H. Wells - Ann Veronica

interests of the most suitable and various kinds. Presently she

woke up to the fact that there was a considerable group of

interests called being in love and getting married, with certain

attractive and amusing subsidiary developments, such as

flirtation and "being interested" in people of the opposite sex.

She approached this field with her usual liveliness of

apprehension. But here she met with a check. These interests

her world promptly, through the agency of schoolmistresses, older

school-mates, her aunt, and a number of other responsible and

authoritative people, assured her she must on no account think

about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moral instruction mistress,

was particularly explicit upon this score, and they all agreed in

indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds ran on such

matters, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dress or

bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike any

other group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly

ashamed of. Nevertheless, Ann Veronica found it a difficult

matter not to think of these things. However having a

considerable amount of pride, she decided she would disavow these

undesirable topics and keep her mind away from them just as far

as she could, but it left her at the end of her school days with

that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at loose ends.

The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no

particular place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a

functionless existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels,

walks, and dusting in her father's house. She thought study

would be better. She was a clever girl, the best of her year in

the High School, and she made a valiant fight for Somerville or

Newnham but her father had met and argued with a Somerville girl

at a friend's dinner-table and he thought that sort of thing

unsexed a woman. He said simply that he wanted her to live at

home. There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhile

she went on at school. They compromised at length on the science

course at the Tredgold Women's College--she had already

matriculated into London University from school--she came of age,

and she bickered with her aunt for latch-key privileges on the

strength of that and her season ticket. Shamefaced curiosities

began to come back into her mind, thinly disguised as literature

and art. She read voraciously, and presently, because of her

aunt's censorship, she took to smuggling any books she thought

might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, and she

went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable

friend to accompany her. She passed her general science

examination with double honors and specialized in science. She

happened to have an acute sense of form and unusual mental

lucidity, and she found in biology, and particularly in

comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest, albeit the

illumination it cast upon her personal life was not altogether

direct. She dissected well, and in a year she found herself

chafing at the limitations of the lady B. Sc. who retailed a

store of faded learning in the Tredgold laboratory. She had

already realized that this instructress was hopelessly wrong and

foggy--it is the test of the good comparative anatomist--upon the

skull. She discovered a desire to enter as a student in the

Imperial College at Westminster, where Russell taught, and go on

with her work at the fountain-head.

She had asked about that already, and her father had replied,

evasively: "We'll have to see about that, little Vee; we'll have

to see about that." In that posture of being seen about the

matter hung until she seemed committed to another session at the

Tredgold College, and in the mean time a small conflict arose and

brought the latch-key question, and in fact the question of Ann

Veronica's position generally, to an acute issue.

In addition to the various business men, solicitors, civil

servants, and widow ladies who lived in the Morningside Park

Avenue, there was a certain family of alien sympathies and

artistic quality, the Widgetts, with which Ann Veronica had

become very friendly. Mr. Widgett was a journalist and art

critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suit and "art" brown

ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday morning,

travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly

despised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the

station. He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three

daughters with peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found

adorable. Two of these had been her particular intimates at the

High School, and had done much to send her mind exploring beyond

the limits of the available literature at home. It was a

cheerful, irresponsible, shamelessly hard-up family in the key of

faded green and flattened purple, and the girls went on from the

High School to the Fadden Art School and a bright, eventful life

of art student dances, Socialist meetings, theatre galleries,

talking about work, and even, at intervals, work; and ever and

again they drew Ann Veronica from her sound persistent industry

into the circle of these experiences. They had asked her to come

to the first of the two great annual Fadden Dances, the October

one, and Ann Veronica had accepted with enthusiasm. And now her

father said she must not go.

He had "put his foot down," and said she must not go.

Going involved two things that all Ann Veronica's tact had been

ineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father. Her usual

dignified reserve had availed her nothing. One point was that

she was to wear fancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair's bride,

and the other was that she was to spend whatever vestiges of the

night remained after the dance was over in London with the

Widgett girls and a select party in "quite a decent little hotel"

near Fitzroy Square.

"But, my dear!" said Ann Veronica's aunt.

"You see," said Ann Veronica, with the air of one who shares a

difficulty, "I've promised to go. I didn't realize-- I don't see

how I can get out of it now."

Then it was her father issued his ultimatum. He had conveyed it

to her, not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to

her a singularly ignoble method of prohibition. "He couldn't

look me in the face and say it," said Ann Veronica.

"But of course it's aunt's doing really."

And thus it was that as Ann Veronica neared the gates of home,

she said to herself: "I'll have it out with him somehow. I'll

have it out with him. And if he won't--"

But she did not give even unspoken words to the alternative at

that time.

Part 3

Ann Veronica's father was a solicitor with a good deal of company

business: a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic,

clean-shaven man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose,

iron-gray hair, gray eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small,

circular baldness at the crown of his head. His name was Peter.

He had had five children at irregular intervals, of whom Ann

Veronica was the youngest, so that as a parent he came to her

perhaps a little practised and jaded and inattentive; and he

called her his "little Vee," and patted her unexpectedly and

disconcertingly, and treated her promiscuously as of any age

between eleven and eight-and-twenty. The City worried him a good