H. Wells - Ann Veronica

their driven, preoccupied haste. She had followed a bobbing

white hat and gray jacket until she reached the Euston Road

corner of Tottenham Court Road, and there, by the name on a bus

and the cries of a conductor, she made a guess of her way. And

she did not merely affect to be driven--she felt driven. She was

afraid people would follow her, she was afraid of the dark, open

doorways she passed, and afraid of the blazes of light; she was

afraid to be alone, and she knew not what it was she feared.

It was past seven when she got back to her hotel. She thought

then that she had shaken off the man of the bulging blue eyes

forever, but that night she found he followed her into her

dreams. He stalked her, he stared at her, he craved her, he

sidled slinking and propitiatory and yet relentlessly toward her,

until at last she awoke from the suffocating nightmare nearness

of his approach, and lay awake in fear and horror listening to

the unaccustomed sounds of the hotel.

She came very near that night to resolving that she would return

to her home next morning. But the morning brought courage again,

and those first intimations of horror vanished completely from

her mind.

Part 5

She had sent her father a telegram from the East Strand

post-office worded thus:

| All | is | well | with | me |

|---------|-----------|----------|----------|---------|

| and | quite | safe | Veronica | |

-----------------------------------------------------

and afterward she had dined a la carte upon a cutlet, and had

then set herself to write an answer to Mr. Manning's proposal of

marriage. But she had found it very difficult.

"DEAR MR. MANNING, she had begun. So far it had been plain

sailing, and it had seemed fairly evident to go on: "I find it

very difficult to answer your letter."

But after that neither ideas nor phrases had come and she had

fallen thinking of the events of the day. She had decided that

she would spend the next morning answering advertisements in the

papers that abounded in the writing-room; and so, after half an

hour's perusal of back numbers of the Sketch in the drawing-room,

she had gone to bed.

She found next morning, when she came to this advertisement

answering, that it was more difficult than she had supposed. In

the first place there were not so many suitable advertisements as

she had expected. She sat down by the paper-rack with a general

feeling of resemblance to Vivie Warren, and looked through the

Morning Post and Standard and Telegraph, and afterward the

half-penny sheets. The Morning Post was hungry for governesses

and nursery governesses, but held out no other hopes; the Daily

Telegraph that morning seemed eager only for skirt hands. She

went to a writing-desk and made some memoranda on a sheet of

note-paper, and then remembered that she had no address as yet to

which letters could be sent.

She decided to leave this matter until the morrow and devote the

morning to settling up with Mr. Manning. At the cost of quite a

number of torn drafts she succeeded in evolving this:

"DEAR MR. MANNING,--I find it very difficult to answer your

letter. I hope you won't mind if I say first that I think it

does me an extraordinary honor that you should think of any one

like myself so highly and seriously, and, secondly, that I wish

it had not been written."

She surveyed this sentence for some time before going on. "I

wonder," she said, "why one writes him sentences like that?

It'll have to go," she decided, "I've written too many already."

She went on, with a desperate attempt to be easy and colloquial:

"You see, we were rather good friends, I thought, and now perhaps

it will be difficult for us to get back to the old friendly

footing. But if that can possibly be done I want it to be done.

You see, the plain fact of the case is that I think I am too

young and ignorant for marriage. I have been thinking these

things over lately, and it seems to me that marriage for a girl

is just the supremest thing in life. It isn't just one among a

number of important things; for her it is the important thing,

and until she knows far more than I know of the facts of life,

how is she to undertake it? So please; if you will, forget that

you wrote that letter, and forgive this answer. I want you to

think of me just as if I was a man, and quite outside marriage

altogether.

"I do hope you will be able to do this, because I value men

friends. I shall be very sorry if I cannot have you for a

friend. I think that there is no better friend for a girl than a

man rather older than herself.

"Perhaps by this time you will have heard of the step I have

taken in leaving my home. Very likely you will disapprove highly

of what I have done--l wonder? You may, perhaps, think I have

done it just in a fit of childish petulance because my father

locked me in when I wanted to go to a ball of which he did not

approve. But really it is much more than that. At Morningside

Park I feel as though all my growing up was presently to stop, as

though I was being shut in from the light of life, and, as they

say in botany, etiolated. I was just like a sort of dummy that

does things as it is told--that is to say, as the strings are

pulled. I want to be a person by myself, and to pull my own

strings. I had rather have trouble and hardship like that than

be taken care of by others. I want to be myself. l wonder if a

man can quite understand that passionate feeling? It is quite a

passionate feeling. So I am already no longer the girl you knew

at Morningside Park. I am a young person seeking employment and

freedom and self-development, just as in quite our first talk of

all I said I wanted to be.

"I do hope you will see how things are, and not be offended with

me or frightfully shocked and distressed by what I have done.

"Very sincerely yours,

"ANN VERONICA STANLEY."

Part 6

In the afternoon she resumed her search for apartments. The

intoxicating sense of novelty had given place to a more

business-like mood. She drifted northward from the Strand, and

came on some queer and dingy quarters.

She had never imagined life was half so sinister as it looked to

her in the beginning of these investigations. She found herself

again in the presence of some element in life about which she had

been trained not to think, about which she was perhaps

instinctively indisposed to think; something which jarred, in

spite of all her mental resistance, with all her preconceptions

of a clean and courageous girl walking out from Morningside Park

as one walks out of a cell into a free and spacious world. One or

two landladies refused her with an air of conscious virtue that

she found hard to explain. "We don't let to ladies," they said.

She drifted, via Theobald's Road, obliquely toward the region

about Titchfield Street. Such apartments as she saw were either

scandalously dirty or unaccountably dear, or both. And some were

adorned with engravings that struck her as being more vulgar and

undesirable than anything she had ever seen in her life. Ann

Veronica loved beautiful things, and the beauty of undraped

loveliness not least among them; but these were pictures that did

but insist coarsely upon the roundness of women's bodies. The

windows of these rooms were obscured with draperies, their floors

a carpet patchwork; the china ornaments on their mantels were of