Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story

CA TALKS T

rt

d on the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had been reached. She made up her mind in the train home that it

scovered with a start, from a lettered lamp, that she was at Morningside Park, and thought she was moving out of the station, whereas she was only moving in. "Lord!" she said. She jumped up at once, caught up a leather clutch containing notebooks, a fat text-book, and a chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the carriage, only to

her home. Outside the post-office stood a no-hatted, blond young man in gray flannels, who was elaborately affixing a stamp to a letter. At the sight of her he became rigid and a singularly

x. "Here goes," he said. Then he hovered undecidedly for some seconds with his hands in h

te, and her face resumed its expression of stern preoccup

s on either side, and then there was the pavement, the little clump of shops about the post-office, and under the railway arch was a congestion of workmen's dwellings. The road from Surbiton and Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in the ditch, there was now appearing a sort

in ascending this stile. "Much as I hate rows, I'v

es; then her eyes wandered to where the new red-and-white villas peeped among the trees.

n't the wo

what he ta

oubt, had gone from her warm-tinted face. She had now the clear and tranquil expression of o

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

eddy!" sh

y for a moment

ealized that he was committed to the path across the

d, "dammit!" with great

rt

btle and fine. She was slender, and sometimes she seemed tall, and walked and carried herself lightly and joyfully as one who commonly and habitually feels well, and sometimes she stooped a little and was preoccupied

when people leave it in the summer. The blinds were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what colors these gray swathings hid. She wanted to know. And there was no intimation whatever that the blinds would ever go

field with her usual liveliness of apprehension. But here she met with a check. These interests her world promptly, through the agency of schoolmistresses, older school-mates, her aunt, and a number of other responsible and authoritative people, assured her she must on no account think about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moral instruction mistress, was particularly explicit upon this score, and they all agreed in indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds ran on such matters, and who betrayed it in their c

ourse at the Tredgold Women's College-she had already matriculated into London University from school-she came of age, and she bickered with her aunt for latch-key privileges on the strength of that and her season ticket. Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind, thinly disguised as literature and art. She read voraciously, and presently, because of her aunt's censorship, she took to smuggling any books she thought might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, and she went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable friend to accompany her. She passed her general science examination with double honors and specialized in science. She happened to hav

t." In that posture of being seen about the matter hung until she seemed committed to another session at the Tredgold College, and in the mean

spised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the station. He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three daughters with peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found adorable. Two of these had been her particular intimates at the High School, and had done much to send her mind exploring beyond the limits of the available literature at home. It was a cheerful, irresponsible, shamelessly hard-up family in the key of faded green and flattened purple, and the girls we

oot down," and sa

her nothing. One point was that she was to wear fancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair's bride, and the other was that she was to spend whatever vestig

!" said Ann V

ho shares a difficulty, "I've promised to go. I did

ally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to her a singularly ignoble method

e it's aunt's

of home, she said to herself: "I'll have it out with h

n unspoken words to the

rt

wn of his head. His name was Peter. He had had five children at irregular intervals, of whom Ann Veronica was the youngest, so that as a parent he came to her perhaps a little practised and jaded and inattentive; and he called her his "little Vee," and patted her unexpectedly and

eal more money and time than he could afford upon the little room at the top of the house, in producing new lapidary apparatus and new microscopic accessories and in rubbing down slices of rock to a transparent thinness and mounting them in a beautiful and dignified manner. He did it, he said, "to distract his mind." His chief successes he exhibited to the Lowndean Microscopical Society, where their high technical merit never failed to ex

fter dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with a tendency to monopolize the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair of dappled fawn-skin slippers across the fender. She wondered occasionally why his mind need

But she certainly remembered that when she was a little girl he sometimes wore tennis flannels, and also rode a bicycle very dexterously in through the gates to the fron

ad died when she was thirteen, her two much older sisters had married off-one submissively, one insubordinately; her two brothers had gon

els-either for worship or contumely, and are withal fragile vessels. He had never wanted daughters. Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealed his chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and had sworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom. He was a manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he had loved his dark-eyed, dainty bright-colored, and active little wife with a real vein of passion in his

out daughters. The

It is a lovely little appendage to the mother who smiles over it, and it does things quaintly like her, gestures with her very gestures. It makes wonderful sentences that you can repeat in the City and are good

to keep to be a comfort in his declining years just as he thought fit. About this conception of ownership he perceived and desired a certain sentimental glamour, he liked everything properly dressed, but it remained ownership. Ownership seemed only a reasonable return for the cares and expenses of a daughter's upbringing. Daughters were not like sons. He perceived, however, that both the novels he read and the world he lived in discountenanced these assumptions. Nothing else was put in their place, and they remained sotto voce, as it were, in his mind. The new and the old cancelled out; his daughters became quasi-independent dependents-which is absurd. One married as he

altogether too urgent. He had finally put aside The Lilac Sunbonnet, gone into his study, lit

rt

rs! He gnawed his pen and reflected,

you wish to go up in some fantastic get-up, wrapped about in your opera cloak, and that after the festivities you propose to stay with these friends of y

, and crossed out t

his can

t tell you quite definitely that I feel it

g a fresh sheet, he recopied what he had written. A c

hould ever have prop

and began a

f some very queer ideas about what a young lady in your position may or may not venture to do. I do not thi

study. It was so diff

your

hed for the mot jus

crude unthinking criticism of youth. You have no grasp upon the essential facts of life (I pray God you never may), and in your rash ignor

t he was now too deeply moved to trace a certain unsatisfactoriness to its source in a mixture o

ut with prowling pitfalls, from whic

and he frowned wit

nt enterprises. A day will come when you will thank me. It is not, my dear Veronica, that I think there is any harm in you; there is not. But a girl is soiled not only by evil but by t

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

ster a

t her that she had acquired through her long engagement to a curate of family, a scion of the Wiltshire Edmondshaws. He had died before they married, and when her brother became a widower she had come to his assistance and taken over much of the care of his youngest daughter. But from the first her rather old-fashioned conception of life had jarred with the suburban atmosphere, the High School spirit and the memories of the lig

pipe he had drawn from his jacket pocke

ged hands and read it judicial

last, "it is firm

have sa

said. It seems to me exactly what is want

d he waited fo

eople or the sort of life to which they would dra

es?" he said,

dded, "to some people. Of course, one doesn't like to

why she shouldn't get

xactly wha

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

manner just as he was leaving the house to catch his London train. When Ann Ve

rt

hings out with her father was no

of Yellow Peril to all the smaller hardy annuals, while her father brought some papers to table and presented himself as preoccupied with them. "It really seems as if we shall have to put down marigolds altogether next year," Aunt Molly repeated three times, "and do away with marguerites. They seed beyond all reason." Elizabeth, the parlormaid, k

imes with an unusually passionate intentness, and then de

said Ann Veronica. "I may as

aid her father, with a

too," she v

ich they walk

began, and was sudde

ect," he said, "it's no good,

ook a fool before

an engagement until you

ough," she gasped, betw

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

ok here

es at her with an

u're not to go. Y

about othe

e. This isn'

to the study to-n

m-B

't talk anywhere else-I D

ntly made Mr. Stanley's acquaintance in the train and shown him one or two trifling civilities. He was an outside broker and the proprietor of a financial newspaper; he had come up very rapid

at possible benefit can come of discussing things that are settled. If you w

t, then,

with iron-gray hair a mobile, clean-shaven mouth and rather protuberant black eyes that now scrutinized Ann Veronica. He dressed rather after the fashion of the West End than the City, and af

ey drew alongside, to account for his own ruffled and heated

said Ramage. "Is Miss St

e said, "and chan

cond," said Rama

mediately think how to put it, he contented himself with a gr

She finds lying up so much very irks

g?" he said. "Are you going on again this winter with that scientific work of yours? It's an instance o

read the Times. He was struck disagreeably by Ramage's air of gallant consideration and Ann Veronica's self-possessed answers. These things did not harmonize with his conception of the forthcoming (if unavoidable) interview. After all, it came to him suddenly as a harsh discovery that she might be in a sense regarded as grownup. He was a man who in all things classified without nuance, and for him there

rked, "struck me as unconvi

and stared with stony eyes at a Book-War proclamation in leaded type that filled half a column of the Times that day. Could she understand what she was talki

y understand the meaning. But a middle-aged man like Ramage ought to know

, "and the main interest of the play was the embezzlement." Thank Heaven! Mr. Stanley allowed

though such attentions from middle-aged, but still gallant, merchants were a matter of course. Then, as Ramage readjusted himself in a co

rough his glasses with some

nd ideas," he said,

usually clever g

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

rt

lled a glimpse he had of her face, bright and serene, as his train ran out of Wimbledon. He recalled with exasperating perplexity her clear, matter-of-fact tone as she talked about love-making being unconvincing. He was really very proud of her, and extraordinarily angry and resentful at the innocent a

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

is bread and cutting it up in a way he h

ht say, in London. Schoolgirl. Her family are solid West End people, Kensington people. Father-dead. She goes out and comes home.

rish stew for

he said, with his m

!" said M

t at Worthing. Very romanti

ut

Sheer calculation on his. Went up to Somerset House to

't care fo

ted to marry a woman of thirty in a tobacconist's shop. Only a son's another story. We fixed that. Well, that's the situation. My people don't know what to do. Can't face a scandal. Can't ask the gent to go

ned Rascal!" he said. "Isn't

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

ls," said Mr. Sta

Ogilvy. "Our interest li

n girls didn't get th

ample. Anyhow, they did

ent of misleading, spurious stuff that pours from the press. These sham i

ing, frank person-had had her imagination fired, so sh

at the present time. Even WITH the Censorship of Plays there's hardly a decent thing to which a man can take

Romeo and Juliet did the mischief. If our young person hadn't had the nurse part cut out, eh? She might have known mo

different. I'm not discussing Shakespeare. I don't want to Bowdlerize

took musta

to check their proceedings but a declining habit of telling the truth and the limitations of their imaginations. And in that respect they stir up one another. Not my affair, of course, but I think we ought to teach them more

rt

that evening Ann Vero

"you must say it in the study. I am going to smoke a little here, and then I shall go to the study. I don't see what you can have

very long, daddy,"

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

ersy had become triangular, for al

. Her aunt went out of the room with dignity and a rustle, and up-stairs to the fastness of her own room.

o be a deliberate and unmerited disregar

ar glow of the green-shaded lamp there lay, conspicuously waiting, a thick bundle of blue and white papers tied with pink tape. Her father held some printed document in his hand, and appeared not to observe her entry. "Sit down,

tion to be seated. She stood on the mat instead, and looked down on him. "Look here, da

deepened. "Why?"

y. "Well, because I don't see

see I

ouldn't

e place; it isn't a

you know of the pla

t; it's impossible for you to stay in an hotel in London-the ide

d down the corners of his mouth, a

asked Ann Veronica, and fidd

d, with an expressio

t's really what I want to discuss. It comes to this-am

proposal of yours,

ink I

in under my roof-" h

as though I wasn't. Well,

f life, nothing of its dangers, nothing of its possibilities. You think everything is harmless and simple, and so forth. It isn't. It isn't. That's where you go wrong. In som

ep hold of a complicated situation and not lose her head. Sh

t because it's a new experience, because I think it will be interesting and give me a vie

ope you may neve

I want to know-jus

nd put out his hand to th

ant to learn about things and know about things, and not to be protected a

ur going to college? Have I ever prevented you going

-up. I want to go on with my University work under proper conditions, now that I've done the Interm

onsiderations come in. While you live in my house you must follow my ideas. You are wrong even about that man's scientific position and his standard of work. There are men in the Lowndean who laugh at him-simply laugh at him. And I have seen work by his pupils myself

pon the gas fire took an expression of obstinacy that brought out a hitherto

n I have graduated

the natura

do no

f things a girl can

takes pity on me

appeal. His foot tapped impatie

d, with a change in her voic

as though this

example, I go

won

r for a moment. "How would

den it!" he said,

ow. But su

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

up anything that y

p anything I wis

rough a pause, and both face

when she spoke her lips quivered, and they came. "I mean to go to that dance!" she blubbered. "

intending to put an arm about her, but she stepped back from him quickly. She produced a handkerchief, and with

easonable. All we do is for your good. Neither your aunt

me live. Only you

t patience. He

nce about at nights in wild costumes with casual art student friends and God knows who. That-that isn't living! You are beside yourself. You don't know what you ask nor what you say. You have neither reason nor logic. I am sorry to seem to hurt you, but all I say is for your g

ecoiled from him, leaving him i

aid, "good-ni

asked; "n

cted not

d standing before the fire, staring at the situation. Then

else I could have