H. Wells - Ann Veronica

Later Gwen's trouble weighed so heavily on Mrs. Stanley in her

illness that her husband consented to receive Mr. Fortescue in

the drawing-room, and actually shake hands with him in an

entirely hopeless manner and hope everything would turn out for

the best.

The forgiveness and reconciliation was a cold and formal affair,

and afterwards her father went off gloomily to his study, and Mr.

Fortescue rambled round the garden with soft, propitiatory steps,

the Corinthian nose upraised and his hands behind his back,

pausing to look long and hard at the fruit-trees against the

wall.

Ann Veronica watched him from the dining-room window, and after

some moments of maidenly hesitation rambled out into the garden

in a reverse direction to Mr. Fortescue's steps, and encountered

him with an air of artless surprise.

"Hello!" said Ann Veronica, with arms akimbo and a careless,

breathless manner. "You Mr. Fortescue?"

"At your service. You Ann Veronica?"

"Rather! I say--did you marry Gwen?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Mr. Fortescue raised his eyebrows and assumed a light-comedy

expression. "I suppose I fell in love with her, Ann Veronica."

"Rum," said Ann Veronica. "Have you got to keep her now?"

"To the best of my ability," said Mr. Fortescue, with a bow.

"Have you much ability?" asked Ann Veronica.

Mr. Fortescue tried to act embarrassment in order to conceal its

reality, and Ann Veronica went on to ask a string of questions

about acting, and whether her sister would act, and was she

beautiful enough for it, and who would make her dresses, and so

on.

As a matter of fact Mr. Fortescue had not much ability to keep

her sister, and a little while after her mother's death Ann

Veronica met Gwen suddenly on the staircase coming from her

father's study, shockingly dingy in dusty mourning and tearful

and resentful, and after that Gwen receded from the Morningside

Park world, and not even the begging letters and distressful

communications that her father and aunt received, but only a

vague intimation of dreadfulness, a leakage of incidental

comment, flashes of paternal anger at "that blackguard," came to

Ann Veronica's ears.

Part 6

These were Ann Veronica's leading cases in the question of

marriage. They were the only real marriages she had seen

clearly. For the rest, she derived her ideas of the married

state from the observed behavior of married women, which

impressed her in Morningside Park as being tied and dull and

inelastic in comparison with the life of the young, and from a

remarkably various reading among books. As a net result she had

come to think of all married people much as one thinks of insects

that have lost their wings, and of her sisters as new hatched

creatures who had scarcely for a moment had wings. She evolved a

dim image of herself cooped up in a house under the benevolent

shadow of Mr. Manning. Who knows?--on the analogy of "Squiggles"

she might come to call him "Mangles!"

"I don't think I can ever marry any one," she said, and fell

suddenly into another set of considerations that perplexed her

for a time. Had romance to be banished from life? . . .

It was hard to part with romance, but she had never thirsted so

keenly to go on with her University work in her life as she did

that day. She had never felt so acutely the desire for free

initiative, for a life unhampered by others. At any cost! Her

brothers had it practically--at least they had it far more than

it seemed likely she would unless she exerted herself with quite

exceptional vigor. Between her and the fair, far prospect of

freedom and self-development manoeuvred Mr. Manning, her aunt and

father, neighbors, customs, traditions, forces. They seemed to

her that morning to be all armed with nets and prepared to throw

them over her directly her movements became in any manner truly

free.

She had a feeling as though something had dropped from her eyes,

as though she had just discovered herself for the first

time--discovered herself as a sleep-walker might do, abruptly

among dangers, hindrances, and perplexities, on the verge of a

cardinal crisis.

The life of a girl presented itself to her as something happy and

heedless and unthinking, yet really guided and controlled by

others, and going on amidst unsuspected screens and concealments.

And in its way it was very well. Then suddenly with a rush came

reality, came "growing up"; a hasty imperative appeal for

seriousness, for supreme seriousness. The Ralphs and Mannings

and Fortescues came down upon the raw inexperience, upon the

blinking ignorance of the newcomer; and before her eyes were

fairly open, before she knew what had happened, a new set of

guides and controls, a new set of obligations and

responsibilities and limitations, had replaced the old. "I want

to be a Person," said Ann Veronica to the downs and the open sky;

"I will not have this happen to me, whatever else may happen in

its place."

Ann Veronica had three things very definitely settled by the time

when, a little after mid-day, she found herself perched up on a

gate between a bridle-path and a field that commanded the whole

wide stretch of country between Chalking and Waldersham.

Firstly, she did not intend to marry at all, and particularly she

did not mean to marry Mr. Manning; secondly, by some measure or

other, she meant to go on with her studies, not at the Tredgold

Schools but at the Imperial College; and, thirdly, she was, as an

immediate and decisive act, a symbol of just exactly where she

stood, a declaration of free and adult initiative, going that

night to the Fadden Ball.

But the possible attitude of her father she had still to face.

So far she had the utmost difficulty in getting on to that

vitally important matter. The whole of that relationship

persisted in remaining obscure. What would happen when next

morning she returned to Morningside Park?

He couldn't turn her out of doors. But what he could do or might

do she could not imagine. She was not afraid of violence, but

she was afraid of something mean, some secondary kind of force.

Suppose he stopped all her allowance, made it imperative that she

should either stay ineffectually resentful at home or earn a

living for herself at once. . . . It appeared highly probable to

her that he would stop her allowance.

What can a girl do?

Somewhere at this point Ann Veronica's speculations were

interrupted and turned aside by the approach of a horse and

rider. Mr. Ramage, that iron-gray man of the world, appeared

dressed in a bowler hat and a suit of hard gray, astride of a

black horse. He pulled rein at the sight of her, saluted, and

regarded her with his rather too protuberant eyes. The girl's

gaze met his in interested inquiry.

"You've got my view," he said, after a pensive second. "I always

get off here and lean over that rail for a bit. May I do so

to-day?"

"It's your gate," she said, amiably; "you got it first. It's for

you to say if I may sit on it."

He slipped off the horse. "Let me introduce you to Caesar," he

said; and she patted Caesar's neck, and remarked how soft his

nose was, and secretly deplored the ugliness of equine teeth.

Ramage tethered the horse to the farther gate-post, and Caesar

blew heavily and began to investigate the hedge.

Ramage leaned over the gate at Ann Veronica's side, and for a