 CHAPTER VI The next morning opened calmly, and Anne 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 expostilations, prelude by her telegram, and headed by her aunt. The telegram reminded Anne 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-swatered 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.'" Anne 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. Anne 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 Anne 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 set 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 pin cushion. "'You didn't even do that, V, not even that.' "'I sent a telegram, aunt,' said Anne 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 offhand, and then when he saw what it was he hit at the table, and sent his soup-spoon flying and splashing onto 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 the most awful word. Then he said, "'It's Anne 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 terrine. 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 V,' he cried, little V, and put his face between his hands and sat still for a long time before he broke out again. Anne 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 anyone 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. Anne Veronica looked down at her fingers on the cleric-coloured tablecloth. 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 two. 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.' "'Enter that,' threw vast rhetorical reanderings, she clung. It reached her only slowly that Anne 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 Polesworthy 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 Anne 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 anyone thinks,' said Anne Veronica. "'I can't imagine what has come over you,' said her aunt. "'I can't conceive what you want, you foolish girl!' Anne Veronica took that in silence. At the back of her mind, deeming 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 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 a 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 expossulation was taken up by Mr Stanley in person. Her father's ideas of expossulation were a little harsh and forcible, and over the cleric-coloured tablecloth 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 smoldering 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 upstairs and get your things together while I look out for a handsome.'" 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, Anne Veronica began to weep with Tara 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 Anne 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?' "'Shall't get odd jobs,' said Anne Veronica, wiping her eyes. And from that point they went on to a thoroughly embittering wrangle. Mr. Stanley used his authority and commanded Anne 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 terrified Anne 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. Anne 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 of your own mother was alive.' He paused, deeply moved. "'If my own mother was alive,' sobbed Anne Veronica, she would understand.' The talk became more and more inconclusive and exhausting. Anne Veronica found herself incompetent, undignified and detestable, holding on desperately to a hardening antagonism to her father, quarreling with him, wrangling with him, thinking of reputies, 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 peals. 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, shaking at her to emphasise his point. You understand, then, he was saying. You understand! I understand, said Anne Veronica, tear-wet and flushed with his 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 four. The next day her aunt came again and expulsulated, and was just saying it was an unheard-of thing for a girl to leave her home as Anne 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 Anne Veronica firmly. Now, he said quietly, it's time we stopped this nonsense. Anne 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! Anne 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 in regarded Anne 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, rubbishing 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 Anne 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. Anne 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. V, she said, come home, before it is too late. Come, Molly, said Mr. Stanley at the door. V, said Miss Stanley, you hear what your father says. Miss Stanley struggled with emotion. She made a curious movement toward her niece. Then suddenly, confusively, she dabbed down something lumpy on the table and turned to follow her brother. Anne 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. Aren't, 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. Anne Veronica realised 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. God's, 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 informants, two postage stamps, a small key, and her aunt's return half-ticket to Morningside Park. Part 5 After the interview, Anne Veronica considered herself formally cut off from home. If nothing else had clinched that, the purse had. Nevertheless, there came a resident of expostilations. 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 Anne Veronica's mind. She exhorted Anne Veronica not to become one of those unsexed intellectuals, neither man nor woman. Anne Veronica meditated over that phrase. That's him, said Anne 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, V, 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 Mahutmus and Theosophy and higher-thoughton 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 GV'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 percent since the beginning. Eight percent. Who 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, lay? I don't have to disagree with you, V, 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 luck right off if I were you, V, he said. I'm five years older than you, and nowhere and 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 GV 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 ascent. Life's hard enough nowadays for an unprotected male. It's a lonely girl. You've 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, V. 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 GV 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 didery, no damn good, after all, 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, V, there's 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, V, and then try again. Then you may have a bit of chance. Now you haven't the ghost of one. Not if you play the game fair. Part 6 It was remarkable to Anne Veronica, how completely Mr. Manning, in his entirely different dialect, endorsed 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 Anne 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 moustache. Anne 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 Weeders' Guardsmen revised by Mr. Haldane and the London School of Economics, and finished in the Celtic 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 pry to do it. Quite!' He sat in the arm-chair and took tea, and consumed several of the extra cakes which he 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 moustache the while. Anne Veronica sat violet by her tea-tree 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 realise 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 this dreadful dingy apartment.' "'I'm afraid I'm anything but a princess when it comes to earning a salary,' said Anne 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 by 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.' Anne 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 Anne 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 a 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, some 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. Every where I went, and wrapped at a door, I found behind it another dreadful dingy woman—another fallen queen, I suppose—dingier than the last, dirty you know, ingrain. They're 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—and 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 remarry, 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 Anne 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 sympathise and understand. Still, here we are in this dingy foggy city. You gods! What a wilderness it is! Everyone trying to get the better of everyone—everyone regardless of everyone. It's one of those days when everyone bumps against you, everyone 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. Anne 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? You know 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 clothes, wearing lovely dresses and picking beautiful flowers? Ah, one could. While those other girls trudged to business and those other women let lodgings, and in reality, even that magic garden clothes 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 clothes would be a better thing than that. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 of Ann Veronica This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Joy Chan Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells Chapter 7 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 darned 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 books she had fetched from Moody's. She had invested a half-guinea with Moody's, or sit over her fire and think. Slowly and reluctantly she came to realise that Vivi 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 school mistress, or a very high type of governess nurse. The other was to go into business, into a photographer's reception room for example, or costumers 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 smoking 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 profit 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 Anne 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 Tredggold 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 treading 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 an amnesty, 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 fairy queen was really a triotise upon molecular chemistry written in a peculiar and picturesquely handled cipher. Part 2 Now while Anne Veronica was taking these surroundings 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 Minerva, 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 Minerva learned of her flight and got her address from the widgets. She arrived about nine o'clock the next evening in a state of tremulous enthusiasm. She followed the landlady half-way upstairs, and called up to Anne Veronica. May I come up? It's me! You know, Nettie Minerva! She appeared before Anne Veronica could clearly recall who Nettie Minerva 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 Anne Veronica. You're glorious, said Miss Minerva, in tones of rapture, holding a hand in each of hers and peering up into Anne Veronica's face. Glorious! You're so calm, dear, and so resolute, so serene. It's girls like you who'll show them what we are, said Miss Minerva, girls whose spirits have not been broken. Anne Veronica sunned herself a little in this warmth. I was watching you at Morningside Park, dear, said Miss Minerva. I'm 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 Anne 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 Anne 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 expostolation and so many secret doubts. She did not listen long. She wanted to talk. She sat, crouched together, by the corner of the hearth rug under the bookcase that supported the pig's skull, and looked into the fire and up at Anne 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 Anne Veronica agreed. You're coming right out into life, facing it all. Anne Veronica sat with her chin on her hand, red-lit and saying little, and misminvoured disgust. As she talked, the drift and significance of what she was saying shaped itself slowly to Anne Veronica's apprehension. It presented itself in the likeness of a great grey, 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 whatnot. But just at present in England, they shaped as commercialism and competition, silk hats, urban 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 Anne 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 in, 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 Niche and Plato, Chinese 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. Anne 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. Anne 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 Anne 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 Anne 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 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 Anne 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, almost like-heartedly. There is Shaw and Webb and Wilkins the author, and Tuma and Dr. Tumperney, 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 Anne 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 Anne Veronica into her peculiar levels of the world, with so enthusiastic generosity, that it seemed in gratitude to remain critical. Indeed almost insensibly Anne Veronica became habituated to the peculiar appearance and the peculiar manners of the people in the van. The shock of the 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 Goops. The Goops were the oddest little couple conceivable, following a fruitarian career upon an upper floor in Theobald's room. They were childless and servantless, and they had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts. Mr. Goops, Anne Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in new ideas upon vegetarian cookery, vivisection, the generation, the lactile 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. Goops, when at home, dressed simply in a pajama-shaped suit of canvas sacking tied with brown ribbons, while his wife wore a purple digba with a richly embroidered yoke. He was a small, dark-reserved man, with a large and flexible-looking convex forehead, and his wife was very pink and high-spirited, with one of those chins that passed insensibly into a full, strong neck. Once a week, every Saturday, they had a little gathering from nine to the small hours, just talk and perhaps reading aloud, and fruitarian refreshments, chestnut sandwiches buttered with nut toast, and so forth, and lemonade and unfermented wine, and to one of these symposia, Miss Miniver, after a good deal of preliminary solicitude, conducted Anne 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 Anne Veronica's inexperienced eye, to be an anti-macassar 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 Merrill-Bone. 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 presently added a roguish-looking young man with reddish hair, an orange tie, and a fluffy tweed suit, and others who, in Anne 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 Anne Veronica rather more than suspected the chief speakers to be, as schoolboys say, showing off at her. They talked of a new substitute for dripping in vegetarian crookery that Mrs. Goots 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 illusions 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 the Goots, and spoke, as if in reply, to long-sustained inquiries on the part of the Goots, into the personnel of the Marlebone Rural Council. If you were to ask me, he would say, I should say Blinde's 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 Anne Veronica's dress. Mrs. Goots 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 Minerva 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 Anne Veronica whether she did not feel the same. And Mr. Goots 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 flavour by questioning whether any one could be perfectly sincere in love. Miss Minerva thought that there was no true sincerity except in love, and appealed to Anne 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. Goots down on him with the less enticient teachers 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 blonde young man, and speaking in undertones of the utmost clearness, gave a brief and confidential account of an unfounded rumour of the bifurcation of the affection of Blinders that had led to a situation of some unpleasantness upon the borough council. The very old lady in the antimacca touched Anne 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 sycophous-like efforts on the part of Goots 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 antimacca said, abruptly, ah you young people, you young people, if you only knew, and then laughed and then used 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. Goots said she believed in nothing else, and with that she glanced at Anne Veronica, rose a little abruptly, and directed Goots 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 crux of sonata and resurrection to Tolstoy again. So the talk went on. Goots, 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 deal at last between them, and all the others sat and listened. Everyone that is except the older man, who had got the blonde young man into a corner by the green stained dresser with the aluminum things, and was sitting with his back to everyone 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 Marlborough. So the talk went on, and presently there 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. Anne Veronica intervened a little in the novelist discussion, with the defence of Esmond, and an denial that the egoist was obscure, and when she spoke everyone else stopped talking and listened. Then they deliberated whether Bernard Shaw ought to go into Parliament, and that brought them to vegetarianism and teatulturalism, and the young man in the orange tie in Mrs. Goops had a great set to about the sincerity of Chesterton and Bellock that was ended by Goops showing signs of resuming the Socratic method. And at last Anne Veronica and Miss Minerva 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 Anne Veronica's lodging. They trudged along a little hungry because of the fruiterian refreshments, and mentally very active. And Miss Minerva fell discussing whether Goops or Bernard Shaw or Tolstoy or Dr. Tumperney 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 Anne Veronica went with Miss Minerva into the back seats of the gallery at Essex Hall, and heard and saw the giant leaders of the Fabian Society who are remaking the world. Bernard Shaw and Tumperney and Dr. Tumperney 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 Goops-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 afterwards 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 and progress sounded, and she went to a soiree in 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. Anne Veronica was carried off her intellectual and critical feet by it all together, 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 has 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 everyone. 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 practicing 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 Anne 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 Anne Veronica, but now she got them masked and alive, instead of by glimpses or in books, alive and articulate and insistent. The London backgrounds, in Bloonsbury and Merrillbone, against which these people went to and fro, took on by reason of their grey facades, their implacably respectable windows and window-blinds, their reiterated unmeaning iron railings, a stronger and stronger suggestion of the flavour 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 widget 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 widgets, for Teddy and Hetty came up from Morningside Park, and took her to an 18-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 percent 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 Anne 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 Anne 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 ties 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 Supervene's. Yet through these talks, these meetings and conferences, these movements and efforts, Anne 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 effective. 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 objection by the glamour of its own assertions. It happened that at the extremist point of Anne Veronica's social circle from the widgets 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 subtle 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 Anne 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 hers 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 realisation that a big and growing organisation of women were giving form, and a generalised 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 in 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 belief. Not for these things, O Anne 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 poker in her brows became more perceptible. PART FIVE In the beginning of December, Anne 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 boot-hole 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 Anne Veronica some new warm under-clothing, 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, for 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 a special 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 Gruz, 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.' Anne 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 Anne 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 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.' Anne 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 and penetrable 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 Andronica. "'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'm looking at you and thinking about you from top to toe.' "'And what do you think I ought to do?' "'Exactly.' He lifted a paperweight 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 onto 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." Anne 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. She pronounced this with an air of profound conviction, and with his eyes on Anne 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 coloured 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 Rammage, as one who routed 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 economic point of view, you are very young and altogether inexperienced person.' He returned to you 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 goldmine 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 to 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 that's 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 Anne Veronica sharply. I see no reason why you shouldn't. It's impossible.' "'As one friend to another. May not always doing it, and if you set up to be a man.' "'No, it's absolutely out of the question, Mr. Rammage.' And Anne Veronica's face was hot. Rammage 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 were 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 Anne Veronica. "'Not a bit. Just a friendly, polite suggestion. I don't suggest any philanthropy. I shall charge you five percent, you know, fair and square.' Anne Veronica opened her lips quickly and did not speak. But the five percent certainly did seem to improve the aspect of Rammage'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, anywhere. 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 Anne Veronica had gone to Rammage 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 Rammage 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 Rammage? It was so true what he said, middle-class people were ridiculously squeamish about money. Why should they be? He and Rammage 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 Rammage and came to the point almost at once. Can you spare me forty pounds? She said. Mr. Rammage controlled his expression and thought very quickly. Indeed, 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 of Fiverr 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 lunchtime. Come and have lunch with me. Anne 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. Anne Veronica, for some undefinable reason, did not want to lunch with him, a reason indeed so indefinable that she dismissed it, and Rammage 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 handsome. Their subsequent conversation is outside the scope of our story. Ritters, said Rammage to the driver, Dean Street. It was rare that Anne Veronica used handsoms, 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 clutter-patter of the horse, the passage of the teeming streets. She admitted her pleasure to Rammage. Anne Ritters, 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 Rammage's orders, and waited with an appearance of affection. Anne Veronica thought the whole affair rather jolly. Ritters sold better food than most of his compatriots, and cooked it better, and Rammage, with a fine perception of a feminine pallet, ordered very capri. It was Anne 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, tater-tater with a man, and yet, at the same time, it was a perfectly innocent and as well as agreeable proceeding. They talked across their meal in an easy and friendly manner about Anne 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. He described the groups and the fabians to him, and gave him a sketch of a 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 embaffling doubts came drifting across this conviction. She doubted how she stood toward him, and what the restrained gleam on 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 giving 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. You are affectionate father. Anne Veronica sat over her fire with her father's note in her hand. Queer letter, 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 felt a 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 things 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 rammages 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 a 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 rammages 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 others are crumple up. Just surrender. Funk, I'll see it out. End of Chapter 7