He had diverged only a little from the truth when he said that his
chief interest in life was women. It wasn't so much women as Woman that
engaged his mind. His was the Latin turn of thinking; he had fallen
in love at thirteen, and he was still capable—he prided himself—of
falling in love. His invalid wife and her money had been only the thin
thread that held his life together; beaded on that permanent relation
had been an inter-weaving series of other feminine experiences,
disturbing, absorbing, interesting, memorable affairs. Each one had
been different from the others, each had had a quality all its own, a
distinctive freshness, a distinctive beauty. He could not understand how
men could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful
research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing, these
complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and mounted to
the supremest, most passionate intimacy. All the rest of his existence
was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for it, worked for it, kept
himself in training for it.
So while he talked to this girl of work and freedom, his slightly
protuberant eyes were noting the gracious balance of her limbs and body
across the gate, the fine lines of her chin and neck. Her grave fine
face, her warm clear complexion, had already aroused his curiosity as he
had gone to and fro in Morningside Park, and here suddenly he was
near to her and talking freely and intimately. He had found her in
a communicative mood, and he used the accumulated skill of years in
turning that to account.
She was pleased and a little flattered by his interest and sympathy. She
became eager to explain herself, to show herself in the right light. He
was manifestly exerting his mind for her, and she found herself fully
disposed to justify his interest.
She, perhaps, displayed herself rather consciously as a fine
person unduly limited. She even touched lightly on her father's
unreasonableness.
"I wonder," said Ramage, "that more girls don't think as you do and want
to strike out in the world."
And then he speculated. "I wonder if you will?"
"Let me say one thing," he said. "If ever you do and I can help you
in any way, by advice or inquiry or recommendation—You see, I'm no
believer in feminine incapacity, but I do perceive there is such a thing
as feminine inexperience. As a sex you're a little under-trained—in
affairs. I'd take it—forgive me if I seem a little urgent—as a sort of
proof of friendliness. I can imagine nothing more pleasant in life than
to help you, because I know it would pay to help you. There's something
about you, a little flavor of Will, I suppose, that makes one feel—good
luck about you and success...."
And while he talked and watched her as he talked, she answered, and
behind her listening watched and thought about him. She liked the
animated eagerness of his manner.
His mind seemed to be a remarkably full one; his knowledge of detailed
reality came in just where her own mind was most weakly equipped.
Through all he said ran one quality that pleased her—the quality of a
man who feels that things can be done, that one need not wait for the
world to push one before one moved. Compared with her father and Mr.
Manning and the men in "fixed" positions generally that she knew,
Ramage, presented by himself, had a fine suggestion of freedom, of
power, of deliberate and sustained adventure....
She was particularly charmed by his theory of friendship. It was really
very jolly to talk to a man in this way—who saw the woman in her and
did not treat her as a child. She was inclined to think that perhaps
for a girl the converse of his method was the case; an older man, a
man beyond the range of anything "nonsensical," was, perhaps, the most
interesting sort of friend one could meet. But in that reservation it
may be she went a little beyond the converse of his view....
They got on wonderfully well together. They talked for the better part
of an hour, and at last walked together to the junction of highroad
and the bridle-path. There, after protestations of friendliness and
helpfulness that were almost ardent, he mounted a little clumsily and
rode off at an amiable pace, looking his best, making a leg with
his riding gaiters, smiling and saluting, while Ann Veronica turned
northward and so came to Micklechesil. There, in a little tea and
sweet-stuff shop, she bought and consumed slowly and absent-mindedly the
insufficient nourishment that is natural to her sex on such occasions.
We left Miss Stanley with Ann Veronica's fancy dress in her hands and
her eyes directed to Ann Veronica's pseudo-Turkish slippers.
When Mr. Stanley came home at a quarter to six—an earlier train by
fifteen minutes than he affected—his sister met him in the hall with
a hushed expression. "I'm so glad you're here, Peter," she said. "She
means to go."
"Go!" he said. "Where?"
"To that ball."
"What ball?" The question was rhetorical. He knew.
"I believe she's dressing up-stairs—now."
"Then tell her to undress, confound her!" The City had been thoroughly
annoying that day, and he was angry from the outset.
Miss Stanley reflected on this proposal for a moment.
"I don't think she will," she said.
"She must," said Mr. Stanley, and went into his study. His sister
followed. "She can't go now. She'll have to wait for dinner," he said,
uncomfortably.
"She's going to have some sort of meal with the Widgetts down the
Avenue, and go up with them.
"She told you that?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"At tea."
"But why didn't you prohibit once for all the whole thing? How dared she
tell you that?"
"Out of defiance. She just sat and told me that was her arrangement.
I've never seen her quite so sure of herself."
"What did you say?"
"I said, 'My dear Veronica! how can you think of such things?'"
"And then?"
"She had two more cups of tea and some cake, and told me of her walk."
"She'll meet somebody one of these days—walking about like that."
"She didn't say she'd met any one."
"But didn't you say some more about that ball?"
"I said everything I could say as soon as I realized she was trying to
avoid the topic. I said, 'It is no use your telling me about this walk
and pretend I've been told about the ball, because you haven't. Your
father has forbidden you to go!'"
"Well?"
"She said, 'I hate being horrid to you and father, but I feel it my duty
to go to that ball!'"
"Felt it her duty!"
"'Very well,' I said, 'then I wash my hands of the whole business. Your
disobedience be upon your own head.'"
"But that is flat rebellion!" said Mr. Stanley, standing on the
hearthrug with his back to the unlit gas-fire. "You ought at once—you
ought at once to have told her that. What duty does a girl owe to any
one before her father? Obedience to him, that is surely the first law.
What CAN she put before that?" His voice began to rise. "One would think
I had said nothing about the matter. One would think I had agreed to
her going. I suppose this is what she learns in her infernal London
colleges. I suppose this is the sort of damned rubbish—"
"Oh! Ssh, Peter!" cried Miss Stanley.
He stopped abruptly. In the pause a door could be heard opening and
closing on the landing up-stairs. Then light footsteps became audible,
descending the staircase with a certain deliberation and a faint rustle
of skirts.
"Tell her," said Mr. Stanley, with an imperious gesture, "to come in
here."
Miss Stanley emerged from the study and stood watching Ann Veronica
descend.
The girl was flushed with excitement, bright-eyed, and braced for a
struggle; her aunt had never seen her looking so fine or so pretty.
Her fancy dress, save for the green-gray stockings, the pseudo-Turkish
slippers, and baggy silk trousered ends natural to a Corsair's bride,
was hidden in a large black-silk-hooded opera-cloak. Beneath the hood
it was evident that her rebellious hair was bound up with red silk, and
fastened by some device in her ears (unless she had them pierced, which
was too dreadful a thing to suppose!) were long brass filigree earrings.
"I'm just off, aunt," said Ann Veronica.
"Your father is in the study and wishes to speak to you."
Ann Veronica hesitated, and then stood in the open doorway and regarded
her father's stern presence. She spoke with an entirely false note of
cheerful off-handedness. "I'm just in time to say good-bye before I go,
father. I'm going up to London with the Widgetts to that ball."
"Now look here, Ann Veronica," said Mr. Stanley, "just a moment. You are
NOT going to that ball!"
Ann Veronica tried a less genial, more dignified note.
"I thought we had discussed that, father."
"You are not going to that ball! You are not going out of this house in
that get-up!"
Ann Veronica tried yet more earnestly to treat him, as she would treat
any man, with an insistence upon her due of masculine respect. "You
see," she said, very gently, "I AM going. I am sorry to seem to disobey
you, but I am. I wish"—she found she had embarked on a bad sentence—"I
wish we needn't have quarrelled."
She stopped abruptly, and turned about toward the front door. In a
moment he was beside her. "I don't think you can have heard me, Vee,"
he said, with intensely controlled fury. "I said you were"—he
shouted—"NOT TO GO!"
She made, and overdid, an immense effort to be a princess. She tossed
her head, and, having no further words, moved toward the door. Her
father intercepted her, and for a moment she and he struggled with their
hands upon the latch. A common rage flushed their faces. "Let go!" she
gasped at him, a blaze of anger.
"Veronica!" cried Miss Stanley, warningly, and, "Peter!"
For a moment they seemed on the verge of an altogether desperate
scuffle. Never for a moment had violence come between these two since
long ago he had, in spite of her mother's protest in the background,
carried her kicking and squalling to the nursery for some forgotten
crime. With something near to horror they found themselves thus
confronted.
The door was fastened by a catch and a latch with an inside key, to
which at night a chain and two bolts were added. Carefully abstaining
from thrusting against each other, Ann Veronica and her father began an
absurdly desperate struggle, the one to open the door, the other to keep
it fastened. She seized the key, and he grasped her hand and squeezed
it roughly and painfully between the handle and the ward as she tried to
turn it. His grip twisted her wrist. She cried out with the pain of it.
A wild passion of shame and self-disgust swept over her. Her spirit
awoke in dismay to an affection in ruins, to the immense undignified
disaster that had come to them.
Abruptly she desisted, recoiled, and turned and fled up-stairs.
She made noises between weeping and laughter as she went. She gained her
room, and slammed her door and locked it as though she feared violence
and pursuit.
"Oh God!" she cried, "Oh God!" and flung aside her opera-cloak, and for
a time walked about the room—a Corsair's bride at a crisis of emotion.
"Why can't he reason with me," she said, again and again, "instead of
doing this?"
There presently came a phase in which she said: "I WON'T stand it even
now. I will go to-night."
She went as far as her door, then turned to the window. She opened
this and scrambled out—a thing she had not done for five long years of
adolescence—upon the leaded space above the built-out bath-room on the
first floor. Once upon a time she and Roddy had descended thence by the
drain-pipe.
But things that a girl of sixteen may do in short skirts are not
things to be done by a young lady of twenty-one in fancy dress and
an opera-cloak, and just as she was coming unaided to an adequate
realization of this, she discovered Mr. Pragmar, the wholesale druggist,
who lived three gardens away, and who had been mowing his lawn to get
an appetite for dinner, standing in a fascinated attitude beside the
forgotten lawn-mower and watching her intently.
She found it extremely difficult to infuse an air of quiet correctitude
into her return through the window, and when she was safely inside she
waved clinched fists and executed a noiseless dance of rage.
When she reflected that Mr. Pragmar probably knew Mr. Ramage, and might
describe the affair to him, she cried "Oh!" with renewed vexation, and
repeated some steps of her dance in a new and more ecstatic measure.
At eight that evening Miss Stanley tapped at Ann Veronica's bedroom
door.
"I've brought you up some dinner, Vee," she said.
Ann Veronica was lying on her bed in a darkling room staring at the
ceiling. She reflected before answering. She was frightfully hungry.
She had eaten little or no tea, and her mid-day meal had been worse than
nothing.
She got up and unlocked the door.
Her aunt did not object to capital punishment or war, or the industrial
system or casual wards, or flogging of criminals or the Congo Free
State, because none of these things really got hold of her imagination;
but she did object, she did not like, she could not bear to think of
people not having and enjoying their meals. It was her distinctive test
of an emotional state, its interference with a kindly normal digestion.
Any one very badly moved choked down a few mouthfuls; the symptom of
supreme distress was not to be able to touch a bit. So that the thought
of Ann Veronica up-stairs had been extremely painful for her through all
the silent dinner-time that night. As soon as dinner was over she went
into the kitchen and devoted herself to compiling a tray—not a tray
merely of half-cooled dinner things, but a specially prepared "nice"
tray, suitable for tempting any one. With this she now entered.