In addition to the various business men, solicitors, civil servants,
and widow ladies who lived in the Morningside Park Avenue, there was a
certain family of alien sympathies and artistic quality, the Widgetts,
with which Ann Veronica had become very friendly. Mr. Widgett was a
journalist and art critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suit
and "art" brown ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday
morning, travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly
despised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the station.
He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three daughters with
peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found adorable. Two of these
had been her particular intimates at the High School, and had done much
to send her mind exploring beyond the limits of the available literature
at home. It was a cheerful, irresponsible, shamelessly hard-up family in
the key of faded green and flattened purple, and the girls went on from
the High School to the Fadden Art School and a bright, eventful life of
art student dances, Socialist meetings, theatre galleries, talking about
work, and even, at intervals, work; and ever and again they drew Ann
Veronica from her sound persistent industry into the circle of these
experiences. They had asked her to come to the first of the two great
annual Fadden Dances, the October one, and Ann Veronica had accepted
with enthusiasm. And now her father said she must not go.
He had "put his foot down," and said she must not go.
Going involved two things that all Ann Veronica's tact had been
ineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father. Her usual dignified
reserve had availed her nothing. One point was that she was to wear
fancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair's bride, and the other was that
she was to spend whatever vestiges of the night remained after the dance
was over in London with the Widgett girls and a select party in "quite a
decent little hotel" near Fitzroy Square.
"But, my dear!" said Ann Veronica's aunt.
"You see," said Ann Veronica, with the air of one who shares a
difficulty, "I've promised to go. I didn't realize—I don't see how I
can get out of it now."
Then it was her father issued his ultimatum. He had conveyed it to her,
not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to her a singularly
ignoble method of prohibition. "He couldn't look me in the face and say
it," said Ann Veronica.
"But of course it's aunt's doing really."
And thus it was that as Ann Veronica neared the gates of home, she said
to herself: "I'll have it out with him somehow. I'll have it out with
him. And if he won't—"
But she did not give even unspoken words to the alternative at that
time.
Ann Veronica's father was a solicitor with a good deal of company
business: a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic, clean-shaven
man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose, iron-gray hair,
gray eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small, circular baldness at the
crown of his head. His name was Peter. He had had five children at
irregular intervals, of whom Ann Veronica was the youngest, so that as
a parent he came to her perhaps a little practised and jaded and
inattentive; and he called her his "little Vee," and patted her
unexpectedly and disconcertingly, and treated her promiscuously as of
any age between eleven and eight-and-twenty. The City worried him a good
deal, and what energy he had left over he spent partly in golf, a game
he treated very seriously, and partly in the practices of microscopic
petrography.
He "went in" for microscopy in the unphilosophical Victorian manner as
his "hobby." A birthday present of a microscope had turned his mind to
technical microscopy when he was eighteen, and a chance friendship with
a Holborn microscope dealer had confirmed that bent. He had remarkably
skilful fingers and a love of detailed processes, and he had become one
of the most dexterous amateur makers of rock sections in the world.
He spent a good deal more money and time than he could afford upon the
little room at the top of the house, in producing new lapidary apparatus
and new microscopic accessories and in rubbing down slices of rock to
a transparent thinness and mounting them in a beautiful and dignified
manner. He did it, he said, "to distract his mind." His chief successes
he exhibited to the Lowndean Microscopical Society, where their high
technical merit never failed to excite admiration. Their scientific
value was less considerable, since he chose rocks entirely with a
view to their difficulty of handling or their attractiveness at
conversaziones when done. He had a great contempt for the sections the
"theorizers" produced. They proved all sorts of things perhaps, but they
were thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work. Yet an indiscriminating,
wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts of distinctions....
He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fiction with
chromatic titles, The Red Sword, The Black Helmet, The Purple Robe, also
in order "to distract his mind." He read it in winter in the evening
after dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with a tendency to
monopolize the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair of dappled fawn-skin
slippers across the fender. She wondered occasionally why his mind
needed so much distraction. His favorite newspaper was the Times, which
he began at breakfast in the morning often with manifest irritation, and
carried off to finish in the train, leaving no other paper at home.
It occurred to Ann Veronica once that she had known him when he was
younger, but day had followed day, and each had largely obliterated the
impression of its predecessor. But she certainly remembered that when
she was a little girl he sometimes wore tennis flannels, and also rode a
bicycle very dexterously in through the gates to the front door. And
in those days, too, he used to help her mother with her gardening, and
hover about her while she stood on the ladder and hammered creepers to
the scullery wall.
It had been Ann Veronica's lot as the youngest child to live in a home
that became less animated and various as she grew up. Her mother had
died when she was thirteen, her two much older sisters had married
off—one submissively, one insubordinately; her two brothers had gone
out into the world well ahead of her, and so she had made what she could
of her father. But he was not a father one could make much of.
His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest
quality; they were creatures, he thought, either too bad for a modern
vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably desirable, or too pure
and good for life. He made this simple classification of a large and
various sex to the exclusion of all intermediate kinds; he held that
the two classes had to be kept apart even in thought and remote from one
another. Women are made like the potter's vessels—either for worship
or contumely, and are withal fragile vessels. He had never wanted
daughters. Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealed
his chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and had
sworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom. He was
a manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he had loved his
dark-eyed, dainty bright-colored, and active little wife with a real
vein of passion in his sentiment. But he had always felt (he had never
allowed himself to think of it) that the promptitude of their family
was a little indelicate of her, and in a sense an intrusion. He had,
however, planned brilliant careers for his two sons, and, with a certain
human amount of warping and delay, they were pursuing these. One was
in the Indian Civil Service and one in the rapidly developing motor
business. The daughters, he had hoped, would be their mother's care.
He had no ideas about daughters. They happen to a man.
Of course a little daughter is a delightful thing enough. It runs about
gayly, it romps, it is bright and pretty, it has enormous quantities of
soft hair and more power of expressing affection than its brothers. It
is a lovely little appendage to the mother who smiles over it, and it
does things quaintly like her, gestures with her very gestures. It makes
wonderful sentences that you can repeat in the City and are good
enough for Punch. You call it a lot of nicknames—"Babs" and "Bibs" and
"Viddles" and "Vee"; you whack at it playfully, and it whacks you back.
It loves to sit on your knee. All that is jolly and as it should be.
But a little daughter is one thing and a daughter quite another. There
one comes to a relationship that Mr. Stanley had never thought out.
When he found himself thinking about it, it upset him so that he at once
resorted to distraction. The chromatic fiction with which he relieved
his mind glanced but slightly at this aspect of life, and never with any
quality of guidance. Its heroes never had daughters, they borrowed other
people's. The one fault, indeed, of this school of fiction for him was
that it had rather a light way with parental rights. His instinct was in
the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property, bound
to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a comfort in his
declining years just as he thought fit. About this conception of
ownership he perceived and desired a certain sentimental glamour, he
liked everything properly dressed, but it remained ownership. Ownership
seemed only a reasonable return for the cares and expenses of a
daughter's upbringing. Daughters were not like sons. He perceived,
however, that both the novels he read and the world he lived in
discountenanced these assumptions. Nothing else was put in their place,
and they remained sotto voce, as it were, in his mind. The new and
the old cancelled out; his daughters became quasi-independent
dependents—which is absurd. One married as he wished and one against
his wishes, and now here was Ann Veronica, his little Vee, discontented
with her beautiful, safe, and sheltering home, going about with hatless
friends to Socialist meetings and art-class dances, and displaying a
disposition to carry her scientific ambitions to unwomanly lengths. She
seemed to think he was merely the paymaster, handing over the means
of her freedom. And now she insisted that she MUST leave the chastened
security of the Tredgold Women's College for Russell's unbridled
classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in pirate costume and
spend the residue of the night with Widgett's ramshackle girls in some
indescribable hotel in Soho!
He had done his best not to think about her at all, but the situation
and his sister had become altogether too urgent. He had finally put
aside The Lilac Sunbonnet, gone into his study, lit the gas fire, and
written the letter that had brought these unsatisfactory relations to a
head.
MY DEAR VEE, he wrote.
These daughters! He gnawed his pen and reflected, tore the sheet up, and
began again.
"MY DEAR VERONICA,—Your aunt tells me you have involved yourself in
some arrangement with the Widgett girls about a Fancy Dress Ball in
London. I gather you wish to go up in some fantastic get-up, wrapped
about in your opera cloak, and that after the festivities you propose to
stay with these friends of yours, and without any older people in your
party, at an hotel. Now I am sorry to cross you in anything you have set
your heart upon, but I regret to say—"
"H'm," he reflected, and crossed out the last four words.
"—but this cannot be."
"No," he said, and tried again: "but I must tell you quite definitely
that I feel it to be my duty to forbid any such exploit."
"Damn!" he remarked at the defaced letter; and, taking a fresh sheet, he
recopied what he had written. A certain irritation crept into his manner
as he did so.
"I regret that you should ever have proposed it," he went on.
He meditated, and began a new paragraph.
"The fact of it is, and this absurd project of yours only brings it to
a head, you have begun to get hold of some very queer ideas about what a
young lady in your position may or may not venture to do. I do not think
you quite understand my ideals or what is becoming as between father and
daughter. Your attitude to me—"
He fell into a brown study. It was so difficult to put precisely.
"—and your aunt—"
For a time he searched for the mot juste. Then he went on:
"—and, indeed, to most of the established things in life is, frankly,
unsatisfactory. You are restless, aggressive, critical with all
the crude unthinking criticism of youth. You have no grasp upon the
essential facts of life (I pray God you never may), and in your rash
ignorance you are prepared to dash into positions that may end in
lifelong regret. The life of a young girl is set about with prowling
pitfalls."
He was arrested for a moment by an indistinct picture of Veronica
reading this last sentence. But he was now too deeply moved to trace
a certain unsatisfactoriness to its source in a mixture of metaphors.
"Well," he said, argumentatively, "it IS. That's all about it. It's time
she knew."
"The life of a young girl is set about with prowling pitfalls, from
which she must be shielded at all costs."
His lips tightened, and he frowned with solemn resolution.
"So long as I am your father, so long as your life is entrusted to my
care, I feel bound by every obligation to use my authority to check this
odd disposition of yours toward extravagant enterprises. A day will come
when you will thank me. It is not, my dear Veronica, that I think there
is any harm in you; there is not. But a girl is soiled not only by evil
but by the proximity of evil, and a reputation for rashness may do
her as serious an injury as really reprehensible conduct. So do please
believe that in this matter I am acting for the best."
He signed his name and reflected. Then he opened the study door and
called "Mollie!" and returned to assume an attitude of authority on the
hearthrug, before the blue flames and orange glow of the gas fire.