H. Wells - Ann Veronica

attended, they sometimes gave musical evenings, they dined out

and gave a finish to people's dinners, they had a full-sized

croquet lawn and tennis beyond, and understood the art of

bringing people together. And they never talked of anything at

all, never discussed, never even encouraged gossip. They were

just nice.

Ann Veronica found herself walking back down the Avenue that had

just been the scene of her first proposal beside her aunt, and

speculating for the first time in her life about that lady's

mental attitudes. Her prevailing effect was one of quiet and

complete assurance, as though she knew all about everything, and

was only restrained by her instinctive delicacy from telling what

she knew. But the restraint exercised by her instinctive

delicacy was very great; over and above coarse or sexual matters

it covered religion and politics and any mention of money matters

or crime, and Ann Veronica found herself wondering whether these

exclusions represented, after all, anything more than

suppressions. Was there anything at all in those locked rooms of

her aunt's mind? Were they fully furnished and only a little

dusty and cobwebby and in need of an airing, or were they stark

vacancy except, perhaps, for a cockroach or so or the gnawing of

a rat? What was the mental equivalent of a rat's gnawing? The

image was going astray. But what would her aunt think of Teddy's

recent off-hand suggestion of marriage? What would she think of

the Widgett conversation? Suppose she was to tell her aunt

quietly but firmly about the parasitic males of degraded

crustacea. The girl suppressed a chuckle that would have been

inexplicable.

There came a wild rush of anthropological lore into her brain, a

flare of indecorous humor. It was one of the secret troubles of

her mind, this grotesque twist her ideas would sometimes take, as

though they rebelled and rioted. After all, she found herself

reflecting, behind her aunt's complacent visage there was a past

as lurid as any one's--not, of course, her aunt's own personal

past, which was apparently just that curate and almost incredibly

jejune, but an ancestral past with all sorts of scandalous things

in it: fire and slaughterings, exogamy, marriage by capture,

corroborees, cannibalism! Ancestresses with perhaps dim

anticipatory likenesses to her aunt, their hair less neatly done,

no doubt, their manners and gestures as yet undisciplined, but

still ancestresses in the direct line, must have danced through a

brief and stirring life in the woady buff. Was there no echo

anywhere in Miss Stanley's pacified brain? Those empty rooms, if

they were empty, were the equivalents of astoundingly decorated

predecessors. Perhaps it was just as well there was no inherited

memory.

Ann Veronica was by this time quite shocked at her own thoughts,

and yet they would go on with their freaks. Great vistas of

history opened, and she and her aunt were near reverting to the

primitive and passionate and entirely indecorous arboreal--were

swinging from branches by the arms, and really going on quite

dread-fully--when their arrival at the Palsworthys' happily

checked this play of fancy, and brought Ann Veronica back to the

exigencies of the wrappered life again.

Lady Palsworthy liked Ann Veronica because she was never awkward,

had steady eyes, and an almost invariable neatness and dignity in

her clothes. She seemed just as stiff and shy as a girl ought to

be, Lady Palsworthy thought, neither garrulous nor unready, and

free from nearly all the heavy aggressiveness, the overgrown,

overblown quality, the egotism and want of consideration of the

typical modern girl. But then Lady Palsworthy had never seen Ann

Veronica running like the wind at hockey. She had never seen her

sitting on tables nor heard her discussing theology, and had

failed to observe that the graceful figure was a natural one and

not due to ably chosen stays. She took it for granted Ann

Veronica wore stays--mild stays, perhaps, but stays, and thought

no more of the matter. She had seen her really only at teas,

with the Stanley strain in her uppermost. There are so many

girls nowadays who are quite unpresentable at tea, with their

untrimmed laughs, their awful dispositions of their legs when

they sit down, their slangy disrespect; they no longer smoke, it

is true, like the girls of the eighties and nineties,

nevertheless to a fine intelligence they have the flavor of

tobacco. They have no amenities, they scratch the mellow surface

of things almost as if they did it on purpose; and Lady

Palsworthy and Mrs. Pramlay lived for amenities and the mellowed

surfaces of things. Ann Veronica was one of the few young

people--and one must have young people just as one must have

flowers--one could ask to a little gathering without the risk of

a painful discord. Then the distant relationship to Miss Stanley

gave them a slight but pleasant sense of proprietorship in the

girl. They had their little dreams about her.

Mrs. Pramlay received them in the pretty chintz drawing-room,

which opened by French windows on the trim garden, with its

croquet lawn, its tennis-net in the middle distance, and its

remote rose alley lined with smart dahlias and flaming

sunflowers. Her eye met Miss Stanley's understandingly, and she

was if anything a trifle more affectionate in her greeting to Ann

Veronica. Then Ann Veronica passed on toward the tea in the

garden, which was dotted with the elite of Morningside Park

society, and there she was pounced upon by Lady Palsworthy and

given tea and led about. Across the lawn and hovering

indecisively, Ann Veronica saw and immediately affected not to

see Mr. Manning, Lady Palsworthy's nephew, a tall young man of

seven-and-thirty with a handsome, thoughtful, impassive face, a

full black mustache, and a certain heavy luxuriousness of

gesture. The party resolved itself for Ann Veronica into a game

in which she manoeuvred unostentatiously and finally

unsuccessfully to avoid talking alone with this gentleman.

Mr. Manning had shown on previous occasions that he found Ann

Veronica interesting and that he wished to interest her. He was

a civil servant of some standing, and after a previous

conversation upon aesthetics of a sententious, nebulous, and

sympathetic character, he had sent her a small volume, which he

described as the fruits of his leisure and which was as a matter

of fact rather carefully finished verse. It dealt with fine

aspects of Mr. Manning's feelings, and as Ann Veronica's mind was

still largely engaged with fundamentals and found no pleasure in

metrical forms, she had not as yet cut its pages. So that as she

saw him she remarked to herself very faintly but definitely, "Oh,

golly!" and set up a campaign of avoidance that Mr. Manning at

last broke down by coming directly at her as she talked with the

vicar's aunt about some of the details of the alleged smell of

the new church lamps. He did not so much cut into this

conversation as loom over it, for he was a tall, if rather

studiously stooping, man.

The face that looked down upon Ann Veronica was full of amiable

intention. "Splendid you are looking to-day, Miss Stanley," he

said. "How well and jolly you must be feeling."

He beamed over the effect of this and shook hands with effusion,

and Lady Palsworthy suddenly appeared as his confederate and