H. Wells - Ann Veronica

a struggle; her aunt had never seen her looking so fine or so

pretty. Her fancy dress, save for the green-gray stockings, the

pseudo-Turkish slippers, and baggy silk trousered ends natural to

a Corsair's bride, was hidden in a large black-silk-hooded

opera-cloak. Beneath the hood it was evident that her rebellious

hair was bound up with red silk, and fastened by some device in

her ears (unless she had them pierced, which was too dreadful a

thing to suppose!) were long brass filigree earrings.

"I'm just off, aunt," said Ann Veronica.

"Your father is in the study and wishes to speak to you."

Ann Veronica hesitated, and then stood in the open doorway and

regarded her father's stern presence. She spoke with an entirely

false note of cheerful off-handedness. "I'm just in time to say

good-bye before I go, father. I'm going up to London with the

Widgetts to that ball."

"Now look here, Ann Veronica," said Mr. Stanley, "just a moment.

You are NOT going to that ball!"

Ann Veronica tried a less genial, more dignified note.

"I thought we had discussed that, father."

"You are not going to that ball! You are not going out of this

house in that get-up!"

Ann Veronica tried yet more earnestly to treat him, as she would

treat any man, with an insistence upon her due of masculine

respect. "You see," she said, very gently, "I AM going. I am

sorry to seem to disobey you, but I am. I wish"--she found she

had embarked on a bad sentence--"I wish we needn't have

quarrelled."

She stopped abruptly, and turned about toward the front door. In

a moment he was beside her. "I don't think you can have heard

me, Vee," he said, with intensely controlled fury. "I said you

were"--he shouted--"NOT TO GO!"

She made, and overdid, an immense effort to be a princess. She

tossed her head, and, having no further words, moved toward the

door. Her father intercepted her, and for a moment she and he

struggled with their hands upon the latch. A common rage flushed

their faces. "Let go!" she gasped at him, a blaze of anger.

"Veronica!" cried Miss Stanley, warningly, and, "Peter!"

For a moment they seemed on the verge of an altogether desperate

scuffle. Never for a moment had violence come between these two

since long ago he had, in spite of her mother's protest in the

background, carried her kicking and squalling to the nursery for

some forgotten crime. With something near to horror they found

themselves thus confronted.

The door was fastened by a catch and a latch with an inside key,

to which at night a chain and two bolts were added. Carefully

abstaining from thrusting against each other, Ann Veronica and

her father began an absurdly desperate struggle, the one to open

the door, the other to keep it fastened. She seized the key, and

he grasped her hand and squeezed it roughly and painfully between

the handle and the ward as she tried to turn it. His grip

twisted her wrist. She cried out with the pain of it.

A wild passion of shame and self-disgust swept over her. Her

spirit awoke in dismay to an affection in ruins, to the immense

undignified disaster that had come to them.

Abruptly she desisted, recoiled, and turned and fled up-stairs.

She made noises between weeping and laughter as she went. She

gained her room, and slammed her door and locked it as though she

feared violence and pursuit.

"Oh God!" she cried, "Oh God!" and flung aside her opera-cloak,

and for a time walked about the room--a Corsair's bride at a

crisis of emotion. "Why can't he reason with me," she said,

again and again, "instead of doing this?"

Part 3

There presently came a phase in which she said: "I WON'T stand

it even now. I will go to-night."

She went as far as her door, then turned to the window. She

opened this and scrambled out--a thing she had not done for five

long years of adolescence--upon the leaded space above the

built-out bath-room on the first floor. Once upon a time she and

Roddy had descended thence by the drain-pipe.

But things that a girl of sixteen may do in short skirts are not

things to be done by a young lady of twenty-one in fancy dress

and an opera-cloak, and just as she was coming unaided to an

adequate realization of this, she discovered Mr. Pragmar, the

wholesale druggist, who lived three gardens away, and who had

been mowing his lawn to get an appetite for dinner, standing in a

fascinated attitude beside the forgotten lawn-mower and watching

her intently.

She found it extremely difficult to infuse an air of quiet

correctitude into her return through the window, and when she was

safely inside she waved clinched fists and executed a noiseless

dance of rage.

When she reflected that Mr. Pragmar probably knew Mr. Ramage, and

might describe the affair to him, she cried "Oh!" with renewed

vexation, and repeated some steps of her dance in a new and more

ecstatic measure.

Part 4

At eight that evening Miss Stanley tapped at Ann Veronica's

bedroom door.

"I've brought you up some dinner, Vee," she said.

Ann Veronica was lying on her bed in a darkling room staring at

the ceiling. She reflected before answering. She was frightfully

hungry. She had eaten little or no tea, and her mid-day meal had

been worse than nothing.

She got up and unlocked the door.

Her aunt did not object to capital punishment or war, or the

industrial system or casual wards, or flogging of criminals or

the Congo Free State, because none of these things really got

hold of her imagination; but she did object, she did not like,

she could not bear to think of people not having and enjoying

their meals. It was her distinctive test of an emotional state,

its interference with a kindly normal digestion. Any one very

badly moved choked down a few mouthfuls; the symptom of supreme

distress was not to be able to touch a bit. So that the thought

of Ann Veronica up-stairs had been extremely painful for her

through all the silent dinner-time that night. As soon as dinner

was over she went into the kitchen and devoted herself to

compiling a tray --not a tray merely of half-cooled dinner

things, but a specially prepared "nice" tray, suitable for

tempting any one. With this she now entered.

Ann Veronica found herself in the presence of the most

disconcerting fact in human experience, the kindliness of people

you believe to be thoroughly wrong. She took the tray with both

hands, gulped, and gave way to tears.

Her aunt leaped unhappily to the thought of penitence.

"My dear," she began, with an affectionate hand on Ann Veronica's

shoulder, "I do SO wish you would realize how it grieves your

father."

Ann Veronica flung away from her hand, and the pepper-pot on the

tray upset, sending a puff of pepper into the air and instantly

filling them both with an intense desire to sneeze.

"I don't think you see," she replied, with tears on her cheeks,

and her brows knitting, "how it shames and, ah!--disgraces me--AH

TISHU!"

She put down the tray with a concussion on her toilet-table.

"But, dear, think! He is your father. SHOOH!"

"That's no reason," said Ann Veronica, speaking through her

handkerchief and stopping abruptly.

Niece and aunt regarded each other for a moment over their

pocket-handkerchiefs with watery but antagonistic eyes, each far

too profoundly moved to see the absurdity of the position.