H. Wells - Ann Veronica

and music; it invaded her dreams, it wrote up broken and

enigmatical sentences upon the passage walls of her mind. She

was aware of it now as if it were a voice shouting outside a

house, shouting passionate verities in a hot sunlight, a voice

that cries while people talk insincerely in a darkened room and

pretend not to hear. Its shouting now did in some occult manner

convey a protest that Mr. Manning would on no account do, though

he was tall and dark and handsome and kind, and thirty-five and

adequately prosperous, and all that a husband should be. But

there was, it insisted, no mobility in his face, no movement,

nothing about him that warmed. If Ann Veronica could have put

words to that song they would have been, "Hot-blooded marriage or

none!" but she was far too indistinct in this matter to frame any

words at all.

"I don't love him," said Ann Veronica, getting a gleam. "I don't

see that his being a good sort matters. That really settles about

that. . . . But it means no end of a row."

For a time she sat on a rail before leaving the road for the

downland turf. "But I wish," she said, "I had some idea what I

was really up to."

Her thoughts went into solution for a time, while she listened to

a lark singing.

"Marriage and mothering," said Ann Veronica, with her mind

crystallizing out again as the lark dropped to the nest in the

turf. "And all the rest of it perhaps is a song."

Part 3

Her mind got back to the Fadden Ball.

She meant to go, she meant to go, she meant to go. Nothing would

stop her, and she was prepared to face the consequences. Suppose

her father turned her out of doors! She did not care, she meant

to go. She would just walk out of the house and go. . . .

She thought of her costume in some detail and with considerable

satisfaction, and particularly of a very jolly property dagger

with large glass jewels in the handle, that reposed in a drawer

in her room. She was to be a Corsair's Bride. "Fancy stabbing a

man for jealousy!" she thought. "You'd have to think how to get

in between his bones."

She thought of her father, and with an effort dismissed him from

her mind.

She tried to imagine the collective effect of the Fadden Ball;

she had never seen a fancy-dress gathering in her life. Mr.

Manning came into her thoughts again, an unexpected, tall, dark,

self-contained presence at the Fadden. One might suppose him

turning up; he knew a lot of clever people, and some of them

might belong to the class. What would he come as?

Presently she roused herself with a guilty start from the task of

dressing and re-dressing Mr. Manning in fancy costume, as though

he was a doll. She had tried him as a Crusader, in which guise

he seemed plausible but heavy--"There IS something heavy about

him; I wonder if it's his mustache?"--and as a Hussar, which made

him preposterous, and as a Black Brunswicker, which was better,

and as an Arab sheik. Also she had tried him as a dragoman and

as a gendarme, which seemed the most suitable of all to his

severely handsome, immobile profile. She felt he would tell

people the way, control traffic, and refuse admission to public

buildings with invincible correctness and the very finest

explicit feelings possible. For each costume she had devised a

suitable form of matrimonial refusal. "Oh, Lord!" she said,

discovering what she was up to, and dropped lightly from the

fence upon the turf and went on her way toward the crest.

"I shall never marry," said Ann Veronica, resolutely; "I'm not

the sort. That's why it's so important I should take my own line

now."

Part 4

Ann Veronica's ideas of marriage were limited and unsystematic.

Her teachers and mistresses had done their best to stamp her mind

with an ineradicable persuasion that it was tremendously

important, and on no account to be thought about. Her first

intimations of marriage as a fact of extreme significance in a

woman's life had come with the marriage of Alice and the

elopement of her second sister, Gwen.

These convulsions occurred when Ann Veronica was about twelve.

There was a gulf of eight years between her and the youngest of

her brace of sisters--an impassable gulf inhabited chaotically by

two noisy brothers. These sisters moved in a grown-up world

inaccessible to Ann Veronica's sympathies, and to a large extent

remote from her curiosity. She got into rows through meddling

with their shoes and tennis-rackets, and had moments of carefully

concealed admiration when she was privileged to see them just

before her bedtime, rather radiantly dressed in white or pink or

amber and prepared to go out with her mother. She thought Alice

a bit of a sneak, an opinion her brothers shared, and Gwen rather

a snatch at meals. She saw nothing of their love-making, and

came home from her boarding-school in a state of decently

suppressed curiosity for Alice's wedding.

Her impressions of this cardinal ceremony were rich and confused,

complicated by a quite transitory passion that awakened no

reciprocal fire for a fat curly headed cousin in black velveteen

and a lace collar, who assisted as a page. She followed him

about persistently, and succeeded, after a brisk, unchivalrous

struggle (in which he pinched and asked her to "cheese it"), in

kissing him among the raspberries behind the greenhouse.

Afterward her brother Roddy, also strange in velveteen, feeling

rather than knowing of this relationship, punched this Adonis's

head.

A marriage in the house proved to be exciting but extremely

disorganizing. Everything seemed designed to unhinge the mind

and make the cat wretched. All the furniture was moved, all the

meals were disarranged, and everybody, Ann Veronica included,

appeared in new, bright costumes. She had to wear cream and a

brown sash and a short frock and her hair down, and Gwen cream

and a brown sash and a long skirt and her hair up. And her

mother, looking unusually alert and hectic, wore cream and brown

also, made up in a more complicated manner.

Ann Veronica was much impressed by a mighty trying on and

altering and fussing about Alice's "things"--Alice was being

re-costumed from garret to cellar, with a walking-dress and

walking-boots to measure, and a bride's costume of the most

ravishing description, and stockings and such like beyond the

dreams of avarice --and a constant and increasing dripping into

the house of irrelevant remarkable objects, such as--

Real lace bedspread;

Gilt travelling clock;

Ornamental pewter plaque;

Salad bowl (silver mounted) and servers;

Madgett's "English Poets" (twelve volumes), bound purple morocco;

Etc., etc.

Through all this flutter of novelty there came and went a

solicitous, preoccupied, almost depressed figure. It was Doctor

Ralph, formerly the partner of Doctor Stickell in the Avenue, and

now with a thriving practice of his own in Wamblesmith. He had

shaved his side-whiskers and come over in flannels, but he was

still indisputably the same person who had attended Ann Veronica

for the measles and when she swallowed the fish-bone. But his

role was altered, and he was now playing the bridegroom in this

remarkable drama. Alice was going to be Mrs. Ralph. He came in

apologetically; all the old "Well, and how ARE we?" note gone;

and once he asked Ann Veronica, almost furtively,

"How's Alice getting on, Vee?" Finally, on the Day, he appeared