H. Wells - Ann Veronica

And how can I get into one brief letter the complex accumulated

desires of what is now, I find on reference to my diary, nearly

sixteen months of letting my mind run on you--ever since that

jolly party at Surbiton, where we raced and beat the other boat.

You steered and I rowed stroke. My very sentences stumble and

give way. But I do not even care if I am absurd. I am a

resolute man, and hitherto when I have wanted a thing I have got

it; but I have never yet wanted anything in my life as I have

wanted you. It isn't the same thing. I am afraid because I love

you, so that the mere thought of failure hurts. If I did not

love you so much I believe I could win you by sheer force of

character, for people tell me I am naturally of the dominating

type. Most of my successes in life have been made with a sort of

reckless vigor.

"Well, I have said what I had to say, stumblingly and badly, and

baldly. But I am sick of tearing up letters and hopeless of

getting what I have to say better said. It would be easy enough

for me to write an eloquent letter about something else. Only I

do not care to write about anything else. Let me put the main

question to you now that I could not put the other afternoon.

Will you marry me, Ann Veronica?

Very sincerely yours,

"HUBERT MANNING."

Ann Veronica read this letter through with grave, attentive eyes.

Her interest grew as she read, a certain distaste disappeared.

Twice she smiled, but not unkindly. Then she went back and mixed

up the sheets in a search for particular passages. Finally she

fell into reflection.

"Odd!" she said. "I suppose I shall have to write an answer.

It's so different from what one has been led to expect."

She became aware of her aunt, through the panes of the

greenhouse, advancing with an air of serene unconsciousness from

among the raspberry canes.

"No you don't!" said Ann Veronica, and walked out at a brisk and

business-like pace toward the house.

"I'm going for a long tramp, auntie," she said.

"Alone, dear?"

"Yes, aunt. I've got a lot of things to think about."

Miss Stanley reflected as Ann Veronica went toward the house.

She thought her niece very hard and very self-possessed and

self-confident. She ought to be softened and tender and

confidential at this phase of her life. She seemed to have no

idea whatever of the emotional states that were becoming to her

age and position. Miss Stanley walked round the garden thinking,

and presently house and garden reverberated to Ann Veronica's

slamming of the front door.

"I wonder!" said Miss Stanley.

For a long time she surveyed a row of towering holly-hocks, as

though they offered an explanation. Then she went in and

up-stairs, hesitated on the landing, and finally, a little

breathless and with an air of great dignity, opened the door and

walked into Ann Veronica's room. It was a neat, efficient-looking

room, with a writing-table placed with a business-like regard to

the window, and a bookcase surmounted by a pig's skull, a

dissected frog in a sealed bottle, and a pile of shiny,

black-covered note-books. In the corner of the room were two

hockey-sticks and a tennis-racket, and upon the walls Ann

Veronica, by means of autotypes, had indicated her proclivities

in art. But Miss Stanley took no notice of these things. She

walked straight across to the wardrobe and opened it. There,

hanging among Ann Veronica's more normal clothing, was a skimpy

dress of red canvas, trimmed with cheap and tawdry braid, and

short--it could hardly reach below the knee. On the same peg and

evidently belonging to it was a black velvet Zouave jacket. And

then! a garment that was conceivably a secondary skirt.

Miss Stanley hesitated, and took first one and then another of

the constituents of this costume off its peg and surveyed it.

The third item she took with a trembling hand by its waistbelt.

As she raised it, its lower portion fell apart into two baggy

crimson masses.

"TROUSERS!" she whispered.

Her eyes travelled about the room as if in appeal to the very

chairs.

Tucked under the writing-table a pair of yellow and gold Turkish

slippers of a highly meretricious quality caught her eye. She

walked over to them still carrying the trousers in her hands, and

stooped to examine them. They were ingenious disguises of gilt

paper destructively gummed, it would seem, to Ann Veronicas' best

dancing-slippers.

Then she reverted to the trousers.

"How CAN I tell him?" whispered Miss Stanley.

Part 2

Ann Veronica carried a light but business-like walking-stick.

She walked with an easy quickness down the Avenue and through the

proletarian portion of Morningside Park, and crossing these

fields came into a pretty overhung lane that led toward

Caddington and the Downs. And then her pace slackened. She

tucked her stick under her arm and re-read Manning's letter.

"Let me think," said Ann Veronica. "I wish this hadn't turned up

to-day of all days."

She found it difficult to begin thinking, and indeed she was

anything but clear what it was she had to think about.

Practically it was most of the chief interests in life that she

proposed to settle in this pedestrian meditation. Primarily it

was her own problem, and in particular the answer she had to give

to Mr. Manning's letter, but in order to get data for that she

found that she, having a logical and ordered mind, had to decide

upon the general relations of men to women, the objects and

conditions of marriage and its bearing upon the welfare of the

race, the purpose of the race, the purpose, if any, of

everything. . . .

"Frightful lot of things aren't settled," said Ann Veronica. In

addition, the Fadden Dance business, all out of proportion,

occupied the whole foreground of her thoughts and threw a color

of rebellion over everything. She kept thinking she was thinking

about Mr. Manning's proposal of marriage and finding she was

thinking of the dance.

For a time her efforts to achieve a comprehensive concentration

were dispersed by the passage of the village street of

Caddington, the passing of a goggled car-load of motorists, and

the struggles of a stable lad mounted on one recalcitrant horse

and leading another. When she got back to her questions again in

the monotonous high-road that led up the hill, she found the

image of Mr. Manning central in her mind. He stood there, large

and dark, enunciating, in his clear voice from beneath his large

mustache, clear flat sentences, deliberately kindly. He

proposed, he wanted to possess her! He loved her.

Ann Veronica felt no repulsion at the prospect. That Mr. Manning

loved her presented itself to her bloodlessly, stilled from any

imaginative quiver or thrill of passion or disgust. The

relationship seemed to have almost as much to do with blood and

body as a mortgage. It was something that would create a mutual

claim, a relationship. It was in another world from that in

which men will die for a kiss, and touching hands lights fires

that burn up lives--the world of romance, the world of

passionately beautiful things.

But that other world, in spite of her resolute exclusion of it,

was always looking round corners and peeping through chinks and

crannies, and rustling and raiding into the order in which she

chose to live, shining out of pictures at her, echoing in lyrics