Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells (page 3)

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