H. Wells - Ann Veronica

moment there was silence.

He made some obvious comments on the wide view warming toward its

autumnal blaze that spread itself in hill and valley, wood and

village, below.

"It's as broad as life," said Mr. Ramage, regarding it and

putting a well-booted foot up on the bottom rail.

Part 7

"And what are you doing here, young lady," he said, looking up at

her face, "wandering alone so far from home?"

"I like long walks," said Ann Veronica, looking down on him.

"Solitary walks?"

"That's the point of them. I think over all sorts of things."

"Problems?"

"Sometimes quite difficult problems."

"You're lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother,

for instance, couldn't. She had to do her thinking at

home--under inspection."

She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of

her free young poise show in his face.

"I suppose things have changed?" she said.

"Never was such an age of transition."

She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know. "Sufficient unto

me is the change thereof," he said, with all the effect of an

epigram.

"I must confess," he said, "the New Woman and the New Girl

intrigue me profoundly. I am one of those people who are

interested in women, more interested than I am in anything else.

I don't conceal it. And the change, the change of attitude! The

way all the old clingingness has been thrown aside is amazing.

And all the old--the old trick of shrinking up like a snail at a

touch. If you had lived twenty years ago you would have been

called a Young Person, and it would have been your chief duty in

life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to

understand."

"There's quite enough still," said Ann Veronica, smiling, "that

one doesn't understand."

"Quite. But your role would have been to go about saying, 'I beg

your pardon' in a reproving tone to things you understood quite

well in your heart and saw no harm in. That terrible Young

Person! she's vanished. Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young

Person! . . . I hope we may never find her again."

He rejoiced over this emancipation. "While that lamb was about

every man of any spirit was regarded as a dangerous wolf. We

wore invisible chains and invisible blinkers. Now, you and I can

gossip at a gate, and {}Honi soit qui mal y pense. The change

has

given man one good thing he never had before," he said. "Girl

friends. And I am coming to believe the best as well as the most

beautiful friends a man can have are girl friends."

He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:

"I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than to any man

alive."

"I suppose we ARE more free than we were?" said Ann Veronica,

keeping the question general.

"Oh, there's no doubt of it! Since the girls of the eighties

broke bounds and sailed away on bicycles--my young days go back

to the very beginnings of that--it's been one triumphant

relaxation."

"Relaxation, perhaps. But are we any more free?"

"Well?"

"I mean we've long strings to tether us, but we are bound all the

same. A woman isn't much freer--in reality."

Mr. Ramage demurred.

"One runs about," said Ann Veronica.

"Yes."

"But it's on condition one doesn't do anything."

"Do what?"

"Oh!--anything."

He looked interrogation with a faint smile.

"It seems to me it comes to earning one's living in the long

run," said Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. "Until a girl can go

away as a son does and earn her independent income, she's still

on a string. It may be a long string, long enough if you like to

tangle up all sorts of people; but there it is! If the paymaster

pulls, home she must go. That's what I mean."

Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that. He was a little impressed

by Ann Veronica's metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed

to Hetty Widgett. "YOU wouldn't like to be independent?" he

asked, abruptly. "I mean REALLY independent. On your own. It

isn't such fun as it seems."

"Every one wants to be independent," said Ann Veronica. "Every

one. Man or woman."

"And you?"

"Rather!"

"I wonder why?"

"There's no why. It's just to feel--one owns one's self."

"Nobody does that," said Ramage, and kept silence for a moment.

"But a boy--a boy goes out into the world and presently stands on

his own feet. He buys his own clothes, chooses his own company,

makes his own way of living."

"You'd like to do that?"

"Exactly."

"Would you like to be a boy?"

"I wonder! It's out of the question, any way."

Ramage reflected. "Why don't you?"

"Well, it might mean rather a row."

"I know--" said Ramage, with sympathy.

"And besides," said Ann Veronica, sweeping that aspect aside,

"what could I do? A boy sails out into a trade or profession.

But--it's one of the things I've just been thinking over.

Suppose--suppose a girl did want to start in life, start in life

for herself--" She looked him frankly in the eyes. "What ought

she to do?"

"Suppose you--"

"Yes, suppose I--"

He felt that his advice was being asked. He became a little more

personal and intimate. "I wonder what you could do?" he said.

"I should think YOU could do all sorts of things. . . .

"What ought you to do?" He began to produce his knowledge of the

world for her benefit, jerkily and allusively, and with a strong,

rank flavor of "savoir faire." He took an optimist view of her

chances. Ann Veronica listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on

the turf, and now and then she asked a question or looked up to

discuss a point. In the meanwhile, as he talked, he scrutinized

her face, ran his eyes over her careless, gracious poise,

wondered hard about her. He described her privately to himself

as a splendid girl. It was clear she wanted to get away from

home, that she was impatient to get away from home. Why? While

the front of his mind was busy warning her not to fall into the

hopeless miseries of underpaid teaching, and explaining his idea

that for women of initiative, quite as much as for men, the world

of business had by far the best chances, the back chambers of his

brain were busy with the problem of that "Why?"

His first idea as a man of the world was to explain her unrest by

a lover, some secret or forbidden or impossible lover. But he

dismissed that because then she would ask her lover and not him

all these things. Restlessness, then, was the trouble, simple

restlessness: home bored her. He could quite understand the

daughter of Mr. Stanley being bored and feeling limited. But was

that enough? Dim, formless suspicions of something more vital

wandered about his mind. Was the young lady impatient for

experience? Was she adventurous? As a man of the world he did

not think it becoming to accept maidenly calm as anything more

than a mask. Warm life was behind that always, even if it slept.

If it was not an actual personal lover, it still might be the

lover not yet incarnate, not yet perhaps suspected. . . .

He had diverged only a little from the truth when he said that

his chief interest in life was women. It wasn't so much women as

Woman that engaged his mind. His was the Latin turn of thinking;

he had fallen in love at thirteen, and he was still capable--he

prided himself--of falling in love. His invalid wife and her

money had been only the thin thread that held his life together;