"There was a time when girls didn't get these extravagant ideas."
"Lydia Languish, for example. Anyhow, they didn't run about so much."
"Yes. That's about the beginning. It's these damned novels. All this
torrent of misleading, spurious stuff that pours from the press. These
sham ideals and advanced notions. Women who Dids, and all that kind of
thing...."
Ogilvy reflected. "This girl—she's really a very charming, frank
person—had had her imagination fired, so she told me, by a school
performance of Romeo and Juliet."
Mr. Stanley decided to treat that as irrelevant. "There ought to be a
Censorship of Books. We want it badly at the present time. Even WITH
the Censorship of Plays there's hardly a decent thing to which a man can
take his wife and daughters, a creeping taint of suggestion everywhere.
What would it be without that safeguard?"
Ogilvy pursued his own topic. "I'm inclined to think, Stanley, myself
that as a matter of fact it was the expurgated Romeo and Juliet did the
mischief. If our young person hadn't had the nurse part cut out, eh? She
might have known more and done less. I was curious about that. All they
left it was the moon and stars. And the balcony and 'My Romeo!'"
"Shakespeare is altogether different from the modern stuff. Altogether
different. I'm not discussing Shakespeare. I don't want to Bowdlerize
Shakespeare. I'm not that sort I quite agree. But this modern miasma—"
Mr. Stanley took mustard savagely.
"Well, we won't go into Shakespeare," said Ogilvy "What interests me
is that our young women nowadays are running about as free as air
practically, with registry offices and all sorts of accommodation round
the corner. Nothing 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 or restrain them more. One or the other.
They're too free for their innocence or too innocent for their freedom.
That's my point. Are you going to have any apple-tart, Stanley? The
apple-tart's been very good lately—very good!"
At the end of dinner that evening Ann Veronica began: "Father!"
Her father looked at her over his glasses and spoke with grave
deliberation; "If there is anything you want to say to me," he said,
"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 to say. I
should have thought my note cleared up everything. There are some papers
I have to look through to-night—important papers."
"I won't keep you very long, daddy," said Ann Veronica.
"I don't see, Mollie," he remarked, taking a cigar from the box on
the table as his sister and daughter rose, "why you and Vee shouldn't
discuss this little affair—whatever it is—without bothering me."
It was the first time this controversy had become triangular, for all
three of them were shy by habit.
He stopped in mid-sentence, and Ann Veronica opened the door for her
aunt. The air was thick with feelings. Her aunt went out of the room
with dignity and a rustle, and up-stairs to the fastness of her own
room. She agreed entirely with her brother. It distressed and confused
her that the girl should not come to her.
It seemed to show a want of affection, to be a deliberate and unmerited
disregard, to justify the reprisal of being hurt.
When Ann Veronica came into the study she found every evidence of a
carefully foreseen grouping about the gas fire. Both arm-chairs had been
moved a little so as to face each other on either side of the
fender, and in the circular 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," he said, and
perused—"perused" is the word for it—for some moments. Then he put
the paper by. "And what is it all about, Veronica?" he asked, with a
deliberate note of irony, looking at her a little quizzically over his
glasses.
Ann Veronica looked bright and a little elated, and she disregarded
her father's invitation to be seated. She stood on the mat instead, and
looked down on him. "Look here, daddy," she said, in a tone of great
reasonableness, "I MUST go to that dance, you know."
Her father's irony deepened. "Why?" he asked, suavely.
Her answer was not quite ready. "Well, because I don't see any reason
why I shouldn't."
"You see I do."
"Why shouldn't I go?"
"It isn't a suitable place; it isn't a suitable gathering."
"But, daddy, what do you know of the place and the gathering?"
"And it's entirely out of order; it isn't right, it isn't correct;
it's impossible for you to stay in an hotel in London—the idea is
preposterous. I can't imagine what possessed you, Veronica."
He put his head on one side, pulled down the corners of his mouth, and
looked at her over his glasses.
"But why is it preposterous?" asked Ann Veronica, and fiddled with a
pipe on the mantel.
"Surely!" he remarked, with an expression of worried appeal.
"You see, daddy, I don't think it IS preposterous. That's really what
I want to discuss. It comes to this—am I to be trusted to take care of
myself, or am I not?"
"To judge from this proposal of yours, I should say not."
"I think I am."
"As long as you remain under my roof—" he began, and paused.
"You are going to treat me as though I wasn't. Well, I don't think
that's fair."
"Your ideas of fairness—" he remarked, and discontinued that sentence.
"My dear girl," he said, in a tone of patient reasonableness, "you are a
mere child. You know nothing of 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 some things,
in many things, you must trust to your elders, to those who know more of
life than you do. Your aunt and I have discussed all this matter. There
it is. You can't go."
The conversation hung for a moment. Ann Veronica tried to keep hold of
a complicated situation and not lose her head. She had turned round
sideways, so as to look down into the fire.
"You see, father," she said, "it isn't only this affair of the dance.
I want to go to that because it's a new experience, because I think
it will be interesting and give me a view of things. You say I know
nothing. That's probably true. But how am I to know of things?"
"Some things I hope you may never know," he said.
"I'm not so sure. I want to know—just as much as I can."
"Tut!" he said, fuming, and put out his hand to the papers in the pink
tape.
"Well, I do. It's just that I want to say. I want to be a human being;
I want to learn about things and know about things, and not to be
protected as something too precious for life, cooped up in one narrow
little corner."
"Cooped up!" he cried. "Did I stand in the way of your going to college?
Have I ever prevented you going about at any reasonable hour? You've got
a bicycle!"
"H'm!" said Ann Veronica, and then went on "I want to be taken
seriously. A girl—at my age—is grown-up. I want to go on with
my University work under proper conditions, now that I've done the
Intermediate. It isn't as though I haven't done well. I've never muffed
an exam yet. Roddy muffed two...."
Her father interrupted. "Now look here, Veronica, let us be plain with
each other. You are not going to that infidel Russell's classes. You are
not going anywhere but to the Tredgold College. I've thought that out,
and you must make up your mind to it. All sorts of considerations 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 that struck me as being—well,
next door to shameful. There's stories, too, about his demonstrator,
Capes Something or other. The kind of man who isn't content with his
science, and writes articles in the monthly reviews. Anyhow, there it
is: YOU ARE NOT GOING THERE."
The girl received this intimation in silence, but the face that looked
down upon the gas fire took an expression of obstinacy that brought out
a hitherto latent resemblance between parent and child. When she spoke,
her lips twitched.
"Then I suppose when I have graduated I am to come home?"
"It seems the natural course—"
"And do nothing?"
"There are plenty of things a girl can find to do at home."
"Until some one takes pity on me and marries me?"
He raised his eyebrows in mild appeal. His foot tapped impatiently, and
he took up the papers.
"Look here, father," she said, with a change in her voice, "suppose I
won't stand it?"
He regarded her as though this was a new idea.
"Suppose, for example, I go to this dance?"
"You won't."
"Well"—her breath failed her for a moment. "How would you prevent it?"
she asked.
"But I have forbidden it!" he said, raising his voice.
"Yes, I know. But suppose I go?"
"Now, Veronica! No, no. This won't do. Understand me! I forbid it. I
do not want to hear from you even the threat of disobedience." He spoke
loudly. "The thing is forbidden!"
"I am ready to give up anything that you show to be wrong."
"You will give up anything I wish you to give up."
They stared at each other through a pause, and both faces were flushed
and obstinate.
She was trying by some wonderful, secret, and motionless gymnastics to
restrain her tears. But when she spoke her lips quivered, and they
came. "I mean to go to that dance!" she blubbered. "I mean to go to
that dance! I meant to reason with you, but you won't reason. You're
dogmatic."
At the sight of her tears his expression changed to a mingling of
triumph and concern. He stood up, apparently intending to put an
arm about her, but she stepped back from him quickly. She produced a
handkerchief, and with one sweep of this and a simultaneous gulp had
abolished her fit of weeping. His voice now had lost its ironies.
"Now, Veronica," he pleaded, "Veronica, this is most unreasonable. All
we do is for your good. Neither your aunt nor I have any other thought
but what is best for you."
"Only you won't let me live. Only you won't let me exist!"
Mr. Stanley lost patience. He bullied frankly.
"What nonsense is this? What raving! My dear child, you DO live, you
DO exist! You have this home. You have friends, acquaintances, social
standing, brothers and sisters, every advantage! Instead of which, you
want to go to some mixed classes or other and cut up rabbits and dance
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 good. You
MUST not, you SHALL not go. On this I am resolved. I put my foot down
like—like adamant. And a time will come, Veronica, mark my words, a
time will come when you will bless me for my firmness to-night. It goes
to my heart to disappoint you, but this thing must not be."
He sidled toward her, but she recoiled from him, leaving him in
possession of the hearth-rug.
"Well," she said, "good-night, father."
"What!" he asked; "not a kiss?"
She affected not to hear.
The door closed softly upon her. For a long time he remained standing
before the fire, staring at the situation. Then he sat down and filled
his pipe slowly and thoughtfully....
"I don't see what else I could have said," he remarked.
"Are you coming to the Fadden Dance, Ann Veronica?" asked Constance
Widgett.
Ann Veronica considered her answer. "I mean to," she replied.
"You are making your dress?"
"Such as it is."
They were in the elder Widgett girl's bedroom; Hetty was laid up, she
said, with a sprained ankle, and a miscellaneous party was gossiping
away her tedium. It was a large, littered, self-forgetful apartment,
decorated with unframed charcoal sketches by various incipient masters;
and an open bookcase, surmounted by plaster casts and the half of a
human skull, displayed an odd miscellany of books—Shaw and Swinburne,
Tom Jones, Fabian Essays, Pope and Dumas, cheek by jowl. Constance
Widgett's abundant copper-red hair was bent down over some dimly
remunerative work—stencilling in colors upon rough, white material—at
a kitchen table she had dragged up-stairs for the purpose, while on her
bed there was seated a slender lady of thirty or so in a dingy green
dress, whom Constance had introduced with a wave of her hand as Miss
Miniver. Miss Miniver looked out on the world through large emotional
blue eyes that were further magnified by the glasses she wore, and her
nose was pinched and pink, and her mouth was whimsically petulant. Her
glasses moved quickly as her glance travelled from face to face.
She seemed bursting with the desire to talk, and watching for her
opportunity. On her lapel was an ivory button, bearing the words "Votes
for Women." Ann Veronica sat at the foot of the sufferer's bed, while
Teddy Widgett, being something of an athlete, occupied the only
bed-room chair—a decadent piece, essentially a tripod and largely a
formality—and smoked cigarettes, and tried to conceal the fact that
he was looking all the time at Ann Veronica's eyebrows. Teddy was the
hatless young man who had turned Ann Veronica aside from the Avenue two
days before. He was the junior of both his sisters, co-educated and
much broken in to feminine society. A bowl of roses, just brought by
Ann Veronica, adorned the communal dressing-table, and Ann Veronica was
particularly trim in preparation for a call she was to make with her
aunt later in the afternoon.