Lowndean

Microscopical Society, where their high technical merit never

failed to excite admiration.  Their scientific value was less

considerable, since he chose rocks entirely with a view to their

difficulty of handling or their attractiveness at conversaziones

when done.  He had a great contempt for the sections the

"theorizers" produced.  They proved all sorts of things perhaps,

but they were thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work.  Yet an

indiscriminating, wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts

of distinctions....

He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fiction with

chromatic titles, The Red Sword, The Black Helmet, The Purple

Robe, also in order "to distract his mind."  He read it in winter

in the evening after dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with

a tendency to monopolize the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair

of dappled fawn-skin slippers across the fender.  She wondered

occasionally why his mind needed so much distraction.  His

favorite newspaper was the Times, which he began at breakfast in

the morning often with manifest irritation, and carried off to

finish in the train, leaving no other paper at home.

It occurred to Ann Veronica once that she had known him when he

was younger, but day had followed day, and each had largely

obliterated the impression of its predecessor.  But she certainly

remembered that when she was a little girl he sometimes wore

tennis flannels, and also rode a bicycle very dexterously in

through the gates to the front door.  And in those days, too, he

used to help her mother with her gardening, and hover about her

while she stood on the ladder and hammered creepers to the

scullery wall.

It had been Ann Veronica's lot as the youngest child to live in a

home that became less animated and various as she grew up.  Her

mother had died when she was thirteen, her two much older sisters

had married off--one submissively, one insubordinately; her two

brothers had gone out into the world well ahead of her, and so

she had made what she could of her father.  But he was not a

father one could make much of.

His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest

quality; they were creatures, he thought, either too bad for a

modern vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably

desirable, or too pure and good for life.  He made this simple

classification of a large and various sex to the exclusion of all

intermediate kinds; he held that the two classes had to be kept

apart even in thought and remote from one another.  Women are

made like the potter's vessels--either for worship or contumely,

and are withal fragile vessels.  He had never wanted daughters.

Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealed his

chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and had

sworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom.

He was a manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he

had loved his dark-eyed, dainty bright-colored, and active little

wife with a real vein of passion in his sentiment.  But he had

always felt (he had never allowed himself to think of it) that

the promptitude of their family was a little indelicate of her,

and in a sense an intrusion.  He had, however, planned brilliant

careers for his two sons, and, with a certain human amount of

warping and delay, they were pursuing these.  One was in the

Indian Civil Service and one in the rapidly developing motor

business.  The daughters, he had hoped, would be their mother's

care.

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

Of course a little daughter is a delightful thing enough. It runs

about gayly, it romps, it is bright and pretty, it has enormous

quantities of soft hair and more power of expressing affection

than its brothers.  It is a lovely little appendage to the mother

who smiles over it, and it does things quaintly like her,

gestures with her very gestures.  It makes wonderful sentences

that you can repeat in the City and are good enough for Punch.

You call it a lot of nicknames--"Babs" and "Bibs" and "Viddles"

and "Vee"; you whack at it playfully, and it whacks you back.  It

loves to sit on your knee.  All that is jolly and as it should

be.

But a little daughter is one thing and a daughter quite another.

There one comes to a relationship that Mr. Stanley had never

thought out.  When he found himself thinking about it, it upset

him so that he at once resorted to distraction.  The chromatic

fiction with which he relieved his mind glanced but slightly at

this aspect of life, and never with any quality of guidance. Its

heroes never had daughters, they borrowed other people's.  The

one fault, indeed, of this school of fiction for him was that it

had rather a light way with parental rights.  His instinct was in

the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property,

bound to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a

comfort in his declining years just as he thought fit.  About

this conception of ownership he perceived and desired a certain

sentimental glamour, he liked everything properly dressed, but it

remained ownership.  Ownership seemed only a reasonable return

for the cares and expenses of a daughter's upbringing.  Daughters

were not like sons. He perceived, however, that both the novels

he read and the world he lived in discountenanced these

assumptions.  Nothing else was put in their place, and they

remained sotto voce, as it were, in his mind.  The new and the

old cancelled out; his daughters became quasi-independent

dependents--which is absurd.  One married as he wished and one

against his wishes, and now here was Ann Veronica, his little

Vee, discontented with her beautiful, safe, and sheltering home,

going about with hatless friends to Socialist meetings and

art-class dances, and displaying a disposition to carry her

scientific ambitions to unwomanly lengths.  She seemed to think

he was merely the paymaster, handing over the means of her

freedom.  And now she insisted that she MUST leave the chastened

security of the Tredgold Women's College for Russell's unbridled

classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in pirate costume

and spend the residue of the night with Widgett's ramshackle

girls in some indescribable hotel in Soho!

He had done his best not to think about her at all, but the

situation and his sister had become altogether too urgent.  He

had finally put aside The Lilac Sunbonnet, gone into his study,

lit the gas fire, and written the letter that had brought these

unsatisfactory relations to a head.

Part 4

MY DEAR VEE, he wrote.

These daughters!  He gnawed his pen and reflected, tore the sheet

up, and began again.

"MY DEAR VERONICA,--Your aunt tells me you have involved yourself

in some arrangement with the Widgett girls about a Fancy Dress

Ball in London.  I gather you wish to go up in some fantastic

get-up, wrapped about in your opera cloak, and that after the

festivities you propose to stay with these friends of yours, and

without any older people in your party, at an hotel.  Now I am

sorry to cross you in anything you have set your heart upon, but

I regret to say--"

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

"--but this cannot be."

"No," he said, and tried again: "but I must tell you quite

definitely that I feel it to be my duty to forbid any such

exploit."

"Damn!" he remarked at the defaced letter; and, taking a fresh

sheet, he recopied what he had written. A certain irritation

crept into his manner as he did so.

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

He meditated, and began a new paragraph.

"The fact of it is, and this absurd project of yours only brings

it to a head, you have begun to get hold of some very queer ideas

about what a young lady in your position may or may not venture

to do.  I do not think you quite understand my ideals or what is

becoming as between father and daughter.  Your attitude to me--"

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

precisely.

"--and your aunt--"

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

"--and, indeed, to most of the established things in life is,

frankly, unsatisfactory.  You are restless, aggressive, critical

with all the crude unthinking criticism of youth. You have no

grasp upon the essential facts of life (I pray God you never

may), and in your rash ignorance you are prepared to dash into

positions that may end in lifelong regret.  The life of a young

girl is set about with prowling pitfalls."

He was arrested for a moment by an indistinct picture of Veronica

reading this last sentence.  But he was now too deeply moved to

trace a certain unsatisfactoriness to its source in a mixture of

metaphors.  "Well," he said, argumentatively, "it IS.  That's all

about it. It's time she knew."

"The life of a young girl is set about with prowling pitfalls,

from which she must be shielded at all costs."

His lips tightened, and he frowned with solemn resolution.

"So long as I am your father, so long as your life is entrusted

to my care, I feel bound by every obligation to use my authority

to check this odd disposition of yours toward extravagant

enterprises.  A day will come when you will thank me.  It is not,

my dear Veronica, that I think there is any harm in you; there is

not.  But a girl is soiled not only by evil but by the proximity

of evil, and a reputation for rashness may do her as serious an

injury as really reprehensible conduct.  So do please believe

that in this matter I am acting for the best."

He signed his name and reflected.  Then he opened the study door

and called "Mollie!" and returned to assume an attitude of

authority on the hearthrug, before the blue flames and orange

glow of the gas fire.

His sister appeared.

She was dressed in one of those complicated dresses that are all

lace and work and confused patternings of black and purple and

cream about the body, and she was in many ways a younger feminine

version of the same theme as himself.  She had the same sharp

nose--which, indeed, only Ann Veronica, of all the family, had

escaped.  She carried herself well, whereas her brother slouched,

and there was a certain aristocratic dignity about her that she

had acquired through her long engagement to a curate of family, a

scion of the Wiltshire Edmondshaws.  He had died before they

married, and when her brother became a widower she had come to

his assistance and taken over much of the care of his youngest

daughter.  But from the first her rather old-fashioned conception

of life had jarred with the suburban atmosphere, the High School

spirit and the memories of the light and little Mrs. Stanley,

whose family had been by any reckoning inconsiderable--to use the

kindliest term.  Miss Stanley had determined from the outset to

have the warmest affection for her youngest niece and to be a

second mother in her life--a second and a better one; but she had

found much to battle with, and there was much in herself that Ann

Veronica failed to understand.  She came in now with an air of

reserved solicitude.

Mr. Stanley pointed to the letter with a pipe he had drawn from

his jacket pocket.  "What do you think of that?" he asked.

She took it up in her many-ringed hands and read it judicially.

He filled his pipe slowly.

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

"I could have said more."

"You seem to have said just what had to be said. It seems to me

exactly what is wanted.  She really must not go to that affair."

She paused, and he waited for her to speak.

"I don't think she quite sees the harm of those people or the

sort of life to which they would draw her," she said.  "They

would spoil every chance."

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

"She is an extremely attractive girl," she said; and added, "to

some people.  Of course, one doesn't like to talk about things

until there are things to talk about."

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

"That is exactly what I feel."

Mr. Stanley took the letter and stood with it in his hand

thoughtfully for a time.  "I'd give anything," he remarked, "to

see our little Vee happily and comfortably married."

He gave the note to the parlormaid the next morning in an

inadvertent, casual manner just as he was leaving the house to

catch his London train.  When Ann Veronica got it she had at

first a wild, fantastic idea that it contained a tip.

Part 5

Ann Veronica's resolve to have things out with her father was not

accomplished without difficulty.

He was not due from the City until about six, and so she went and

played Badminton with the Widgett girls until dinner-time.  The

atmosphere at dinner was not propitious.  Her aunt was blandly

amiable above a certain tremulous undertow, and talked as if to a

caller about the alarming spread of marigolds that summer at the

end of the garden, a sort of Yellow Peril to all the smaller

hardy annuals, while her father brought some papers to table and

presented himself as preoccupied with them.  "It really seems as

if we shall have to put down marigolds altogether next year,"

Aunt Molly repeated three times, "and do away with marguerites.

They seed beyond all reason."  Elizabeth, the parlormaid, kept

coming in to hand vegetables whenever there seemed a chance of

Ann Veronica asking for an interview.  Directly dinner was over

Mr. Stanley, having pretended to linger to smoke, fled suddenly

up-stairs to petrography, and when Veronica tapped he answered

through the locked door, "Go away, Vee! I'm busy," and made a

lapidary's wheel buzz loudly.

Breakfast, too, was an impossible occasion.  He read the Times

with an unusually passionate intentness, and then declared

suddenly for the earlier of the two trains he used.

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

come up by this train."

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

watch.

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

Instead of which they walked sharply. . . .

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

"If it's about that dance project," he said, "it's no good,

Veronica.  I've made up my mind."

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

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

aunt."

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

crying.

Her father's step quickened to a trot.  "I won't have you

quarrelling and crying in the Avenue," he said.  "Stop it! . . .

If you've got anything to say, you must say it to your aunt--"

"But look here, daddy!"

He flapped the Times at her with an imperious gesture.

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

"But it's about other things."

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

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

"I'm--BUSY!"

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

understanding."

Ahead of them walked a gentleman whom it was evident they must at

their present pace very speedily overtake.  It was Ramage, the

occupant of the big house at the end of the Avenue.  He had

recently made Mr. Stanley's acquaintance in the train and shown

him one or two trifling civilities.  He was an outside broker and

the proprietor of a financial newspaper; he had come up very

rapidly in the last few years, and Mr. Stanley admired and

detested him in almost equal measure.  It was intolerable to

think that he might overhear words and phrases.  Mr. Stanley's

pace slackened.

"You've no right to badger me like this, Veronica," he said.  "I

can't see what possible benefit can come of discussing things

that are settled.  If you want advice, your aunt is the person.

However, if you must air your opinions--"

"To-night, then, daddy!"

He made an angry but conceivably an assenting noise, and then

Ramage glanced back and stopped, saluted elaborately, and waited

for them to come up.  He was a square-faced man of nearly fifty,

with iron-gray hair a mobile, clean-shaven mouth and rather

protuberant black eyes that now scrutinized Ann Veronica.  He

dressed rather after the fashion of the West End than the City,

and affected a cultured urbanity that somehow disconcerted and

always annoyed Ann Veronica's father extremely.  He did not play

golf, but took his exercise on horseback, which was also

unsympathetic.

"Stuffy these trees make the Avenue," said Mr. Stanley as they

drew alongside, to account for his own ruffled and heated

expression.  "They ought to have been lopped in the spring."

"There's plenty of time," said Ramage.  "Is Miss Stanley coming

up with us?"

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

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

Mr. Stanley wanted to object strongly, but as he could not

immediately think how to put it, he contented himself with a

grunt, and the motion was carried. "How's Mrs. Ramage?" he asked.

"Very much as usual," said Ramage.  "She finds lying up so much

very irksome.  But, you see, she HAS to lie up."

The topic of his invalid wife bored him, and he turned at once to

Ann Veronica.  "And where are YOU going?" he said.  "Are you

going on again this winter with that scientific work of yours?

It's an instance of heredity, I suppose."  For a moment Mr.

Stanley almost liked Ramage.  "You're a biologist, aren't you?"

He began to talk of his own impressions of biology as a

commonplace magazine reader who had to get what he could from the

monthly reviews, and was glad to meet with any information from

nearer the fountainhead. In a little while he and she were

talking quite easily and agreeably.  They went on talking in the

train--it seemed to her father a slight want of deference to

him--and he listened and pretended to read the Times.  He was

struck disagreeably by Ramage's air of gallant consideration and

Ann Veronica's self-possessed answers.  These things did not

harmonize with his conception of the forthcoming (if unavoidable)

interview.  After all, it came to him suddenly as a harsh

discovery that she might be in a sense regarded as grownup. He

was a man who in all things classified without nuance, and for

him there were in the matter of age just two feminine classes and

no more--girls and women. The distinction lay chiefly in the

right to pat their heads. But here was a girl--she must be a

girl, since she was his daughter and pat-able--imitating the

woman quite remarkably and cleverly.  He resumed his listening.

She was discussing one of those modern advanced plays with a

remarkable, with an extraordinary, confidence.

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

seemed too noisy."

The full significance of her words did not instantly appear to

him.  Then it dawned.  Good heavens!  She was discussing

love-making.  For a time he heard no more, and stared with stony

eyes at a Book-War proclamation in leaded type that filled half a

column of the Times that day.  Could she understand what she was

talking about?  Luckily it was a second-class carriage and the

ordinary fellow-travellers were not there. Everybody, he felt,

must be listening behind their papers.

Of course, girls repeat phrases and opinions of which they cannot

possibly understand the meaning.  But a middle-aged man like

Ramage ought to know better than to draw out a girl, the daughter

of a friend and neighbor. . . .

Well, after all, he seemed to be turning the subject. "Broddick

is a heavy man," he was saying, "and the main interest of the

play was the embezzlement." Thank Heaven!  Mr. Stanley allowed

his paper to drop a little, and scrutinized the hats and brows of

their three fellow-travellers .

They reached Wimbledon, and Ramage whipped out to hand Miss

Stanley to the platform as though she had been a duchess, and she

descended as though such attentions from middle-aged, but still

gallant, merchants were a matter of course.  Then, as Ramage

readjusted himself in a corner, he remarked:  "These young people

shoot up, Stanley.  It seems only yesterday that she was running

down the Avenue, all hair and legs."

Mr. Stanley regarded him through his glasses with something

approaching animosity.

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

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

Mr. Stanley regarded his neighbor's clean-shaven face almost

warily.  "I'm not sure whether we don't rather overdo all this

higher education," he said, with an effect of conveying profound

meanings.

Part 6

He became quite sure, by a sort of accumulation of reflection, as

the day wore on.  He found his youngest daughter intrusive in his

thoughts all through the morning, and still more so in the

afternoon.  He saw her young and graceful back as she descended

from the carriage, severely ignoring him, and recalled a glimpse

he had of her face, bright and serene, as his train ran out of

Wimbledon.  He recalled with exasperating perplexity her clear,

matter-of-fact tone as she talked about love-making being

unconvincing.  He was really very proud of her, and

extraordinarily angry and resentful at the innocent and audacious

self-reliance that seemed to intimate her sense of absolute

independence of him, her absolute security without him.  After

all, she only LOOKED a woman.  She was rash and ignorant,

absolutely inexperienced.  Absolutely.  He began to think of

speeches, very firm, explicit speeches, he would make.

He lunched in the Legal Club in Chancery Lane, and met Ogilvy.

Daughters were in the air that day. Ogilvy was full of a client's

trouble in that matter, a grave and even tragic trouble.  He told

some of the particulars.

"Curious case," said Ogilvy, buttering his bread and cutting it

up in a way he had.  "Curious case--and sets one thinking."

He resumed, after a mouthful:  "Here is a girl of sixteen or

seventeen, seventeen and a half to be exact, running about, as

one might say, in London.  Schoolgirl. Her family are solid West

End people, Kensington people.  Father--dead.  She goes out and

comes home. Afterward goes on to Oxford.  Twenty-one, twenty-two.

Why doesn't she marry?  Plenty of money under her father's will.

Charming girl."

He consumed Irish stew for some moments.

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

"Good God!" said Mr. Stanley.

"Good-looking rascal she met at Worthing.  Very romantic and all

that.  He fixed it."

"But--"

"He left her alone.  Pure romantic nonsense on her part.  Sheer

calculation on his.  Went up to Somerset House to examine the

will before he did it.  Yes.  Nice position."

"She doesn't care for him now?"

"Not a bit.  What a girl of sixteen cares for is hair and a high

color and moonlight and a tenor voice.  I suppose most of our

daughters would marry organ-grinders if they had a chance--at

that age.  My son wanted to marry a woman of thirty in a

tobacconist's shop.  Only a son's another story.  We fixed that.

Well, that's the situation.  My people don't know what to do.

Can't face a scandal.  Can't ask the gent to go abroad and

condone a bigamy.  He misstated her age and address; but you

can't get home on him for a thing like that. . . .  There you

are!  Girl spoilt for life.  Makes one want to go back to the

Oriental system!"

Mr. Stanley poured wine.  "Damned Rascal!" he said.  "Isn't there

a brother to kick him?"

"Mere satisfaction," reflected Ogilvy.  "Mere sensuality.  I

rather think they have kicked him, from the tone of some of the

letters.  Nice, of course.  But it doesn't alter the situation."

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

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

them off."

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

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

much."

"Yes. That's about the beginning.  It's these damned novels.  All

this torrent of misleading, spurious stuff that pours from the

press.  These sham ideals and advanced notions.  Women who Dids,

and all that kind of thing. . . ."

Ogilvy reflected.  "This girl--she's really a very charming,

frank person--had had her imagination fired, so she told me, by a

school performance of Romeo and Juliet."

Mr. Stanley decided to treat that as irrelevant.  "There ought to

be a Censorship of Books.  We want it badly at the present time.

Even WITH the Censorship of Plays there's hardly a decent thing

to which a man can take his wife and daughters, a creeping taint

of suggestion everywhere.  What would it be without that

safeguard?"

Ogilvy pursued his own topic.  "I'm inclined to think, Stanley,

myself that as a matter of fact it was the expurgated Romeo and

Juliet did the mischief.  If our young person hadn't had the

nurse part cut out, eh? She might have known more and done less.

I was curious about that.  All they left it was the moon and

stars.  And the balcony and 'My Romeo!' "

"Shakespeare is altogether different from the modern stuff.

Altogether different.  I'm not discussing Shakespeare.  I don't

want to Bowdlerize Shakespeare.  I'm not that sort I quite agree.

But this modern miasma--"

Mr. Stanley took mustard savagely.

"Well, we won't go into Shakespeare," said Ogilvy "What interests

me is that our young women nowadays are running about as free as

air practically, with registry offices and all sorts of

accommodation round the corner.  Nothing to check their

proceedings but a declining habit of telling the truth and the

limitations of their imaginations.  And in that respect they stir

up one another.  Not my affair, of course, but I think we ought

to teach them more or restrain them more. One or the other.

They're too free for their innocence or too innocent for their

freedom.  That's my point. Are you going to have any apple-tart,

Stanley?  The apple-tart's been very good lately--very good!"

Part 7

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

Her father looked at her over his glasses and spoke with grave

deliberation; "If there is anything you want to say to me," he

said, "you must say it in the study.  I am going to smoke a

little here, and then I shall go to the study.  I don't see what

you can have to say.  I should have thought my note cleared up

everything.  There are some papers I have to look through

to-night--important papers."

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

"I don't see, Mollie," he remarked, taking a cigar from the box

on the table as his sister and daughter rose, "why you and Vee

shouldn't discuss this little affair--whatever it is--without

bothering me."

It was the first time this controversy had become triangular, for

all three of them were shy by habit.

He stopped in mid-sentence, and Ann Veronica opened the door for

her aunt.  The air was thick with feelings. Her aunt went out of

the room with dignity and a rustle, and up-stairs to the fastness

of her own room.  She agreed entirely with her brother.  It

distressed and confused her that the girl should not come to her.

It seemed to show a want of affection, to be a deliberate and

unmerited disregard, to justify the reprisal of being hurt.

When Ann Veronica came into the study she found every evidence of

a carefully foreseen grouping about the gas fire.  Both

arm-chairs had been moved a little so as to face each other on

either side of the fender, and in the circular glow of the

green-shaded lamp there lay, conspicuously waiting, a thick

bundle of blue and white papers tied with pink tape.  Her father

held some printed document in his hand, and appeared not to

observe her entry.  "Sit down," he said, and perused--"perused"

is the word for it--for some moments.  Then he put the paper by.

"And what is it all about, Veronica?" he asked, with a deliberate

note of irony, looking at her a little quizzically over his

glasses.

Ann Veronica looked bright and a little elated, and she

disregarded her father's invitation to be seated. She stood on

the mat instead, and looked down on him. "Look here, daddy," she

said, in a tone of great reasonableness, "I MUST go to that

dance, you know."

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

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

reason why I shouldn't."

"You see I do."

"Why shouldn't I go?"

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

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

"And it's entirely out of order; it isn't right, it isn't

correct; it's impossible for you to stay in an hotel in

London--the idea is preposterous.  I can't imagine what possessed

you, Veronica."

He put his head on one side, pulled down the corners of his

mouth, and looked at her over his glasses.

"But why is it preposterous?" asked Ann Veronica, and fiddled

with a pipe on the mantel.

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

"You see, daddy, I don't think it IS preposterous. That's really

what I want to discuss.  It comes to this--am I to be trusted to

take care of myself, or am I not?"

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

"I think I am."

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

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

think that's fair."

"Your ideas of fairness--" he remarked, and discontinued that

sentence.  "My dear girl," he said, in a tone of patient

reasonableness, "you are a mere child. You know nothing of life,

nothing of its dangers, nothing of its possibilities.  You think

everything is harmless and simple, and so forth.  It isn't.  It

isn't.  That's where you go wrong.  In some things, in many

things, you must trust to your elders, to those who know more of

life than you do.  Your aunt and I have discussed all this

matter.  There it is.  You can't go."

The conversation hung for a moment.  Ann Veronica tried to keep

hold of a complicated situation and not lose her head.  She had

turned round sideways, so as to look down into the fire.

"You see, father," she said, "it isn't only this affair of the

dance.  I want to go to that because it's a new experience,

because I think it will be interesting and give me a view of

things.  You say I know nothing.  That's probably true.  But how

am I to know of things?"

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

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

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

pink tape.

"Well, I do.  It's just that I want to say.  I want to be a human

being; I want to learn about things and know about things, and

not to be protected as something too precious for life, cooped up

in one narrow little corner."

"Cooped up!" he cried.  "Did I stand in the way of your going to

college?  Have I ever prevented you going about at any reasonable

hour?  You've got a bicycle!"

"H'm!" said Ann Veronica, and then went on "I want to be taken

seriously.  A girl--at my age--is grown-up.  I want to go on with

my University work under proper conditions, now that I've done

the Intermediate.  It isn't as though I haven't done well.  I've

never muffed an exam.  yet.  Roddy muffed two. . . ."

Her father interrupted.  "Now look here, Veronica, let us be

plain with each other.  You are not going to that infidel

Russell's classes.  You are not going anywhere but to the

Tredgold College.  I've thought that out, and you must make up

your mind to it.  All sorts of considerations come in.  While you

live in my house you must follow my ideas.  You are wrong even

about that man's scientific position and his standard of work.

There are men in the Lowndean who laugh at him--simply laugh at

him.  And I have seen work by his pupils myself that struck me as

being--well, next door to shameful.  There's stories, too, about

his demonstrator, Capes Something or other.  The kind of man

who isn't content with his science, and writes articles in the

monthly reviews.  Anyhow, there it is: YOU ARE NOT GOING THERE."

The girl received this intimation in silence.  but the face that

looked down upon the gas fire took an expression of obstinacy

that brought out a hitherto latent resemblance between parent and

child.  When she spoke, her lips twitched.

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

"It seems the natural course "

"And do nothing?"

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

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

He raised his eyebrows in mild appeal.  His foot tapped

impatiently, and he took up the papers.

"Look here, father," she said, with a change in her voice,

"suppose I won't stand it?"

He regarded her as though this was a new idea.

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

"You won't."

"Well"--her breath failed her for a moment.  "How would you

prevent it?" she asked.

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

"Yes, I know.  But suppose I go?"

"Now, Veronica!  No, no.  This won't do.  Understand me!  I

forbid it.  I do not want to hear from you even the threat of

disobedience."  He spoke loudly. "The thing is forbidden!"

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

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

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

flushed and obstinate.

She was trying by some wonderful, secret, and motionless

gymnastics to restrain her tears.  But when she spoke her lips

quivered, and they came.  "I mean to go to that dance!" she

blubbered.  "I mean to go to that dance!  I meant to reason with

you, but you won't reason.  You're dogmatic."

At the sight of her tears his expression changed to a mingling of

triumph and concern.  He stood up, apparently intending to put an

arm about her, but she stepped back from him quickly.  She

produced a handkerchief, and with one sweep of this and a

simultaneous gulp had abolished her fit of weeping.  His voice

now had lost its ironies.

"Now, Veronica," he pleaded, "Veronica, this is most

unreasonable.  All we do is for your good.  Neither your aunt nor

I have any other thought but what is best for you."

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

Mr. Stanley lost patience.  He bullied frankly.

"What nonsense is this?  What raving!  My dear child, you DO

live, you DO exist!  You have this home. You have friends,

acquaintances, social standing, brothers and sisters, every

advantage!  Instead of which, you want to go to some mixed

classes or other and cut up rabbits and dance about at nights in

wild costumes with casual art student friends and God knows who.

That--that isn't living!  You are beside yourself.  You don't

know what you ask nor what you say.  You have neither reason nor

logic.  I am sorry to seem to hurt you, but all I say is for your

good.  You MUST not, you SHALL not go.  On this I am resolved.  I

put my foot down like--like adamant.  And a time will come,

Veronica, mark my words, a time will come when you will bless me

for my firmness to-night.  It goes to my heart to disappoint you,

but this thing must not be."

He sidled toward her, but she recoiled from him, leaving him in

possession of the hearth-rug.

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

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

She affected not to hear.

The door closed softly upon her.  For a long time he remained

standing before the fire, staring at the situation.  Then he sat

down and filled his pipe slowly and thoughtfully. . . .

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

CHAPTER THE SECOND

ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW

Part 1

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

Constance Widgett.

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

"You are making your dress?"

"Such as it is."

They were in the elder Widgett girl's bedroom; Hetty was laid up,

she said, with a sprained ankle, and a miscellaneous party was

gossiping away her tedium.  It was a large, littered,

self-forgetful apartment, decorated with unframed charcoal

sketches by various incipient masters; and an open bookcase,

surmounted by plaster casts and the half of a human skull,

displayed an odd miscellany of books--Shaw and Swinburne, Tom

Jones, Fabian Essays, Pope and Dumas, cheek by jowl. Constance

Widgett's abundant copper-red hair was bent down over some dimly

remunerative work--stencilling in colors upon rough, white

material--at a kitchen table she had dragged up-stairs for the

purpose, while on her bed there was seated a slender lady of

thirty or so in a dingy green dress, whom Constance had

introduced with a wave of her hand as Miss Miniver.  Miss Miniver

looked out on the world through large emotional blue eyes that

were further magnified by the glasses she wore, and her nose was

pinched and pink, and her mouth was whimsically petulant.  Her

glasses moved quickly as her glance travelled from face to face.

She seemed bursting with the desire to talk, and watching for her

opportunity.  On her lapel was an ivory button, bearing the words

"Votes for Women."  Ann Veronica sat at the foot of the

sufferer's bed, while Teddy Widgett, being something of an

athlete, occupied the only bed-room chair--a decadent piece,

essentially a tripod and largely a formality--and smoked

cigarettes, and tried to conceal the fact that he was looking all

the time at Ann Veronica's eyebrows.  Teddy was the hatless young

man who had turned Ann Veronica aside from the Avenue two days

before.  He was the junior of both his sisters, co-educated and

much broken in to feminine society.  A bowl of roses, just

brought by Ann Veronica, adorned the communal dressing-table, and

Ann Veronica was particularly trim in preparation for a call she

was to make with her aunt later in the afternoon.

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

"forbidden to come."

"Hul-LO!" said Hetty, turning her head on the pillow; and Teddy

remarked with profound emotion, "My God!"

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

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

affairs.

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

"Why?" asked Hetty.

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

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

great intensity.

"Yes.  I tried to have it out with him, but he wouldn't have it

out.  "Ann Veronica reflected for an instant "That's why I think

I ought to come."

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

"We always have things out with OUR father, poor dear!" said

Hetty.  "He's got almost to like it."

"Men," said Miss Miniver, "NEVER have a reason. Never!  And they

don't know it!  They have no idea of it.  It's one of their worst

traits, one of their very worst."

"But I say, Vee," said Constance, "if you come and you are

forbidden to come there'll be the deuce of a row."

Ann Veronica was deciding for further confidences. Her situation

was perplexing her very much, and the Widgett atmosphere was lax

and sympathetic, and provocative of discussion.  "It isn't only

the dance," she said.

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

"There's the whole situation.  Apparently I'm not to exist yet.

I'm not to study, I'm not to grow.  I've got to stay at home and

remain in a state of suspended animation."

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

"Until you marry, Vee," said Hetty.

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

"Thousands of women have married merely for freedom," said Miss

Miniver.  "Thousands!  Ugh!  And found it a worse slavery."

"I suppose," said Constance, stencilling away at bright pink

petals, "it's our lot.  But it's very beastly."

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

"Slavery!  Downtroddenness!  When I think of it I feel all over

boot marks--men's boots.  We hide it bravely, but so it is.

Damn!  I've splashed."

Miss Miniver's manner became impressive.  She addressed Ann

Veronica with an air of conveying great open secrets to her.  "As

things are at present," she said, "it is true.  We live under

man-made institutions, and that is what they amount to.  Every

girl in the world practically, except a few of us who teach or

type-write, and then we're underpaid and sweated--it's dreadful

to think how we are sweated!"  She had lost her generalization,

whatever it was.  She hung for a moment, and then went on,

conclusively, "Until we have the vote that is how things WILL

be."

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

"I suppose a girl MUST be underpaid and sweated," said Ann

Veronica.  "I suppose there's no way of getting a decent

income--independently."

"Women have practically NO economic freedom," said Miss Miniver,

"because they have no political freedom. Men have seen to that.

The one profession, the one decent profession, I mean, for a

woman--except the stage--is teaching, and there we trample on one

another. Everywhere else--the law, medicine, the Stock

Exchange--prejudice bars us."

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

"Every one hasn't the Gift.  Even there a woman never gets a fair

chance.  Men are against her.  Whatever she does is minimized.

All the best novels have been written by women, and yet see how

men sneer at the lady novelist still!  There's only one way to

get on for a woman, and that is to please men.  That is what they

think we are for!"

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

But Miss Miniver took no notice of his admission.

"Of course," said Miss Miniver--she went on in a regularly

undulating voice--"we DO please men.  We have that gift.  We can

see round them and behind them and through them, and most of us

use that knowledge, in the silent way we have, for our great

ends. Not all of us, but some of us.  Too many.  I wonder what

men would say if we threw the mask aside--if we really told them

what WE thought of them, really showed them what WE were."  A

flush of excitement crept into her cheeks.

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

From that she opened out into a long, confused emphatic discourse

on the position of women, full of wonderful statements, while

Constance worked at her stencilling and Ann Veronica and Hetty

listened, and Teddy contributed sympathetic noises and consumed

cheap cigarettes.  As she talked she made weak little gestures

with her hands, and she thrust her face forward from her bent

shoulders; and she peered sometimes at Ann Veronica and sometimes

at a photograph of the Axenstrasse, near Fluelen, that hung upon

the wall.  Ann Veronica watched her face, vaguely sympathizing

with her, vaguely disliking her physical insufficiency and her

convulsive movements, and the fine eyebrows were knit with a

faint perplexity.  Essentially the talk was a mixture of

fragments of sentences heard, of passages read, or arguments

indicated rather than stated, and all of it was served in a sauce

of strange enthusiasm, thin yet intense.  Ann Veronica had had

some training at the Tredgold College in disentangling threads

from confused statements, and she had a curious persuasion that

in all this fluent muddle there was something--something real,

something that signified.  But it was very hard to follow. She

did not understand the note of hostility to men that ran through

it all, the bitter vindictiveness that lit Miss Miniver's cheeks

and eyes, the sense of some at last insupportable wrong slowly

accumulated.  She had no inkling of that insupportable wrong.

"We are the species," said Miss Miniver, "men are only incidents.

They give themselves airs, but so it is. In all the species of

animals the females are more important than the males; the males

have to please them. Look at the cock's feathers, look at the

competition there is everywhere, except among humans.  The stags

and oxen and things all have to fight for us, everywhere. Only in

man is the male made the most important.  And that happens

through our maternity; it's our very importance that degrades us.

While we were minding the children they stole our rights and

liberties.  The children made us slaves, and the men took

advantage of it.  It's --Mrs. Shalford says--the accidental

conquering the essential.  Originally in the first animals there

were no males, none at all.  It has been proved.  Then they

appear among the lower things"--she made meticulous gestures to

figure the scale of life; she seemed to be holding up specimens,

and peering through her glasses at them--"among crustaceans and

things, just as little creatures, ever so inferior to the

females.  Mere hangers on.  Things you would laugh at.  And among

human beings, too, women to begin with were the rulers and

leaders; they owned all the property, they invented all the arts.

The primitive government was the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate!

The Lords of Creation just ran about and did what they were

told."

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

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

professors."

"But how did they prove it?"

"By science," said Miss Miniver, and hurried on, putting out a

rhetorical hand that showed a slash of finger through its glove.

"And now, look at us!  See what we have become.  Toys!  Delicate

trifles!  A sex of invalids.  It is we who have become the

parasites and toys."

It was, Ann Veronica felt, at once absurd and extraordinarily

right.  Hetty, who had periods of lucid expression, put the thing

for her from her pillow.  She charged boldly into the space of

Miss Miniver's rhetorical pause.

"It isn't quite that we're toys.  Nobody toys with me.  Nobody

regards Constance or Vee as a delicate trifle."

Teddy made some confused noise, a thoracic street row; some

remark was assassinated by a rival in his throat and buried

hastily under a cough.

"They'd better not," said Hetty.  "The point is we're not toys,

toys isn't the word; we're litter.  We're handfuls.  We're

regarded as inflammable litter that mustn't be left about.  We

are the species, and maternity is our game; that's all right, but

nobody wants that admitted for fear we should all catch fire, and

set about fulfilling the purpose of our beings without waiting

for further explanations.  As if we didn't know!  The practical

trouble is our ages.  They used to marry us off at seventeen,

rush us into things before we had time to protest.  They don't

now.  Heaven knows why!  They don't marry most of us off now

until high up in the twenties.  And the age gets higher.  We have

to hang about in the interval.  There's a great gulf opened, and

nobody's got any plans what to do with us.  So the world is

choked with waste and waiting daughters. Hanging about!  And they

start thinking and asking questions, and begin to be neither one

thing nor the other.  We're partly human beings and partly

females in suspense."

Miss Miniver followed with an expression of perplexity, her mouth

shaped to futile expositions.  The Widgett method of thought

puzzled her weakly rhetorical mind. "There is no remedy, girls,"

she began, breathlessly, "except the Vote.  Give us that--"

Ann Veronica came in with a certain disregard of Miss Miniver.

"That's it," she said.  "They have no plans for us.  They have no

ideas what to do with us."

"Except," said Constance, surveying her work with her head on one

side, "to keep the matches from the litter."

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

"We will," said Miss Miniver, refusing to be suppressed, "if some

of us have to be killed to get it."  And she pressed her lips

together in white resolution and nodded, and she was manifestly

full of that same passion for conflict and self-sacrifice that

has given the world martyrs since the beginning of things.  "I

wish I could make every woman, every girl, see this as clearly as

I see it--just what the Vote means to us.  Just what it means. .

. ."

Part 2

As Ann Veronica went back along the Avenue to her aunt she became

aware of a light-footed pursuer running. Teddy overtook her, a

little out of breath, his innocent face flushed, his

straw-colored hair disordered. He was out of breath, and spoke in

broken sentences.

"I say, Vee.  Half a minute, Vee.  It's like this: You want

freedom.  Look here.  You know--if you want freedom.  Just an

idea of mine.  You know how those Russian students do?  In

Russia.  Just a formal marriage.  Mere formality.  Liberates the

girl from parental control.  See?  You marry me.  Simply.  No

further responsibility whatever.  Without hindrance--present

occupation.  Why not?  Quite willing.  Get a license--just an

idea of mine.  Doesn't matter a bit to me.  Do anything to please

you, Vee.  Anything. Not fit to be dust on your boots.

Still--there you are!"

He paused.

Ann Veronica's desire to laugh unrestrainedly was checked by the

tremendous earnestness of his expression. "Awfully good of you,

Teddy." she said.

He nodded silently, too full for words.

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

present situation."

"No!  Well, I just suggested it.  Threw it out.  Of course, if at

any time--see reason--alter your opinion. Always at your service.

No offence, I hope.  All right! I'm off.  Due to play hockey.

Jackson's.  Horrid snorters! So long, Vee!  Just suggested it.

See?  Nothing really.  Passing thought."

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

"Oh, quite!" said Teddy, convulsively, and lifted an imaginary

hat and left her.

Part 3

The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that afternoon had at

first much the same relation to the Widgett conversation that a

plaster statue of Mr. Gladstone would have to a carelessly

displayed interior on a dissecting-room table.  The Widgetts

talked with a remarkable absence of external coverings; the

Palsworthys found all the meanings of life on its surfaces.  They

seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica's wrappered

world.  The Widgett mental furniture was perhaps worn and shabby,

but there it was before you, undisguised, fading visibly in an

almost pitiless sunlight.  Lady Palsworthy was the widow of a

knight who had won his spurs in the wholesale coal trade, she was

of good seventeenth-century attorney blood, a county family, and

distantly related to Aunt Mollie's deceased curate.  She was the

social leader of Morningside Park, and in her superficial and

euphuistic way an extremely kind and pleasant woman.  With her

lived a Mrs. Pramlay, a sister of the Morningside Park doctor,

and a very active and useful member of the Committee of the

Impoverished Gentlewomen's Aid Society.  Both ladies were on easy

and friendly terms with all that was best in Morningside Park

society; they had an afternoon once a month that was quite well

attended, they sometimes gave musical evenings, they dined out

and gave a finish to people's dinners, they had a full-sized

croquet lawn and tennis beyond, and understood the art of

bringing people together.  And they never talked of anything at

all, never discussed, never even encouraged gossip.  They were

just nice.

Ann Veronica found herself walking back down the Avenue that had

just been the scene of her first proposal beside her aunt, and

speculating for the first time in her life about that lady's

mental attitudes.  Her prevailing effect was one of quiet and

complete assurance, as though she knew all about everything, and

was only restrained by her instinctive delicacy from telling what

she knew.  But the restraint exercised by her instinctive

delicacy was very great; over and above coarse or sexual matters

it covered religion and politics and any mention of money matters

or crime, and Ann Veronica found herself wondering whether these

exclusions represented, after all, anything more than

suppressions.  Was there anything at all in those locked rooms of

her aunt's mind?  Were they fully furnished and only a little

dusty and cobwebby and in need of an airing, or were they stark

vacancy except, perhaps, for a cockroach or so or the gnawing of

a rat?  What was the mental equivalent of a rat's gnawing?  The

image was going astray.  But what would her aunt think of Teddy's

recent off-hand suggestion of marriage?  What would she think of

the Widgett conversation?  Suppose she was to tell her aunt

quietly but firmly about the parasitic males of degraded

crustacea.  The girl suppressed a chuckle that would have been

inexplicable.

There came a wild rush of anthropological lore into her brain, a

flare of indecorous humor.  It was one of the secret troubles of

her mind, this grotesque twist her ideas would sometimes take, as

though they rebelled and rioted.  After all, she found herself

reflecting, behind her aunt's complacent visage there was a past

as lurid as any one's--not, of course, her aunt's own personal

past, which was apparently just that curate and almost incredibly

jejune, but an ancestral past with all sorts of scandalous things

in it: fire and slaughterings, exogamy, marriage by capture,

corroborees, cannibalism! Ancestresses with perhaps dim

anticipatory likenesses to her aunt, their hair less neatly done,

no doubt, their manners and gestures as yet undisciplined, but

still ancestresses in the direct line, must have danced through a

brief and stirring life in the woady buff.  Was there no echo

anywhere in Miss Stanley's pacified brain? Those empty rooms, if

they were empty, were the equivalents of astoundingly decorated

predecessors.  Perhaps it was just as well there was no inherited

memory.

Ann Veronica was by this time quite shocked at her own thoughts,

and yet they would go on with their freaks.  Great vistas of

history opened, and she and her aunt were near reverting to the

primitive and passionate and entirely indecorous arboreal--were

swinging from branches by the arms, and really going on quite

dread-fully--when their arrival at the Palsworthys' happily

checked this play of fancy, and brought Ann Veronica back to the

exigencies of the wrappered life again.

Lady Palsworthy liked Ann Veronica because she was never awkward,

had steady eyes, and an almost invariable neatness and dignity in

her clothes.  She seemed just as stiff and shy as a girl ought to

be, Lady Palsworthy thought, neither garrulous nor unready, and

free from nearly all the heavy aggressiveness, the overgrown,

overblown quality, the egotism and want of consideration of the

typical modern girl.  But then Lady Palsworthy had never seen Ann

Veronica running like the wind at hockey.  She had never seen her

sitting on tables nor heard her discussing theology, and had

failed to observe that the graceful figure was a natural one and

not due to ably chosen stays.  She took it for granted Ann

Veronica wore stays--mild stays, perhaps, but stays, and thought

no more of the matter.  She had seen her really only at teas,

with the Stanley strain in her uppermost.  There are so many

girls nowadays who are quite unpresentable at tea, with their

untrimmed laughs, their awful dispositions of their legs when

they sit down, their slangy disrespect; they no longer smoke, it

is true, like the girls of the eighties and nineties,

nevertheless to a fine intelligence they have the flavor of

tobacco.  They have no amenities, they scratch the mellow surface

of things almost as if they did it on purpose; and Lady

Palsworthy and Mrs. Pramlay lived for amenities and the mellowed

surfaces of things.  Ann Veronica was one of the few young

people--and one must have young people just as one must have

flowers--one could ask to a little gathering without the risk of

a painful discord.  Then the distant relationship to Miss Stanley

gave them a slight but pleasant sense of proprietorship in the

girl. They had their little dreams about her.

Mrs. Pramlay received them in the pretty chintz drawing-room,

which opened by French windows on the trim garden, with its

croquet lawn, its tennis-net in the middle distance, and its

remote rose alley lined with smart dahlias and flaming

sunflowers.  Her eye met Miss Stanley's understandingly, and she

was if anything a trifle more affectionate in her greeting to Ann

Veronica.  Then Ann Veronica passed on toward the tea in the

garden, which was dotted with the elite of Morningside Park

society, and there she was pounced upon by Lady Palsworthy and

given tea and led about.  Across the lawn and hovering

indecisively, Ann Veronica saw and immediately affected not to

see Mr. Manning, Lady Palsworthy's nephew, a tall young man of

seven-and-thirty with a handsome, thoughtful, impassive face, a

full black mustache, and a certain heavy luxuriousness of

gesture.  The party resolved itself for Ann Veronica into a game

in which she manoeuvred unostentatiously and finally

unsuccessfully to avoid talking alone with this gentleman.

Mr. Manning had shown on previous occasions that he found Ann

Veronica interesting and that he wished to interest her.  He was

a civil servant of some standing, and after a previous

conversation upon aesthetics of a sententious, nebulous, and

sympathetic character, he had sent her a small volume, which he

described as the fruits of his leisure and which was as a matter

of fact rather carefully finished verse.  It dealt with fine

aspects of Mr. Manning's feelings, and as Ann Veronica's mind was

still largely engaged with fundamentals and found no pleasure in

metrical forms, she had not as yet cut its pages.  So that as she

saw him she remarked to herself very faintly but definitely, "Oh,

golly!" and set up a campaign of avoidance that Mr. Manning at

last broke down by coming directly at her as she talked with the

vicar's aunt about some of the details of the alleged smell of

the new church lamps.  He did not so much cut into this

conversation as loom over it, for he was a tall, if rather

studiously stooping, man.

The face that looked down upon Ann Veronica was full of amiable

intention.  "Splendid you are looking to-day, Miss Stanley," he

said.  "How well and jolly you must be feeling."

He beamed over the effect of this and shook hands with effusion,

and Lady Palsworthy suddenly appeared as his confederate and

disentangled the vicar's aunt.

"I love this warm end of summer more than words can tell," he

said.  "I've tried to make words tell it. It's no good.  Mild,

you know, and boon.  You want music."

Ann Veronica agreed, and tried to make the manner of her assent

cover a possible knowledge of a probable poem.

"Splendid it must be to be a composer.  Glorious! The Pastoral.

Beethoven; he's the best of them. Don't you think?  Tum, tay,

tum, tay."

Ann Veronica did.

"What have you been doing since our last talk? Still cutting up

rabbits and probing into things?  I've often thought of that talk

of ours--often."

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

"Often," he repeated, a little heavily.

"Beautiful these autumn flowers are," said Ann Veronica, in a

wide, uncomfortable pause.

"Do come and see the Michaelmas daisies at the end of the

garden," said Mr. Manning, "they're a dream." And Ann Veronica

found herself being carried off to an isolation even remoter and

more conspicuous than the corner of the lawn, with the whole of

the party aiding and abetting and glancing at them.  "Damn!" said

Ann Veronica to herself, rousing herself for a conflict.

Mr. Manning told her he loved beauty, and extorted a similar

admission from her; he then expatiated upon his own love of

beauty.  He said that for him beauty justified life, that he

could not imagine a good action that was not a beautiful one nor

any beautiful thing that could be altogether bad.  Ann Veronica

hazarded an opinion that as a matter of history some very

beautiful people had, to a quite considerable extent, been bad,

but Mr. Manning questioned whether when they were bad they were

really beautiful or when they were beautiful bad.  Ann Veronica

found her attention wandering a little as he told her that he was

not ashamed to feel almost slavish in the presence of really

beautiful people, and then they came to the Michaelmas daisies.

They were really very fine and abundant, with a blaze of

perennial sunflowers behind them.

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

the arm.

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

controversial matter.

"Either I want to shout," said Mr. Manning, "when I see beautiful

things, or else I want to weep."  He paused and looked at her,

and said, with a sudden drop into a confidential undertone, "Or

else I want to pray."

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

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

"I thought it was earlier," said Ann Veronica.  "Wasn't

Parliament to reassemble?"

He put out his hand and leaned against a tree and crossed his

legs.  "You're not interested in politics?" he asked, almost with

a note of protest.

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

interesting."

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

decline and decline."

"I'm curious.  Perhaps because I don't know.  I suppose an

intelligent person OUGHT to be interested in political affairs.

They concern us all."

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

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

"A sort of history," said Mr. Manning; and repeated, "a sort of

history.  But look at these glorious daisies!"

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

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

are to you."

Ann Veronica turned her back on the Michaelmas daisies, and faced

toward the house with an air of a duty completed.

"Just come to that seat now you are here, Miss Stanley, and look

down the other path; there's a vista of just the common sort.

Better even than these."

Ann Veronica walked as he indicated.

"You know I'm old-fashioned, Miss Stanley.  I don't think women

need to trouble about political questions."

"I want a vote," said Ann Veronica.

"Really!" said Mr. Manning, in an earnest voice, and waved his

hand to the alley of mauve and purple. "I wish you didn't."

"Why not?"  She turned on him.

"It jars.  It jars with all my ideas.  Women to me are something

so serene, so fine, so feminine, and politics are so dusty, so

sordid, so wearisome and quarrelsome. It seems to me a woman's

duty to be beautiful, to BE beautiful and to behave beautifully,

and politics are by their very nature ugly.  You see, I--I am a

woman worshipper.  I worshipped women long before I found any

woman I might ever hope to worship.  Long ago. And--the idea of

committees, of hustings, of agenda-papers!"

"I don't see why the responsibility of beauty should all be

shifted on to the women," said Ann Veronica, suddenly remembering

a part of Miss Miniver's discourse.

"It rests with them by the nature of things.  Why should you who

are queens come down from your thrones? If you can afford it, WE

can't.  We can't afford to turn our women, our Madonnas, our

Saint Catherines, our Mona Lisas, our goddesses and angels and

fairy princesses, into a sort of man.  Womanhood is sacred to me.

My politics in that matter wouldn't be to give women votes. I'm a

Socialist, Miss Stanley."

"WHAT?" said Ann Veronica, startled.

"A Socialist of the order of John Ruskin.  Indeed I am!  I would

make this country a collective monarchy, and all the girls and

women in it should be the Queen. They should never come into

contact with politics or economics--or any of those things.  And

we men would work for them and serve them in loyal fealty."

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

men neglect their duties."

"Yes," said Mr. Manning, with an air of emerging from an

elaborate demonstration, "and so each of us must, under existing

conditions, being chivalrous indeed to all women, choose for

himself his own particular and worshipful queen."

"So far as one can judge from the system in practice," said Ann

Veronica, speaking in a loud, common-sense, detached tone, and

beginning to walk slowly but resolutely toward the lawn, "it

doesn't work."

"Every one must be experimental," said Mr. Manning, and glanced

round hastily for further horticultural points of interest in

secluded corners.  None presented themselves to save him from

that return.

"That's all very well when one isn't the material experimented

upon," Ann Veronica had remarked.

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

influences, as inspirations."

Ann Veronica said nothing in answer to that.

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

"I think I ought to have one."

"Well, I have two," said Mr. Manning--"one in Oxford University

and one in Kensington."  He caught up and went on with a sort of

clumsiness:  "Let me present you with them and be your voter."

There followed an instant's pause, and then Ann Veronica had

decided to misunderstand.

"I want a vote for myself," she said.  "I don't see why I should

take it second-hand.  Though it's very kind of you.  And rather

unscrupulous.  Have you ever voted, Mr. Manning?  I suppose

there's a sort of place like a ticket-office.  And a

ballot-box--"  Her face assumed an expression of intellectual

conflict. "What is a ballot-box like, exactly?" she asked, as

though it was very important to her.

Mr. Manning regarded her thoughtfully for a moment and stroked

his mustache.  "A ballot-box, you know," he said, "is very

largely just a box."  He made quite a long pause, and went on,

with a sigh:  "You have a voting paper given you--"

They emerged into the publicity of the lawn.

"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "yes," to his explanation, and saw

across the lawn Lady Palsworthy talking to her aunt, and both of

them staring frankly across at her and Mr. Manning as they

talked.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

Part 1

Two days after came the day of the Crisis, the day of the Fadden

Dance.  It would have been a crisis anyhow, but it was

complicated in Ann Veronica's mind by the fact that a letter lay

on the breakfast-table from Mr. Manning, and that her aunt

focussed a brightly tactful disregard upon this throughout the

meal.  Ann Veronica had come down thinking of nothing in the

world but her inflexible resolution to go to the dance in the

teeth of all opposition.  She did not know Mr. Manning's

handwriting, and opened his letter and read some lines before its

import appeared.  Then for a time she forgot the Fadden affair

altogether.  With a well-simulated unconcern and a heightened

color she finished her breakfast.

She was not obliged to go to the Tredgold College, because as yet

the College had not settled down for the session.  She was

supposed to be reading at home, and after breakfast she strolled

into the vegetable garden, and having taken up a position upon

the staging of a disused greenhouse that had the double advantage

of being hidden from the windows of the house and secure from the

sudden appearance of any one, she resumed the reading of Mr.

Manning's letter.

Mr. Manning's handwriting had an air of being clear without being

easily legible; it was large and rather roundish, with a lack of

definition about the letters and a disposition to treat the large

ones as liberal-minded people nowadays treat opinions, as all

amounting to the same thing really--a years-smoothed boyish

rather than an adult hand.  And it filled seven sheets of

notepaper, each written only on one side.

"MY DEAR MISS STANLEY," it began,--"I hope you will forgive my

bothering you with a letter, but I have been thinking very much

over our conversation at Lady Palsworthy's, and I feel there are

things I want to say to you so much that I cannot wait until we

meet again.  It is the worst of talk under such social

circumstances that it is always getting cut off so soon as it is

beginning; and I went home that afternoon feeling I had said

nothing--literally nothing--of the things I had meant to say to

you and that were coursing through my head.  They were things I

had meant very much to talk to you about, so that I went home

vexed and disappointed, and only relieved myself a little by

writing a few verses.  I wonder if you will mind very much when I

tell you they were suggested by you.  You must forgive the poet's

license I take.  Here is one verse.  The metrical irregularity is

intentional, because I want, as it were, to put you apart: to

change the lilt and the mood altogether when I speak of you.

" 'A SONG OF LADIES AND MY LADY

" 'Saintly white and a lily is Mary,

Margaret's violets, sweet and shy;

Green and dewy is Nellie-bud fairy,

Forget-me-nots live in Gwendolen's eye.

Annabel shines like a star in the darkness,

Rosamund queens it a rose, deep rose;

But the lady I love is like sunshine in April weather,

She gleams and gladdens, she warms--and goes.'

"Crude, I admit.  But let that verse tell my secret.  All bad

verse--originally the epigram was Lang's, I believe--is written

in a state of emotion.

"My dear Miss Stanley, when I talked to you the other afternoon

of work and politics and such-like things, my mind was all the

time resenting it beyond measure.  There we were discussing

whether you should have a vote, and I remembered the last

occasion we met it was about your prospects of success in the

medical profession or as a Government official such as a number

of women now are, and all the time my heart was crying out within

me, 'Here is the Queen of your career.'  I wanted, as I have

never wanted before, to take you up, to make you mine, to carry

you off and set you apart from all the strain and turmoil of

life.  For nothing will ever convince me that it is not the man's

share in life to shield, to protect, to lead and toil and watch

and battle with the world at large.  I want to be your knight,

your servant, your protector, your--I dare scarcely write the

word--your husband.  So I come suppliant.  I am five-and-thirty,

and I have knocked about in the world and tasted the quality of

life.  I had a hard fight to begin with to win my way into the

Upper Division--I was third on a list of forty-seven--and since

then I have found myself promoted almost yearly in a widening

sphere of social service.  Before I met you I never met any one

whom I felt I could love, but you have discovered depths in my

own nature I had scarcely suspected.  Except for a few early

ebullitions of passion, natural to a warm and romantic

disposition, and leaving no harmful after-effects--ebullitions

that by the standards of the higher truth I feel no one can

justly cast a stone at, and of which I for one am by no means

ashamed--I come to you a pure and unencumbered man.  I love you.

In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property

and further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you

a life of wide and generous refinement, travel, books,

discussion, and easy relations with a circle of clever and

brilliant and thoughtful people with whom my literary work has

brought me into contact, and of which, seeing me only as you have

done alone in Morningside Park, you can have no idea. I have a

certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic, and I

belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of the

day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of

affairs, artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally,

mingle together in the easiest and most delightful intercourse.

That is my real milieu, and one that I am convinced you would not

only adorn but delight in.

"I find it very hard to write this letter.  There are so many

things I want to tell you, and they stand on such different

levels, that the effect is necessarily confusing and discordant,

and I find myself doubting if I am really giving you the thread

of emotion that should run through all this letter.  For although

I must confess it reads very much like an application or a

testimonial or some such thing as that, I can assure you I am

writing this in fear and trembling with a sinking heart.  My mind

is full of ideas and images that I have been cherishing and

accumulating--dreams of travelling side by side, of lunching

quietly together in some jolly restaurant, of moonlight and music

and all that side of life, of seeing you dressed like a queen and

shining in some brilliant throng--mine; of your looking at

flowers in some old-world garden, our garden--there are splendid

places to be got down in Surrey, and a little runabout motor is

quite within my means.  You know they say, as, indeed, I have

just quoted already, that all bad poetry is written in a state of

emotion, but I have no doubt that this is true of bad offers of

marriage.  I have often felt before that it is only when one has

nothing to say that one can write easy poetry.  Witness Browning.

And how can I get into one brief letter the complex accumulated

desires of what is now, I find on reference to my diary, nearly

sixteen months of letting my mind run on you--ever since that

jolly party at Surbiton, where we raced and beat the other boat.

You steered and I rowed stroke.  My very sentences stumble and

give way.  But I do not even care if I am absurd.  I am a

resolute man, and hitherto when I have wanted a thing I have got

it; but I have never yet wanted anything in my life as I have

wanted you.  It isn't the same thing.  I am afraid because I love

you, so that the mere thought of failure hurts.  If I did not

love you so much I believe I could win you by sheer force of

character, for people tell me I am naturally of the dominating

type.  Most of my successes in life have been made with a sort of

reckless vigor.

"Well, I have said what I had to say, stumblingly and badly, and

baldly.  But I am sick of tearing up letters and hopeless of

getting what I have to say better said.  It would be easy enough

for me to write an eloquent letter about something else.  Only I

do not care to write about anything else.  Let me put the main

question to you now that I could not put the other afternoon.

Will you marry me, Ann Veronica?

Very sincerely yours,

"HUBERT MANNING."

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

Her interest grew as she read, a certain distaste disappeared.

Twice she smiled, but not unkindly.  Then she went back and mixed

up the sheets in a search for particular passages.  Finally she

fell into reflection.

"Odd!" she said.  "I suppose I shall have to write an answer.

It's so different from what one has been led to expect."

She became aware of her aunt, through the panes of the

greenhouse, advancing with an air of serene unconsciousness from

among the raspberry canes.

"No you don't!" said Ann Veronica, and walked out at a brisk and

business-like pace toward the house.

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

"Alone, dear?"

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

Miss Stanley reflected as Ann Veronica went toward the house.

She thought her niece very hard and very self-possessed and

self-confident.  She ought to be softened and tender and

confidential at this phase of her life.  She seemed to have no

idea whatever of the emotional states that were becoming to her

age and position.  Miss Stanley walked round the garden thinking,

and presently house and garden reverberated to Ann Veronica's

slamming of the front door.

"I wonder!" said Miss Stanley.

For a long time she surveyed a row of towering holly-hocks, as

though they offered an explanation.  Then she went in and

up-stairs, hesitated on the landing, and finally, a little

breathless and with an air of great dignity, opened the door and

walked into Ann Veronica's room. It was a neat, efficient-looking

room, with a writing-table placed with a business-like regard to

the window, and a bookcase surmounted by a pig's skull, a

dissected frog in a sealed bottle, and a pile of shiny,

black-covered note-books.  In the corner of the room were two

hockey-sticks and a tennis-racket, and upon the walls Ann

Veronica, by means of autotypes, had indicated her proclivities

in art.  But Miss Stanley took no notice of these things.  She

walked straight across to the wardrobe and opened it.  There,

hanging among Ann Veronica's more normal clothing, was a skimpy

dress of red canvas, trimmed with cheap and tawdry braid, and

short--it could hardly reach below the knee. On the same peg and

evidently belonging to it was a black velvet Zouave jacket.  And

then! a garment that was conceivably a secondary skirt.

Miss Stanley hesitated, and took first one and then another of

the constituents of this costume off its peg and surveyed it.

The third item she took with a trembling hand by its waistbelt.

As she raised it, its lower portion fell apart into two baggy

crimson masses.

"TROUSERS!" she whispered.

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

chairs.

Tucked under the writing-table a pair of yellow and gold Turkish

slippers of a highly meretricious quality caught her eye.  She

walked over to them still carrying the trousers in her hands, and

stooped to examine them.  They were ingenious disguises of gilt

paper destructively gummed, it would seem, to Ann Veronicas' best

dancing-slippers.

Then she reverted to the trousers.

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

Part 2

Ann Veronica carried a light but business-like walking-stick.

She walked with an easy quickness down the Avenue and through the

proletarian portion of Morningside Park, and crossing these

fields came into a pretty overhung lane that led toward

Caddington and the Downs.  And then her pace slackened.  She

tucked her stick under her arm and re-read Manning's letter.

"Let me think," said Ann Veronica.  "I wish this hadn't turned up

to-day of all days."

She found it difficult to begin thinking, and indeed she was

anything but clear what it was she had to think about.

Practically it was most of the chief interests in life that she

proposed to settle in this pedestrian meditation.  Primarily it

was her own problem, and in particular the answer she had to give

to Mr. Manning's letter, but in order to get data for that she

found that she, having a logical and ordered mind, had to decide

upon the general relations of men to women, the objects and

conditions of marriage and its bearing upon the welfare of the

race, the purpose of the race, the purpose, if any, of

everything. . . .

"Frightful lot of things aren't settled," said Ann Veronica.  In

addition, the Fadden Dance business, all out of proportion,

occupied the whole foreground of her thoughts and threw a color

of rebellion over everything.  She kept thinking she was thinking

about Mr. Manning's proposal of marriage and finding she was

thinking of the dance.

For a time her efforts to achieve a comprehensive concentration

were dispersed by the passage of the village street of

Caddington, the passing of a goggled car-load of motorists, and

the struggles of a stable lad mounted on one recalcitrant horse

and leading another.  When she got back to her questions again in

the monotonous high-road that led up the hill, she found the

image of Mr. Manning central in her mind. He stood there, large

and dark, enunciating, in his clear voice from beneath his large

mustache, clear flat sentences, deliberately kindly.  He

proposed, he wanted to possess her!  He loved her.

Ann Veronica felt no repulsion at the prospect. That Mr. Manning

loved her presented itself to her bloodlessly, stilled from any

imaginative quiver or thrill of passion or disgust.  The

relationship seemed to have almost as much to do with blood and

body as a mortgage.  It was something that would create a mutual

claim, a relationship.  It was in another world from that in

which men will die for a kiss, and touching hands lights fires

that burn up lives--the world of romance, the world of

passionately beautiful things.

But that other world, in spite of her resolute exclusion of it,

was always looking round corners and peeping through chinks and

crannies, and rustling and raiding into the order in which she

chose to live, shining out of pictures at her, echoing in lyrics

and music; it invaded her dreams, it wrote up broken and

enigmatical sentences upon the passage walls of her mind.  She

was aware of it now as if it were a voice shouting outside a

house, shouting passionate verities in a hot sunlight, a voice

that cries while people talk insincerely in a darkened room and

pretend not to hear.  Its shouting now did in some occult manner

convey a protest that Mr. Manning would on no account do, though

he was tall and dark and handsome and kind, and thirty-five and

adequately prosperous, and all that a husband should be.  But

there was, it insisted, no mobility in his face, no movement,

nothing about him that warmed.  If Ann Veronica could have put

words to that song they would have been, "Hot-blooded marriage or

none!" but she was far too indistinct in this matter to frame any

words at all.

"I don't love him," said Ann Veronica, getting a gleam.  "I don't

see that his being a good sort matters. That really settles about

that. . . .  But it means no end of a row."

For a time she sat on a rail before leaving the road for the

downland turf.  "But I wish," she said, "I had some idea what I

was really up to."

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

a lark singing.

"Marriage and mothering," said Ann Veronica, with her mind

crystallizing out again as the lark dropped to the nest in the

turf.  "And all the rest of it perhaps is a song."

Part 3

Her mind got back to the Fadden Ball.

She meant to go, she meant to go, she meant to go. Nothing would

stop her, and she was prepared to face the consequences.  Suppose

her father turned her out of doors!  She did not care, she meant

to go.  She would just walk out of the house and go. . . .

She thought of her costume in some detail and with considerable

satisfaction, and particularly of a very jolly property dagger

with large glass jewels in the handle, that reposed in a drawer

in her room.  She was to be a Corsair's Bride.  "Fancy stabbing a

man for jealousy!" she thought.  "You'd have to think how to get

in between his bones."

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

her mind.

She tried to imagine the collective effect of the Fadden Ball;

she had never seen a fancy-dress gathering in her life.  Mr.

Manning came into her thoughts again, an unexpected, tall, dark,

self-contained presence at the Fadden.  One might suppose him

turning up; he knew a lot of clever people, and some of them

might belong to the class.  What would he come as?

Presently she roused herself with a guilty start from the task of

dressing and re-dressing Mr. Manning in fancy costume, as though

he was a doll.  She had tried him  as a Crusader, in which guise

he seemed plausible but heavy--"There IS something heavy about

him; I wonder if it's his mustache?"--and as a Hussar, which made

him preposterous, and as a Black Brunswicker, which was better,

and as an Arab sheik.  Also she had tried him as a dragoman and

as a gendarme, which seemed the most suitable of all to his

severely handsome, immobile profile.  She felt he would tell

people the way, control traffic, and refuse admission to public

buildings with invincible correctness and the very finest

explicit feelings possible.  For each costume she had devised a

suitable form of matrimonial refusal.  "Oh, Lord!" she said,

discovering what she was up to, and dropped lightly from the

fence upon the turf and went on her way toward the crest.

"I shall never marry," said Ann Veronica, resolutely; "I'm not

the sort.  That's why it's so important I should take my own line

now."

Part 4

Ann Veronica's ideas of marriage were limited and unsystematic.

Her teachers and mistresses had done their best to stamp her mind

with an ineradicable persuasion that it was tremendously

important, and on no account to be thought about.  Her first

intimations of marriage as a fact of extreme significance in a

woman's life had come with the marriage of Alice and the

elopement of her second sister, Gwen.

These convulsions occurred when Ann Veronica was about twelve.

There was a gulf of eight years between her and the youngest of

her brace of sisters--an impassable gulf inhabited chaotically by

two noisy brothers. These sisters moved in a grown-up world

inaccessible to Ann Veronica's sympathies, and to a large extent

remote from her curiosity.  She got into rows through meddling

with their shoes and tennis-rackets, and had moments of carefully

concealed admiration when she was privileged to see them just

before her bedtime, rather radiantly dressed in white or pink or

amber and prepared to go out with her mother.  She thought Alice

a bit of a sneak, an opinion her brothers shared, and Gwen rather

a snatch at meals.  She saw nothing of their love-making, and

came home from her boarding-school in a state of decently

suppressed curiosity for Alice's wedding.

Her impressions of this cardinal ceremony were rich and confused,

complicated by a quite transitory passion that awakened no

reciprocal fire for a fat curly headed cousin in black velveteen

and a lace collar, who assisted as a page.  She followed him

about persistently, and succeeded, after a brisk, unchivalrous

struggle (in which he pinched and asked her to "cheese it"), in

kissing him among the raspberries behind the greenhouse.

Afterward her brother Roddy, also strange in velveteen, feeling

rather than knowing of this relationship, punched this Adonis's

head.

A marriage in the house proved to be exciting but extremely

disorganizing.  Everything seemed designed to unhinge the mind

and make the cat wretched.  All the furniture was moved, all the

meals were disarranged, and everybody, Ann Veronica included,

appeared in new, bright costumes.  She had to wear cream and a

brown sash and a short frock and her hair down, and Gwen cream

and a brown sash and a long skirt and her hair up. And her

mother, looking unusually alert and hectic, wore cream and brown

also, made up in a more complicated manner.

Ann Veronica was much impressed by a mighty trying on and

altering and fussing about Alice's "things"--Alice was being

re-costumed from garret to cellar, with a walking-dress and

walking-boots to measure, and a bride's costume of the most

ravishing description, and stockings and such like beyond the

dreams of avarice --and a constant and increasing dripping into

the house of irrelevant remarkable objects, such as--

Real lace bedspread;

Gilt travelling clock;

Ornamental pewter plaque;

Salad bowl (silver mounted) and servers;

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

Etc., etc.

Through all this flutter of novelty there came and went a

solicitous, preoccupied, almost depressed figure. It was Doctor

Ralph, formerly the partner of Doctor Stickell in the Avenue, and

now with a thriving practice of his own in Wamblesmith.  He had

shaved his side-whiskers and come over in flannels, but he was

still indisputably the same person who had attended Ann Veronica

for the measles and when she swallowed the fish-bone.  But his

role was altered, and he was now playing the bridegroom in this

remarkable drama. Alice was going to be Mrs. Ralph.  He came in

apologetically; all the old "Well, and how ARE we?" note gone;

and once he asked Ann Veronica, almost furtively,

"How's Alice getting on, Vee?"  Finally, on the Day, he appeared

like his old professional self transfigured, in the most

beautiful light gray trousers Ann Veronica had ever seen and a

new shiny silk hat with a most becoming roll. . . .

It was not simply that all the rooms were rearranged and

everybody dressed in unusual fashions, and all the routines of

life abolished and put away: people's tempers and emotions also

seemed strangely disturbed and shifted about.  Her father was

distinctly irascible, and disposed more than ever to hide away

among the petrological things--the study was turned out.  At

table he carved in a gloomy but resolute manner.  On the Day he

had trumpet-like outbreaks of cordiality, varied by a watchful

preoccupation.  Gwen and Alice were fantastically friendly, which

seemed to annoy him, and Mrs. Stanley was throughout enigmatical,

with an anxious eye on her husband and Alice.

There was a confused impression of livery carriages and whips

with white favors, people fussily wanting other people to get in

before them, and then the church. People sat in unusual pews, and

a wide margin of hassocky emptiness intervened between the

ceremony and the walls.

Ann Veronica had a number of fragmentary impressions of Alice

strangely transfigured in bridal raiment. It seemed to make her

sister downcast beyond any precedent.  The bridesmaids and pages

got rather jumbled in the aisle, and she had an effect of Alice's

white back and sloping shoulders and veiled head receding toward

the altar.  In some incomprehensible way that back view made her

feel sorry for Alice.  Also she remembered very vividly the smell

of orange blossom, and Alice, drooping and spiritless, mumbling

responses, facing Doctor Ralph, while the Rev. Edward Bribble

stood between them with an open book.  Doctor Ralph looked kind

and large, and listened to Alice's responses as though he was

listening to symptoms and thought that on the whole she was

progressing favorably.

And afterward her mother and Alice kissed long and clung to each

other.  And Doctor Ralph stood by looking considerate.  He and

her father shook hands manfully.

Ann Veronica had got quite interested in Mr. Bribble's rendering

of the service--he had the sort of voice that brings out

things--and was still teeming with ideas about it when finally a

wild outburst from the organ made it clear that, whatever

snivelling there might be down in the chancel, that excellent

wind instrument was, in its Mendelssohnian way, as glad as ever

it could be. "Pump, pump, per-um-pump, Pum, Pump, Per-um. . . ."

The wedding-breakfast was for Ann Veronica a spectacle of the

unreal consuming the real; she liked that part very well, until

she was carelessly served against her expressed wishes with

mayonnaise.  She was caught by an uncle, whose opinion she

valued, making faces at Roddy because he had exulted at this.

Of the vast mass of these impressions Ann Veronica could make

nothing at the time; there they were--Fact! She stored them away

in a mind naturally retentive, as a squirrel stores away nuts,

for further digestion.  Only one thing emerged with any

reasonable clarity in her mind at once, and that was that unless

she was saved from drowning by an unmarried man, in which case

the ceremony is unavoidable, or totally destitute of under-

clothing, and so driven to get a trousseau, in which hardship a

trousseau would certainly be "ripping," marriage was an

experience to be strenuously evaded.

When they were going home she asked her mother why she and Gwen

and Alice had cried.

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

feeling, dear."

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

"Oh, ssh, Vee!" said her mother, with an evasion as patent as an

advertisement board.  "I am sure she will be very happy indeed

with Doctor Ralph."

But Ann Veronica was by no means sure of that until she went over

to Wamblesmith and saw her sister, very remote and domestic and

authoritative, in a becoming tea-gown, in command of Doctor

Ralph's home.  Doctor Ralph came in to tea and put his arm round

Alice and kissed her, and Alice called him "Squiggles," and stood

in the shelter of his arms for a moment with an expression of

satisfied proprietorship.  She HAD cried, Ann Veronica knew.

There had been fusses and scenes dimly apprehended through

half-open doors.  She had heard Alice talking and crying at the

same time, a painful noise.  Perhaps marriage hurt.  But now it

was all over, and Alice was getting on well.  It reminded Ann

Veronica of having a tooth stopped.

And after that Alice became remoter than ever, and, after a time,

ill.  Then she had a baby and became as old as any really

grown-up person, or older, and very dull.  Then she and her

husband went off to a Yorkshire practice, and had four more

babies, none of whom  photographed well, and so she passed beyond

the sphere of Ann Veronica's sympathies altogether.

Part 5

The Gwen affair happened when she was away at school at

Marticombe-on-Sea, a term before she went to the High School, and

was never very clear to her.

Her mother missed writing for a week, and then she wrote in an

unusual key.  "My dear," the letter ran, "I have to tell you that

your sister Gwen has offended your father very much.  I hope you

will always love her, but I want you to remember she has offended

your father and married without his consent.  Your father is very

angry, and will not have her name mentioned in his hearing.  She

has married some one he could not approve of, and gone right

away. . . ."

When the next holidays came Ann Veronica's mother was ill, and

Gwen was in the sick-room when Ann Veronica returned home.  She

was in one of her old walking-dresses, her hair was done in an

unfamiliar manner, she wore a wedding-ring, and she looked as if

she had been crying.

"Hello, Gwen!" said Ann Veronica, trying to put every one at

their ease.  "Been and married? . . . What's the name of the

happy man?"

Gwen owned to "Fortescue."

"Got a photograph of him or anything?" said Ann Veronica, after

kissing her mother.

Gwen made an inquiry, and, directed by Mrs. Stanley, produced a

portrait from its hiding-place in the jewel-drawer under the

mirror.  It presented a clean-shaven face with a large Corinthian

nose, hair tremendously waving off the forehead and more chin and

neck than is good for a man.

"LOOKS all right," said Ann Veronica, regarding him with her head

first on one side and then on the other, and trying to be

agreeable.  "What's the objection?"

"I suppose she ought to know?" said Gwen to her mother, trying to

alter the key of the conversation.

"You see, Vee," said Mrs. Stanley, "Mr. Fortescue is an actor,

and your father does not approve of the profession."

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

actors?"

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

business."

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

"I don't know whether I shall go on," said Gwen, a novel note of

languorous professionalism creeping into her voice.  "The other

women don't much like it if husband and wife work together, and I

don't think Hal would like me to act away from him."

Ann Veronica regarded her sister with a new respect, but the

traditions of family life are strong.  "I don't suppose you'll be

able to do it much," said Ann Veronica.

Later Gwen's trouble weighed so heavily on Mrs. Stanley in her

illness that her husband consented to receive Mr. Fortescue in

the drawing-room, and actually shake hands with him in an

entirely hopeless manner and hope everything would turn out for

the best.

The forgiveness and reconciliation was a cold and formal affair,

and afterwards her father went off gloomily to his study, and Mr.

Fortescue rambled round the garden with soft, propitiatory steps,

the Corinthian nose upraised and his hands behind his back,

pausing to look long and hard at the fruit-trees against the

wall.

Ann Veronica watched him from the dining-room window, and after

some moments of maidenly hesitation rambled out into the garden

in a reverse direction to Mr. Fortescue's steps, and encountered

him with an air of artless surprise.

"Hello!" said Ann Veronica, with arms akimbo and a careless,

breathless manner.  "You Mr. Fortescue?"

"At your service.  You Ann Veronica?"

"Rather!  I say--did you marry Gwen?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Mr. Fortescue raised his eyebrows and assumed a light-comedy

expression.  "I suppose I fell in love with her, Ann Veronica."

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

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

"Have you much ability?" asked Ann Veronica.

Mr. Fortescue tried to act embarrassment in order to conceal its

reality, and Ann Veronica went on to ask a string of questions

about acting, and whether her sister would act, and was she

beautiful enough for it, and who would make her dresses, and so

on.

As a matter of fact Mr. Fortescue had not much ability to keep

her sister, and a little while after her mother's death Ann

Veronica met Gwen suddenly on the staircase coming from her

father's study, shockingly dingy in dusty mourning and tearful

and resentful, and after that Gwen receded from the Morningside

Park world, and not even the begging letters and distressful

communications that her father and aunt received, but only a

vague intimation of dreadfulness, a leakage of incidental

comment, flashes of paternal anger at "that blackguard," came to

Ann Veronica's ears.

Part 6

These were Ann Veronica's leading cases in the question of

marriage.  They were the only real marriages she had seen

clearly.  For the rest, she derived her ideas of the married

state from the observed behavior of married women, which

impressed her in Morningside Park as being tied and dull and

inelastic in comparison with the life of the young, and from a

remarkably various reading among books.  As a net result she had

come to think of all married people much as one thinks of insects

that have lost their wings, and of her sisters as new hatched

creatures who had scarcely for a moment had wings.  She evolved a

dim image of herself cooped up in a house under the benevolent

shadow of Mr. Manning.  Who knows?--on the analogy of "Squiggles"

she might come to call him "Mangles!"

"I don't think I can ever marry any one," she said, and fell

suddenly into another set of considerations that perplexed her

for a time.  Had romance to be banished from life? . . .

It was hard to part with romance, but she had never thirsted so

keenly to go on with her University work in her life as she did

that day.  She had never felt so acutely the desire for free

initiative, for a life unhampered by others.  At any cost!  Her

brothers had it practically--at least they had it far more than

it seemed likely she would unless she exerted herself with quite

exceptional vigor.  Between her and the fair, far prospect of

freedom and self-development manoeuvred Mr. Manning, her aunt and

father, neighbors, customs, traditions, forces.  They seemed to

her that morning to be all armed with nets and prepared to throw

them over her directly her movements became in any manner truly

free.

She had a feeling as though something had dropped from her eyes,

as though she had just discovered herself for the first

time--discovered herself as a sleep-walker might do, abruptly

among dangers, hindrances, and perplexities, on the verge of a

cardinal crisis.

The life of a girl presented itself to her as something happy and

heedless and unthinking, yet really guided and controlled by

others, and going on amidst unsuspected screens and concealments.

And in its way it was very well.  Then suddenly with a rush came

reality, came "growing up"; a hasty imperative appeal for

seriousness, for supreme seriousness.  The Ralphs and Mannings

and Fortescues came down upon the raw inexperience, upon the

blinking ignorance of the newcomer; and before her eyes were

fairly open, before she knew what had happened, a new set of

guides and controls, a new set of obligations and

responsibilities and limitations, had replaced the old.  "I want

to be a Person," said Ann Veronica to the downs and the open sky;

"I will not have this happen to me, whatever else may happen in

its place."

Ann Veronica had three things very definitely settled by the time

when, a little after mid-day, she found herself perched up on a

gate between a bridle-path and a field that commanded the whole

wide stretch of country between Chalking and Waldersham.

Firstly, she did not intend to marry at all, and particularly she

did not mean to marry Mr. Manning; secondly, by some measure or

other, she meant to go on with her studies, not at the Tredgold

Schools but at the Imperial College; and, thirdly, she was, as an

immediate and decisive act, a symbol of just exactly where she

stood, a declaration of free and adult initiative, going that

night to the Fadden Ball.

But the possible attitude of her father she had still to face.

So far she had the utmost difficulty in getting on to that

vitally important matter.  The whole of that relationship

persisted in remaining obscure.  What would happen when next

morning she returned to Morningside Park?

He couldn't turn her out of doors.  But what he could do or might

do she could not imagine.  She was not afraid of violence, but

she was afraid of something mean, some secondary kind of force.

Suppose he stopped all her allowance, made it imperative that she

should either stay ineffectually resentful at home or earn a

living for herself at once. . . .  It appeared highly probable to

her that he would stop her allowance.

What can a girl do?

Somewhere at this point Ann Veronica's speculations were

interrupted and turned aside by the approach of a horse and

rider.  Mr. Ramage, that iron-gray man of the world, appeared

dressed in a bowler hat and a suit of hard gray, astride of a

black horse.  He pulled rein at the sight of her, saluted, and

regarded her with his rather too protuberant eyes.  The girl's

gaze met his in interested inquiry.

"You've got my view," he said, after a pensive second.  "I always

get off here and lean over that rail for a bit.  May I do so

to-day?"

"It's your gate," she said, amiably; "you got it first.  It's for

you to say if I may sit on it."

He slipped off the horse.  "Let me introduce you to Caesar," he

said; and she patted Caesar's neck, and remarked how soft his

nose was, and secretly deplored the ugliness of equine teeth.

Ramage tethered the horse to the farther gate-post, and Caesar

blew heavily and began to investigate the hedge.

Ramage leaned over the gate at Ann Veronica's side, and for a

moment there was silence.

He made some obvious comments on the wide view warming toward its

autumnal blaze that spread itself in hill and valley, wood and

village, below.

"It's as broad as life," said Mr. Ramage, regarding it and

putting a well-booted foot up on the bottom rail.

Part 7

"And what are you doing here, young lady," he said, looking up at

her face, "wandering alone so far from home?"

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

"Solitary walks?"

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

"Problems?"

"Sometimes quite difficult problems."

"You're lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother,

for instance, couldn't.  She had to do her thinking at

home--under inspection."

She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of

her free young poise show in his face.

"I suppose things have changed?" she said.

"Never was such an age of transition."

She wondered what to.  Mr. Ramage did not know. "Sufficient unto

me is the change thereof," he said, with all the effect of an

epigram.

"I must confess," he said, "the New Woman and the New Girl

intrigue me profoundly.  I am one of those people who are

interested in women, more interested than I am in anything else.

I don't conceal it.  And the change, the change of attitude!  The

way all the old clingingness has been thrown aside is amazing.

And all the old--the old trick of shrinking up like a snail at a

touch.  If you had lived twenty years ago you would have been

called a Young Person, and it would have been your chief duty in

life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to

understand."

"There's quite enough still," said Ann Veronica, smiling, "that

one doesn't understand."

"Quite.  But your role would have been to go about saying, 'I beg

your pardon' in a reproving tone to things you understood quite

well in your heart and saw no harm in.  That terrible Young

Person! she's vanished. Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young

Person! . . .  I hope we may never find her again."

He rejoiced over this emancipation.  "While that lamb was about

every man of any spirit was regarded as a dangerous wolf.  We

wore invisible chains and invisible blinkers.  Now, you and I can

gossip at a gate, and {}Honi soit qui mal y pense.  The change

has

given man one good thing he never had before," he said. "Girl

friends.  And I am coming to believe the best as well as the most

beautiful friends a man can have are girl friends."

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

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

alive."

"I suppose we ARE more free than we were?" said Ann Veronica,

keeping the question general.

"Oh, there's no doubt of it!  Since the girls of the eighties

broke bounds and sailed away on bicycles--my young days go back

to the very beginnings of that--it's been one triumphant

relaxation."

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

"Well?"

"I mean we've long strings to tether us, but we are bound all the

same.  A woman isn't much freer--in reality."

Mr. Ramage demurred.

"One runs about," said Ann Veronica.

"Yes."

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

"Do what?"

"Oh!--anything."

He looked interrogation with a faint smile.

"It seems to me it comes to earning one's living in the long

run," said Ann Veronica, coloring faintly.  "Until a girl can go

away as a son does and earn her independent income, she's still

on a string.  It may be a long string, long enough if you like to

tangle up all sorts of people; but there it is!  If the paymaster

pulls, home she must go.  That's what I mean."

Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that.  He was a little impressed

by Ann Veronica's metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed

to Hetty Widgett. "YOU wouldn't like to be independent?" he

asked, abruptly.  "I mean REALLY independent.  On your own. It

isn't such fun as it seems."

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

one.  Man or woman."

"And you?"

"Rather!"

"I wonder why?"

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

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

"But a boy--a boy goes out into the world and presently stands on

his own feet.  He buys his own clothes, chooses his own company,

makes his own way of living."

"You'd like to do that?"

"Exactly."

"Would you like to be a boy?"

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

Ramage reflected.  "Why don't you?"

"Well, it might mean rather a row."

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

"And besides," said Ann Veronica, sweeping that aspect aside,

"what could I do?  A boy sails out into a trade or profession.

But--it's one of the things I've just been thinking over.

Suppose--suppose a girl did want to start in life, start in life

for herself--"  She looked him frankly in the eyes.  "What ought

she to do?"

"Suppose you--"

"Yes, suppose I--"

He felt that his advice was being asked.  He became a little more

personal and intimate.  "I wonder what you could do?" he said.

"I should think YOU could do all sorts of things. . . .

"What ought you to do?"  He began to produce his knowledge of the

world for her benefit, jerkily and allusively, and with a strong,

rank flavor of "savoir faire."  He took an optimist view of her

chances.  Ann Veronica listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on

the turf, and now and then she asked a question or looked up to

discuss a point.  In the meanwhile, as he talked, he scrutinized

her face, ran his eyes over her careless, gracious poise,

wondered hard about her.  He described her privately to himself

as a splendid girl.  It was clear she wanted to get away from

home, that she was impatient to get away from home.  Why?  While

the front of his mind was busy warning her not to fall into the

hopeless miseries of underpaid teaching, and explaining his idea

that for women of initiative, quite as much as for men, the world

of business had by far the best chances, the back chambers of his

brain were busy with the problem of that "Why?"

His first idea as a man of the world was to explain her unrest by

a lover, some secret or forbidden or impossible lover.  But he

dismissed that because then she would ask her lover and not him

all these things.  Restlessness, then, was the trouble, simple

restlessness: home bored her.  He could quite understand the

daughter of Mr. Stanley being bored and feeling limited.  But was

that enough?  Dim, formless suspicions of something more vital

wandered about his mind.  Was the young lady impatient for

experience?  Was she adventurous? As a man of the world he did

not think it becoming to accept maidenly calm as anything more

than a mask. Warm life was behind that always, even if it slept.

If it was not an actual personal lover, it still might be the

lover not yet incarnate, not yet perhaps suspected. . . .

He had diverged only a little from the truth when he said that

his chief interest in life was women.  It wasn't so much women as

Woman that engaged his mind.  His was the Latin turn of thinking;

he had fallen in love at thirteen, and he was still capable--he

prided himself--of falling in love.  His invalid wife and her

money had been only the thin thread that held his life together;

beaded on that permanent relation had been an inter-weaving

series of other feminine experiences, disturbing, absorbing,

interesting, memorable affairs.  Each one had been different from

the others, each had had a quality all its own, a distinctive

freshness, a distinctive beauty.  He could not understand how men

could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful

research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing,

these complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and

mounted to the supremest, most passionate intimacy.  All the rest

of his existence was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for

it, worked for it, kept himself in training for it.

So while he talked to this girl of work and freedom, his slightly

protuberant eyes were noting 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

intimately.  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 something 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 or friendship. 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 together 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 Ann Veronica turned northward and so

came to Micklechesil. 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

Part 1

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.

"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?"

"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.' "

"But that is flat rebellion!" said Mr. Stanley, standing 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 London 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 gesture, "to come

in here."

Part 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 device 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-handedness.  "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

quarrelled."

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 intensely controlled fury.  "I said you

were"--he shouted--"NOT TO GO!"

She made, and overdid, an immense effort to be a princess.  She

tossed her head, and, having no further 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 altogether desperate

scuffle.  Never for a moment had violence 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 painfully 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.

"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?"

Part 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 window.  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 descended 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 mowing 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 cried "Oh!" with renewed

vexation, and repeated some steps of her dance in a new and more

ecstatic measure.

Part 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 most

disconcerting fact in human experience, the kindliness 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 intense 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.  SHOOH!"

"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 antagonistic 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 independent 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

Part 1

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 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 Morningside 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

confident 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 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 propitiatory,

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 reverted 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.

Part 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 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.  "Anything 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  for the benefit of the

less advanced section of Morningside 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 entertaining.  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 horrible to think of you!"

"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 herself 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 perhaps 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

meanwhile 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 exaltation that partook of panic and defiance, but

was chiefly a sense of vast unexampled release.

She inhaled a deep breath of air--London air.

Part 3

She dismissed the first hotels she passed, she scarcely knew why,

mainly perhaps from the mere dread of entering 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

determination 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, Westminster, 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 Wellington 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

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 inquire, 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. . . .

Part 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 pictureless walls and stereotyped

furnishings, a sudden blankness came upon her as though she

didn't matter, and had been thrust away into this impersonal

corner, she and her gear. . . .

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 herself.  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

London, 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. Warren's Profession.  She had seen Mrs. Warren's

Profession furtively with Hetty Widgett from the gallery of a

Stage Society performance one Monday afternoon. Most of it had

been incomprehensible to her, or comprehensible in a way that

checked further curiosity, 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 suddenly

over his shoulder.

"Whither away?" he said, very distinctly in a curiously 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!

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 expected to know nothing, aspects that

were extraordinarily 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 unaverted 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 movement was gone.

As she neared the bottom of the dip in Piccadilly she saw a woman

approaching her from the opposite direction--a tall woman who at

the first glance seemed altogether 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 --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.  Something 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 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.

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 departed.  Against the sinister, the threatening, monstrous

inhumanity of the limitless city, there was nothing now but this

supreme, ugly fact of a pursuit--the pursuit 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 general, 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 homeward workers that was now

welling out of a thousand places of employment, and to imitate

their driven, preoccupied haste.  She had followed a bobbing

white 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

forever, 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 propitiatory 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 morning brought courage again,

and those first intimations of horror vanished completely from

her mind.

Part 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 |         |

-----------------------------------------------------

and afterward she had dined a la carte upon a cutlet, and had

then set herself to write an answer to Mr. Manning'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:  "I 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 morning answering advertisements in the

papers that abounded in the writing-room; and so, after half an

hour's perusal 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 expected. 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. Manning.  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 sentences like that?

It'll have to go," she decided, "I've written too many already."

She went on, with a desperate 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.  I 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.

"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--l 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. l wonder if a

man can quite understand that passionate feeling?  It is quite a

passionate feeling.  So I am already 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."

Part 6

In the afternoon she resumed her search for apartments. The

intoxicating sense of novelty had given place to a more

business-like mood.  She drifted northward 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 unaccountably dear, or both.  And some were

adorned with engravings that struck her as being more vulgar and

undesirable than anything she had ever seen in her life.  Ann

Veronica loved beautiful things, and the beauty of undraped

loveliness not least among them; but these were pictures that did

but insist coarsely upon the roundness 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 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 something 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        |

--------------------------

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 Veronica.  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

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.  Afterward 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 reflected 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

Part 1

The next morning opened calmly, and Ann Veronica sat in her own

room, her very own room, and consumed an egg and marmalade, and

read the advertisements in the Daily Telegraph.  Then began

expostulations, 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 important 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 remained 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!"

"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 persuaded him to go to bed.  He wanted to

put on his overcoat 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.

"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

tablecloth.  'My God!' 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. 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."

Part 2

Then it was the expostulations really began.

From first to last, on this occasion, her aunt expostulated for

about two hours.  "But, my dear," she began, "it is Impossible!

It is quite out of the Question. 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 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 defined

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 another, as she mingled assurances and

aspects and emotions, 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 Veronica.

"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--madness!  Just

because your father--wouldn't let you disobey him!"

Part 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 chandelier, 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 insurrection was over and

that she was coming home submissively. 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."

Then he went on to say:  "Well, you've had your little 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 anxious.  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, 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 second 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 exhausting.  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.

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 unreasonable things, but that by some

incomprehensible infection 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 principle. 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 emphasize his point.

"You understand, then," he was saying, "you understand?"

"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 penny--not one penny--and never darken your doors again!"

Part 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 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 everything 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 anything 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."

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, convulsively, 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

object 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.

Part 5

After the interview Ann Veronica considered herself formally cut

off from home.  If nothing else had clinched that, the purse had.

Nevertheless there came 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 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 disagree 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; _I_ 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--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

generations.  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."

Part 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 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

unconsciously, 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 understand. I've seen him, and he

doesn't a bit understand. _I_ 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!"

"You're like a Princess in Exile!" he repeated, overruling her.

"You come into these sordid surroundings--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 archangel 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!"

"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 impatience 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, 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, glorious tiger?  Una and the Lion

again, and all that!  But this isn't that sort of thing; this is

just a great, ugly, endless 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 Morningside Park and my father

being more and more cross and overbearing at meals--and a general

feeling of insecurity and futility."

Mr. Manning relinquished his cup, and looked meaningly at Ann

Veronica.  "There," he said, "you don't treat me fairly, Miss

Stanley.  My garden-close would be a better thing than that."

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

IDEALS AND A REALITY

Part 1

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 offered was at all of the quality she

had vaguely postulated for herself.  With such qualifications as

she possessed, 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 governess 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 costumer's or hat-shop.  The first set of occupations 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 themselves in

which, at least, there was no specific exclusion of womanhood;

one was under a Radical Member 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 companion.

And nearly all these things were fearfully ill-paid. 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

presence 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.

Part 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

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 bursting 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 seemed  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!  Everything seems so close to fruition, so coming on and

leading 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 apprehension. 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 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 intervals, 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 forward, 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.  Something 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 finger on the pulse of things."

Ann Veronica said nothing.

"The dawn!" said Miss Miniver, with her glasses reflecting the

fire like pools of blood-red flame.

"I came to London," said Ann Veronica, "rather because of my own

difficulty.  I don't know that I understand altogether."

"Of course you don't," said Miss Miniver, gesticulating

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 everywhere. 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.

"What else can happen?" asked Miss Miniver, with a little weak

gesture at the glow.  "What else can possibly happen--as things

are going now?"

Part 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 rightness, absurd.

Very central in Miss Miniver's universe were the Goopes.  The

Goopes were the oddest little couple conceivable, 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 Tottenham Court Road.  Their very

furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes

when at home 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 nut

tose, and so forth--and lemonade and unfermented 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 tweed suit, and

others who, in Ann Veronica's memory, in spite of her efforts to

recall details, remained obstinately 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 Socialism, 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 Alderman 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 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.

Then they discoursed on love for a time, and Alderman 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 Sisyphus-like

efforts on the part of Goopes to get the topic on to a higher

plane, displayed great persistence in speculating 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 something 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 a little

reserved, resorted presently to the Socratic method 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 aluminum 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

struggle between the natural modesty and general inoffensiveness

of the Borough Council and the social evil in Marylebone.

So the talk went on, and presently they were criticising

novelists, and certain daring essays of Wilkins got their due

share of attention, and then they were discussing the future of

the theatre.  Ann Veronica intervened 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 listened.  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 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 powerful and perfect mind in existence at

the present time. She was clear there were no other minds like

them in all the world.

Part 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 Society 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 personal 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 movement in Caxton Hall, where the same note

of vast changes in progress sounded; and she went to a soiree 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 Socialists'.  Ann Veronica was carried

off her intellectual and critical feet by it altogether, and

applauded and uttered cries that subsequent reflection failed to

endorse.  "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 together."

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--reconstruction 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 consciousness 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 suggestion of the urgency of this pervasive project of

alteration.  Some indeed carried themselves, dressed themselves

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-

supporting women or girls of the student class.  They made 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 perhaps 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 "advanced," 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 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 argument

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, incoherently

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 Miniver would have called the Higher

Truth supervenes.

Yet through these talks, these meetings and conferences, these

movements and efforts, Ann Veronica, for all that she went with

her friend, and at times applauded 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.  Morningside 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 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

spectacle 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 general 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 propositions of Socialism, for example,

struck her as admirable, 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 freedom 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 badgering 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 revolted.  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 something very

beautiful and wonderful as yet unimagined. The little pucker in

her brows became more perceptible.

Part 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. Finally she

decided upon a step that had always seemed reasonable to her, but

that hitherto she had, from motives too faint for her to

formulate, refrained from taking.  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 appearance 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 Morningside 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 prominent his eyes

were.

"I want some advice," said 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 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

like that.  As a matter of fact it isn't their affair.  And as a

natural consequence, they 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 conviction and with

his eyes on Ann Veronica's face.  He had an air of having told

her a deep, personal secret. 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 goddesses and the contemporary of

any man alive.  But 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

accumulate 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."

"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.  Consider 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 improve the aspect of

Ramage's suggestion.

"Well, anyhow, consider it open."  He dabbed with his

paper-weight again, and spoke in an entirely indifferent 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 should be considered too

old.  I don't feel it. . . .  Didn't you feel rather EVENTFUL--in

the train--coming up to Waterloo?"

Part 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 better 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 argument 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.

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

Mr. Ramage controlled his expression and thought very quickly.

"Agreed," he said, "certainly," and drew a checkbook 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 something 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 City 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 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 insufficient 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 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.

Part 7

That was two days before Christmas Eve.  The next morning came a

compact letter from her father.

"MY 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 what you are managing on.  If you will

think only of one trifling aspect--the inconvenience it must be

to us to explain your absence--I 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.

"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 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 female.  What could I do

at home?  The other's a crumple-up--just surrender.  Funk!  I'll

see it out."

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

BIOLOGY

Part 1

January found Ann Veronica a student in the biological laboratory

of the Central Imperial College 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 developing 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

satisfactory activity by incurring a debt to Ramage of forty

pounds, and, secondly, that her present position was necessarily

temporary and her outlook quite uncertain.

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 and of a mitigated and sterilized organic decay.  Along

the inner side was a wonderfully arranged series of displayed

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 vegetable

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 enthusiasm

behind the suffrage demand, with the speeches that were partly

egotistical displays, partly artful manoeuvres, and partly

incoherent cries for unsoundly formulated 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,

methodical 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

almost living tissue with microscope and scalpel, probe and

microtome, and the utmost of their skill and care, 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 direction 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 contrasted

vividly with Russell's slow, definitive articulation, directed

the dissection and made illuminating comments 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 if it was but momentary

light, into a hundred corners that Russell left steadfastly 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 directness

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, perhaps 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 manner, hovering for an

invitation.

From the first, Ann Veronica found him an exceptionally

interesting man.  To begin with, he struck her as being the most

variable person she had ever encountered.  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. Sometimes he was

obviously irritable and uncomfortable and unfortunate in his

efforts to seem at ease.  And sometimes he overflowed with a

peculiarly malignant wit that played, with devastating effect,

upon any topics that 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 authoritative 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 bacteriology from his father; a

Japanese student of unassuming manners who drew beautifully and

had an imperfect knowledge of English; and a dark, unwashed

Scotchman with complicated spectacles, who would come every

morning as a sort of volunteer supplementary demonstrator, 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 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.

Part 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 together directly her mind left the

chaotic search for employment 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. Moreover, a vigorous fire of mutual criticism

was going on now between the Imperial College and the Cambridge

Mendelians and echoed in the lectures.  From beginning to end it

was first-hand stuff.

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. Biology 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, beginning again its recurrent journey to selection

and multiplication and failure or survival.

But this was but a momentary gleam of personal application, 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 occasionally

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

contributed to the commissariat of Ann Veronica's campaign--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 thousand 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 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 mattered 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 establishments 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'oeuvre 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

woman'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.

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 interest 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 absolutely 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 unconscious--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 doing his best to call her attention to the fact that

he was a man of spirit and quality and experience, and she a

young and beautiful woman, and that all sorts of constructions

upon their relationship were possible, trusting her to go on from

that to the idea that all sorts of relationships were possible.

She responded with an unfaltering 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 conversations 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.

Part 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 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 _I_ 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 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 abandoned 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. . . ."

Part 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 conflicts of

life.  The discussion wandered, and was punctuated 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 throughout the animal kingdom.

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 opportunity.

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 interesting 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.

Part 5

Yet Ann Veronica was thinking a very great deal about love.  A

dozen shynesses and intellectual barriers were being outflanked

or broken down in her mind. All the influences about her worked

with her own predisposition and against all the traditions of her

home and upbringing to deal with the facts of life in an

unabashed 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 comes 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 people 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 squarely. She

made herself a private declaration of liberty. "This is mere

nonsense, mere tongue-tied fear!" she 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 prevented 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 experienced man of the world, her

friend, who evidently took a great interest in this supreme topic

and was willing 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 repeated phrases

of Mrs. Goopes's:  "Advanced people," she said, with an air of

great elucidation, "tend to GENERALIZE 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 something 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 moment, 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 coarseness!"

"What coarseness?" said Ann Veronica.

"My dear Vee!"  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 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 platonically," 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 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 horrible 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 nostrils.  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."

Part 6

Then, arising she knew not how, like a new-born appetite, 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, incidentally, and as a thing taken out of

life.  Now the 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 principle 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 comparative 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 preferences 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 butterflies, the incomprehensible

elaboration and splendor of birds of Paradise and humming-birds'

plumes, the patterning of tigers, and a leopard's spots.  He was

interesting and inconclusive, and the original papers to which he

referred her discursive were at best only suggestive.  Afterward,

one afternoon, he hovered about her, and came and sat beside her

and talked of beauty 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 methods 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 Veronica 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,

discovered 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 preparation-room.

Part 7

Then one day a little thing happened that clothed itself in

significance.

She had been working upon a ribbon of microtome 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 perception 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 herself

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 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.

Part 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.  Oh

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 beautiful?  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.

"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.

Part 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 impressions 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 questions.

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 beyond the compass of

her imagination.  Indeed, she did not want to think of him as

loving her.  She wanted 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

passionately 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 seemed 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."

"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 perceived."

"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 beautiful. One must get them with

exactly the same intensity."

He did not agree with that.  "I don't mean simply intensity of

sensation.  I said intensity of perception. You may perceive

harmony, proportion, rhythm, intensely.  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 understandable--they couldn't

like precious stones.  One thing may be a necessary collateral of

the others.  And, after 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 moment, 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 contrive another year in

the laboratory.

"Now I see what everything means," said Ann Veronica 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 altogether displayed.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

DISCORDS

Part 1

One afternoon, soon after Ann Veronica's great discovery, 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 itself about inside her head

within a yard of him.

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 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 regarding 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 instinct," 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 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 reflection 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, 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 Ann Veronica woke out of

her confused dream of involuntary 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 random.

"Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic

descriptions of it from a mistress I didn't 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 exposition 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; 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, perplexed.  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 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 lighting-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 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 inquiries.  "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 disturbed.  She

remembered abruptly that she was really living upon his money.

She leaned forward and addressed 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."

"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 enormously. 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?"

"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 beginning, 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.

Part 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 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 apprehending 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 preoccupation 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

already 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 Ramage, 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?"

"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 questions were running through

her mind.  "I wonder why people in love are so defiant, so

careless of other considerations?"

"The very hares grow brave.  I suppose because it IS the chief

thing in life."  He stopped and said earnestly: "It is the chief

thing in life, and everything else goes down before it.

Everything, my dear, everything! . . .  But we have got to talk

upon indifferent themes until we have done with this blond young

gentleman 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 ostentatious 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.

"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 altogether 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 became frightfully aware of the other as a

plastic energetic 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 grimacing insult

at her.  "How dare you!"

They were both astonished at the other's strength. Perhaps Ramage

was the more astonished.  Ann Veronica 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 painfulness 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?"

Part 3

Each of them stared at the other, set in a universe that had

changed its system of values with kaleidoscopic 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.

"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 deliberately

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.

Part 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 were thinking

very quickly.  Her state of mind would have seemed altogether

discreditable to her grandmother. She ought to have been disposed

to faint and scream at all these happenings; she ought to have

maintained 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 attitude.  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 adventurous strain in her being, some element, subtle at

least if base, going about the rioting ways and crowded insurgent

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 bottom 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 critical 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.

"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 indignation, 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 respectability 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 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 relations of men

and women upon her in one astonishing question.  His hand went

with an almost instinctive inquiry 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 offensive

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 anything 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 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 table."

"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 Ramage'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, reassuringly 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. . . .  Bitte! . . .  Oui, dans la

note. . . .  Presently. Presently."  That conversation ended and

he turned to her again.

"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.

"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 disappointing

men.  This lover of yours--"

"He doesn't know!" cried Ann Veronica.

"Well, you know."

Ann Veronica could have wept with vexation.  Indeed, 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!"

Part 5

But she did not get away just then.

Ramage's bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggression. "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 contradictory

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 that beloved person was a

lover, and she found herself unable to say a word to explain to

him that this other person, the person she loved, did not even

know of her love--Ramage grew angry and savage once more, and

returned 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 Hotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory

of relationships, past a tall porter in blue and crimson, into a

cool, clear night.

Part 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, 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 defensive

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? . .

."

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 unwonted 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 unavoidable 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 dependence 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 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 desperate expedients, and with

passionate petulance rejected 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 whatever 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!

"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 amounted to two-and-twenty

pounds.  She addressed an envelope 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 immediate

necessities.  A little relieved by this step toward

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.

Part 7

For a time the biological laboratory was full of healing virtue.

Her sleepless night had left her languid but not stupefied, and

for an hour or so the work distracted 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 she would never set eyes on him again.

After that consolations fled.

The overnight nervous strain began to tell; she became

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 himself 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 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 another.

The question ceased to be a tea-table talk, and became 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 possibilities, 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, 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 tolerable 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 beside 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  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 impelled 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

everything 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 enlargement of segments

of his eye.

The door into the passage offered itself with an irresistible

invitation--the one alternative to a public, inexplicable passion

of weeping.

Capes flashed to an understanding of her intention, sprang to his

feet, and opened the door for her retreat.

Part 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."

"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 saying. After you

went he got up and took refuge in the preparation-room.  Or else

_I_ 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 Veronica,

resuming the conversation with an entire disappearance 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."

Part 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:

"MY 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

Part 1

"There is only one way out of all this," said Ann Veronica,

sitting up in her little bed in the darkness 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 alleviated, in which women

would stand on their own feet in equal citizenship with men.  For

a time she brooded 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 recollection 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.

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 conceivable 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 submission. The vote is only the

beginning, the necessary beginning.  If we do not begin--"

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.

Part 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 unsuccessful letters to

Ramage, which she tore up unfinished; 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 107A, 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 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 announcements 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 seventeen 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 hammered industriously at a typewriter.  The

tired woman looked up in inquiring silence at Ann Veronica's

diffident 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.

"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 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, reading 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 atmospheric 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

viviparous?"--"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 patient, 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 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!"

Part 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, gesticulating 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 dispose 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.

"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.  "Everything 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, "without 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 resonances.  And like that gospel

it meant something, something different from its phrases,

something elusive, and yet something that in spite of the

superficial incoherence 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 something indeed holding the whole species back

from the imaginable largeness of life. . . .

"The Vote is the symbol of everything," said Miss 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

common 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, interrupting 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."

Part 4

It was not Ann Veronica's fault that the night's work should have

taken upon itself the forms of wild burlesque.  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

wrappering, 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 policeman 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 restrained

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 standing 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.

"Through there," he said, and pointed with the pamphlet he was

carrying.

Ann Veronica found herself in a little stirring crowd of excited

women, whispering and tittering and speaking 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 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!"

Part 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 marvellous 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

present 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 untroubled and

unsuspecting police about the entries of those great buildings

whose square and panelled Victorian Gothic streams up from the

glare of the lamps into the murkiness of the night; Big Ben

shining overhead, 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 detachments of the police, their

attention all directed westward 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 unsuspected vans.

They travelled past the few idle sightseers who had braved the

uninviting evening to see what the Suffragettes might be doing;

they pulled up unchallenged within thirty yards of those coveted

portals.

And then they disgorged.

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 objects, 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 overwhelmed 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 hands.  The policemen were closing in

from 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 experienced anything so

disagreeable in her life as the sense of being held helplessly

off her feet.  She screamed involuntarily--she had never in her

life screamed before --and then she began to wriggle and fight

like a frightened animal against the men who were holding her.

The affair passed at one leap from a spree to a nightmare 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 fatherly policeman.  "This ain't

no place for you."

He pushed her a dozen yards along the greasy pavement with flat,

well-trained hands that there seemed to be no opposing.  Before

her stretched blank spaces, dotted with running people coming

toward her, and below them railings and a statue.  She almost

submitted 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 evaded 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 superhuman 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 swaying, noisy crowd, whose faces grinned

and stared pitilessly in the light of the electric standards.

"Go it, miss!" cried one.  "Kick aht at 'em!" though, indeed, she

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

frequent.  A lean young man in spectacles pursued her for some

time, crying "Courage!  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 attempts to get to her and replace it.

"You must arrest me!" she gasped, breathlessly, insisting

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, 107A,

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 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 his best to express the attitude 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 jurisdiction that had ruffled him.  He resented being

regarded 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 undistinguished.  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. 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 remarked 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 unutterable 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 eyebrows, 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.

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 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 contact 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

Part 1

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 confronted her, and she argued with him about

men and women.  She visualized him as in a policeman's uniform

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.

"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."

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 innocence 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 something--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 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!"

Part 2

"Now," said Ann Veronica, after the half-hour of exercise, and

sitting on the uncomfortable wooden seat 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,

substratum of the evolutionary process, and, in a vein of vague

sentimentality that doesn't give a datum for anything 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 intellectual 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?

"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!"

Part 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 Canongate. She got up, as she had

been told to do, at his appearance, and he amazed her by sitting

down, according 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 countenance 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?"

"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.

Part 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 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 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! . . ."

Part 5

One afternoon, while everything was still, the wardress 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?"

Part 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 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!"

Part 7

One day the idea of self-sacrifice came into her head, and she

made, she thought, some important moral discoveries.

It came with an extreme effect of re-discovery, a remarkable

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 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-development, 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 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 grandson. . . .

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 kindnesses; 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 unselfishness, 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

greedy fingers.  One learns to sit up . . .

"And somehow or other," she added, after a long interval, "I must

pay Mr. Ramage back his forty pounds."

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

ANN VERONICA PUTS THINGS IN ORDER

Part 1

Ann 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.

"MY DEAR FATHER," she wrote,--"I have been thinking 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 necessary 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.

"I must read him when I come out.  But I see very clearly that as

things are a daughter is necessarily dependent 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."

Part 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 specifically 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 vegetarian meal before

she recovered her head again.  Obeying some fine instinct, she

had come to the prison in a dark veil, but she had pushed this up

to kiss Ann Veronica and never drawn it down again.  Eggs were

procured for her, and she sat out the subsequent emotions and

eloquence with the dignity becoming an injured lady of good

family.  The quiet encounter and home-coming Ann Veronica and she

had contemplated was entirely disorganized by this misadventure;

there 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. . . ."

Part 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, 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 politeness 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, indeed, in the father and softly rounded

in the daughter --but hardness nevertheless, that made every

compromise 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 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 it 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.

"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 hesitate.  "Eight

pounds," she plunged, and added foolishly, "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.)

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 circumstances 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!)

Part 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 displayed 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 difficulty she

would find in borrowing the forty pounds she needed for Ramage.

That had taken her by surprise, 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?

"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 pretending?

"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.

Part 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 straightened 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 preparation-room door opened behind her.  She

heard it open, but as she felt unable to look round in a careless

manner she pretended not to hear it.  Then Capes' footsteps

approached.  She turned with an effort.

"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 understand 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."

"_I_ 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.

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.  "Veronique!" 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."

Part 6

Capes lit things wonderfully for Ann Veronica all that afternoon,

he was so friendly, so palpably interested 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, professed 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.

It was a refusal of expediency, he said, and not an absolute

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 something 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 inimitable 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 discretion 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.  "Everything goes on,

confound it!  One doesn't change anything one has set going by

making good resolutions."

And then ahead of her she saw the radiant and 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.

Part 7

The steps by which Ann Veronica determined to engage 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 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 recklessness 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

presently 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 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 apparent, 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 ornament 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. Their eyes met,

and his expressed perplexity and curiosity.  "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 finding 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

Part 1

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 friendship. They went to the

Zoological Gardens together one Saturday to see for themselves a

point of morphological interest about the toucan's bill--that

friendly and entertaining bird--and they spent the rest of the

afternoon 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 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 apartment

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.

Part 2

When at last she did so, the sapphire ring took on a new quality

in the imagination of Capes.  It ceased to be the symbol of

liberty and a remote and quite abstracted person, and became

suddenly and very disagreeably 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 perplexities 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-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 microscope-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 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 contained 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 puckered 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."

Part 3

There was one serious flaw in Ann Veronica's arrangements for

self-rehabilitation, and that was Ramage. He hung over her--he

and his loan to her and his connection 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 beyond 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 extremely 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 impossible--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 pulling 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.

"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.

"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 perfection. 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-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."

Part 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 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 commanded 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 warmed toward him.  It had seemed 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 expressing

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. 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.  Tum, tum, tirray, tum,

tum, tum, 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 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.

Part 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

indefinable 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 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 herself to be the pampered Queen of

Fortune, the crown of a good man's love (and secretly, but nobly,

worshipping some one else), to the time when she realized she was

in fact just a mannequin for her lover's imagination, 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 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 possibility 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 her 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 wrappered life unwrappered forever,

vistas of dull responses, crises of make-believe, years of

exacting mutual disregard 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 perforce! . . .

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 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 resting 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 Veronica pushed aside a tea-cup and

the vestiges of her strawberries and cream, and put her elbows

before her on the table.  "Mr. Manning," she said, "I HAVE a

confession to make."

"I wish you would use my Christian name," he said.

She attended to that, and then dismissed it as unimportant.

Something in her voice and manner conveyed an effect 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 grateful."

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 are difficult.

It wasn't clear to me that I had to explain. . . .  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 herself.  She realized dimly

that there was no personal thing behind his cry, that countless

myriads of Mannings had "My God!"-ed with an equal gusto at

situations as flatly apprehended.  This mitigated her remorse

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 subduing 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 control 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.

"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 tremendous

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!"

Part 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 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 understand.  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--"

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 consuming 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

sisterless 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 engagement 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 a man, and I know what I mean.  It's a

tremendous blow, of course--but it doesn't kill me.  And the

situation 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 sudden 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. . ."

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

Part 1

Spring had held back that year until the dawn of May, and then

spring and summer came with a rush together.  Two days after this

conversation between 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."

"_I_ 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 which everything

begins to run about and begin new things.  Work becomes

distasteful; one thinks of holidays.  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 moments 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.

"I--I didn't love the man I was engaged to," she said. She met

his eyes for a moment, and could not interpret their expression.

They struck her as cold and indifferent.

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

helplessly on one of the little stools by her table and covered

her face with her hands.

"Can't you SEE how things are?" she said.

Part 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 uncovered a tearless face, and with one swift movement

assumed 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 difficult 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.

Part 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.

"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."

"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 concluding the

discussion.

They walked side by side for a time.

"In that laboratory one gets to disregard these passions," 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 accustomed 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."

"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 another.  Because

I'm younger than you. . . .  I've got imagination. . . .  I know

what I am talking about.  Mr. Capes, do you think . . .  do you

think I don't know the meaning of love?"

Part 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 and won't divorce me.

You don't understand the fix I am in.  And you don't know what

led to our separation. 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."

"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 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.

She was fine and tender.  I worshipped her and subdued myself."

He left off abruptly.  "Do you understand what I 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?"

"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--humiliating 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 insisted 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 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 dreaming, 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 never 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. 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.

Part 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.

"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 began 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

instincts 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.

"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.  Salvation. I know what I am doing

better than you do. Think--think of that engagement!"

Their talk had come to eloquent silences that contradicted 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 her in his

arms, and smoothed her hair from her forehead, and very tenderly

kissed her lips.

Part 6

They spent the next Sunday in Richmond Park, and mingled the

happy sensation of being together uninterruptedly 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

glitter 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 afternoon away in the garden that looks

out upon the crescent 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 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," he 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."

Part 7

It was rather less than a week after that walk that Capes came

and sat down beside Ann Veronica for their 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

moment 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."

"If you dare--I dare," said Ann Veronica.  "I was never so clear

in all my life as I have been in this business."  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 nothing 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 settled.  I sha'n't care a rap if

we can never marry.  I'm not a bit afraid of anything--scandal,

difficulty, struggle. . . .  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 meditative 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.

"I shall have to give up biology, anyhow.  I've always 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 doing 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

Part 1

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 emotion that threatened to submerge her intellectual

being.

Nevertheless, she could not prevent a rising excitement 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.  Sometimes 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 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 exasperating

habit of interrupting 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 relations 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 revived her childhood.  She was saying good-bye

to childhood 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 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 herbaceous perennials under whose stems

was fairyland.  The back of the house had been the Alps for

climbing, 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

sundering year.

She was unusually helpful at breakfast, and unselfish 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 sought to dominate.  The crowning aspect of the

incident, 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 surprised her she

hadn't thought of it before!  She tried to explain that she was

going to pay him forty pounds without 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 impressive 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, indeed!  She was going to be as

primordial as chipped flint.

Part 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.

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 dislike 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."

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 acquaintances," he remarked, by way of

transition.  "They mould one insensibly."  His voice assumed an

easy detached 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 people, 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 different."

"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."

"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 everything 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 protect 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 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

hardened 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 growing 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 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.

Part 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.

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 unwise," 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 penetrating 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?"

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 letting 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 playing

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 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 shining 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

Part 1

Next day Ann Veronica and Capes felt like newborn things.  It

seemed to them they could never have been really alive before,

but only dimly anticipating existence.  They sat face to face

beneath an experienced-looking rucksack and a brand new

portmanteau 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 went by way of Spies

to Frutigen.  There was no railway  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 boulders.  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

mountain, 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 fellow passengers

would hear it.  It was too good to be 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 rightest 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 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 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 deferences 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 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 barriers 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."

Part 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. Adventure rules, and morality--looks up the trains in the

Bradshaw.  Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves

you.  If morality means anything it means keeping bounds,

respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds.  If

individuality means anything it means breaking bounds--adventure.

Will you be  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 scandalize and Shelleyfy.  When first you

left your home you had no idea that _I_ 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

gorgeous!"

"Glorious!" said Ann Veronica.

"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 prohibitions 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  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.

Part 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 flowers and turf, a wild strawberry, a rare butterfly,

and suchlike little intimate things had become more interesting

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

could roll my little body up small and squeeze it into your hand

and grip your 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 beautiful."

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.

. . ."

Part 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 between the vast precipices overhead and

looked over the tree-tops down the widening gorge.  A distant

suggestion 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--"

"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.

Part 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-morrow?"

There was a brief silence.

"It is a very pleasant place," said Ann Veronica, 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 and 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 distances beyond blue

distances to the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa and a long regiment of

sunny, snowy mountains. 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, 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 sometimes we

will loiter among the rocks and trees about Saas or peep into

Samuel Butler's chapels, and sometimes we will climb up out of

the way of the other people on to the glaciers and snow.  And,

for one expedition 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."

"But Italy--"

"Italy's for a good girl," he said, and laid his hand for a

moment on her shoulder.  "She must look forward 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. . . .

Part 6

Most of the things that he had planned they did.  But they

climbed more than he had intended because Ann  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 conversation 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; "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 perpetual

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.  "_I_ 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.

Part 7

As they came back from that day's climb--it was up the

Mittaghorn--they had to cross a shining space  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 extraordinary passion.

"My God!" and ceased to move.

Capes became rigid and adhesive.  Nothing ensued. "All right?" he

asked.

"I'll have to pay it."

"Eh?"

"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!"

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 rarefied 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!"

Part 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 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 Taschhorn 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."

"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."

Part 9

"All sorts of things we're going to do," said Capes; "all sorts

of times we're going to have.  Sooner or later 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 unnecessary.

We met dissecting dogfish. . . .  Do you remember your first day

with me? . . .  Do you indeed remember?  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 remembrance. 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

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!"

Part 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."

Part 11

They sat for a time without speaking a word, in an enormous

shining globe of mutual satisfaction.

"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 nameless 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 dayspring 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

Part 1

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 enhanced the gentle gravity of her style, and her

black hair flowed off her open forehead to pass under the control

of a simple ribbon of silver.  A silver necklace 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.

"Wonderful man!" said Ann Veronica, reassured, and stroking his

cheek with her finger.

Capes made a quick movement as if to bite that aggressive 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 talking. He--he has rather a poor

opinion of his contemporaries.  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

confessed 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 London 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 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 introduced 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.

Part 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 arrangement 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.

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

intelligently.  The burning topic of the Mendelian controversy

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 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, however 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. "Exceptionally 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 and dull his nerves a

little.  A gust of irrational impatience 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 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 pronounced, 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, consenting with dignity.

"Ann Veronica has never looked quite so well, I think," said

Capes, clinging, because of a preconceived plan, to the

suppressed topic.

Part 3

At last the evening was over, and Capes and his wife had gone

down to see Mr. Stanley and his sister into a 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 thoughtful 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?"

"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 uncomfortable, 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 practical 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.

"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 remember 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 falling 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 rich as we may be, we won't forget the

tune 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 overwhelm us.  These petals!  I've been wanting

to cry all the evening, cry here on your shoulder 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."

Content

Wells H. G. Ann Veronica