H. Wells - Ann Veronica

largely just a box." He made quite a long pause, and went on,

with a sigh: "You have a voting paper given you--"

They emerged into the publicity of the lawn.

"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "yes," to his explanation, and saw

across the lawn Lady Palsworthy talking to her aunt, and both of

them staring frankly across at her and Mr. Manning as they

talked.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

Part 1

Two days after came the day of the Crisis, the day of the Fadden

Dance. It would have been a crisis anyhow, but it was

complicated in Ann Veronica's mind by the fact that a letter lay

on the breakfast-table from Mr. Manning, and that her aunt

focussed a brightly tactful disregard upon this throughout the

meal. Ann Veronica had come down thinking of nothing in the

world but her inflexible resolution to go to the dance in the

teeth of all opposition. She did not know Mr. Manning's

handwriting, and opened his letter and read some lines before its

import appeared. Then for a time she forgot the Fadden affair

altogether. With a well-simulated unconcern and a heightened

color she finished her breakfast.

She was not obliged to go to the Tredgold College, because as yet

the College had not settled down for the session. She was

supposed to be reading at home, and after breakfast she strolled

into the vegetable garden, and having taken up a position upon

the staging of a disused greenhouse that had the double advantage

of being hidden from the windows of the house and secure from the

sudden appearance of any one, she resumed the reading of Mr.

Manning's letter.

Mr. Manning's handwriting had an air of being clear without being

easily legible; it was large and rather roundish, with a lack of

definition about the letters and a disposition to treat the large

ones as liberal-minded people nowadays treat opinions, as all

amounting to the same thing really--a years-smoothed boyish

rather than an adult hand. And it filled seven sheets of

notepaper, each written only on one side.

"MY DEAR MISS STANLEY," it began,--"I hope you will forgive my

bothering you with a letter, but I have been thinking very much

over our conversation at Lady Palsworthy's, and I feel there are

things I want to say to you so much that I cannot wait until we

meet again. It is the worst of talk under such social

circumstances that it is always getting cut off so soon as it is

beginning; and I went home that afternoon feeling I had said

nothing--literally nothing--of the things I had meant to say to

you and that were coursing through my head. They were things I

had meant very much to talk to you about, so that I went home

vexed and disappointed, and only relieved myself a little by

writing a few verses. I wonder if you will mind very much when I

tell you they were suggested by you. You must forgive the poet's

license I take. Here is one verse. The metrical irregularity is

intentional, because I want, as it were, to put you apart: to

change the lilt and the mood altogether when I speak of you.

" 'A SONG OF LADIES AND MY LADY

" 'Saintly white and a lily is Mary,

Margaret's violets, sweet and shy;

Green and dewy is Nellie-bud fairy,

Forget-me-nots live in Gwendolen's eye.

Annabel shines like a star in the darkness,

Rosamund queens it a rose, deep rose;

But the lady I love is like sunshine in April weather,

She gleams and gladdens, she warms--and goes.'

"Crude, I admit. But let that verse tell my secret. All bad

verse--originally the epigram was Lang's, I believe--is written

in a state of emotion.

"My dear Miss Stanley, when I talked to you the other afternoon

of work and politics and such-like things, my mind was all the

time resenting it beyond measure. There we were discussing

whether you should have a vote, and I remembered the last

occasion we met it was about your prospects of success in the

medical profession or as a Government official such as a number

of women now are, and all the time my heart was crying out within

me, 'Here is the Queen of your career.' I wanted, as I have

never wanted before, to take you up, to make you mine, to carry

you off and set you apart from all the strain and turmoil of

life. For nothing will ever convince me that it is not the man's

share in life to shield, to protect, to lead and toil and watch

and battle with the world at large. I want to be your knight,

your servant, your protector, your--I dare scarcely write the

word--your husband. So I come suppliant. I am five-and-thirty,

and I have knocked about in the world and tasted the quality of

life. I had a hard fight to begin with to win my way into the

Upper Division--I was third on a list of forty-seven--and since

then I have found myself promoted almost yearly in a widening

sphere of social service. Before I met you I never met any one

whom I felt I could love, but you have discovered depths in my

own nature I had scarcely suspected. Except for a few early

ebullitions of passion, natural to a warm and romantic

disposition, and leaving no harmful after-effects--ebullitions

that by the standards of the higher truth I feel no one can

justly cast a stone at, and of which I for one am by no means

ashamed--I come to you a pure and unencumbered man. I love you.

In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property

and further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you

a life of wide and generous refinement, travel, books,

discussion, and easy relations with a circle of clever and

brilliant and thoughtful people with whom my literary work has

brought me into contact, and of which, seeing me only as you have

done alone in Morningside Park, you can have no idea. I have a

certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic, and I

belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of the

day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of

affairs, artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally,

mingle together in the easiest and most delightful intercourse.

That is my real milieu, and one that I am convinced you would not

only adorn but delight in.

"I find it very hard to write this letter. There are so many

things I want to tell you, and they stand on such different

levels, that the effect is necessarily confusing and discordant,

and I find myself doubting if I am really giving you the thread

of emotion that should run through all this letter. For although

I must confess it reads very much like an application or a

testimonial or some such thing as that, I can assure you I am

writing this in fear and trembling with a sinking heart. My mind

is full of ideas and images that I have been cherishing and

accumulating--dreams of travelling side by side, of lunching

quietly together in some jolly restaurant, of moonlight and music

and all that side of life, of seeing you dressed like a queen and

shining in some brilliant throng--mine; of your looking at

flowers in some old-world garden, our garden--there are splendid

places to be got down in Surrey, and a little runabout motor is

quite within my means. You know they say, as, indeed, I have

just quoted already, that all bad poetry is written in a state of

emotion, but I have no doubt that this is true of bad offers of

marriage. I have often felt before that it is only when one has

nothing to say that one can write easy poetry. Witness Browning.