H. Wells - Ann Veronica

rooms last week. It got on my nerves--the women I saw. Worse

than any man. Everywhere I went and rapped at a door I found

behind it another dreadful dingy woman--another fallen queen, I

suppose--dingier than the last, dirty, you know, in grain. Their

poor hands!"

"I know," said Mr. Manning, with entirely suitable emotion.

"And think of the ordinary wives and mothers, with their anxiety,

their limitations, their swarms of children!"

Mr. Manning displayed distress. He fended these things off from

him with the rump of his fourth piece of cake. "I know that our

social order is dreadful enough," he said, "and sacrifices all

that is best and most beautiful in life. I don't defend it."

"And besides, when it comes to the idea of queens," Ann Veronica

went on, "there's twenty-one and a half million women to twenty

million men. Suppose our proper place is a shrine. Still, that

leaves over a million shrines short, not reckoning widows who

re-marry. And more boys die than girls, so that the real

disproportion among adults is even greater."

"I know," said Mr Manning, "I know these Dreadful Statistics. I

know there's a sort of right in your impatience at the slowness

of Progress. But tell me one thing I don't understand--tell me

one thing: How can you help it by coming down into the battle

and the mire? That's the thing that concerns me."

"Oh, I'm not trying to help it," said Ann Veronica. "I'm only

arguing against your position of what a woman should be, and

trying to get it clear in my own mind. I'm in this apartment and

looking for work because-- Well, what else can I do, when my

father practically locks me up?"

"I know," said Mr. Manning, "I know. Don't think I can't

sympathize and understand. Still, here we are in this dingy,

foggy city. Ye gods! what a wilderness it is! Every one trying

to get the better of every one, every one regardless of every

one--it's one of those days when every one bumps against

you--every one pouring coal smoke into the air and making

confusion worse confounded, motor omnibuses clattering and

smelling, a horse down in the Tottenham Court Road, an old woman

at the corner coughing dreadfully--all the painful sights of a

great city, and here you come into it to take your chances. It's

too valiant, Miss Stanley, too valiant altogether!"

Ann Veronica meditated. She had had two days of

employment-seeking now. "I wonder if it is."

"It isn't," said Mr. Manning, "that I mind Courage in a Woman--I

love and admire Courage. What could be more splendid than a

beautiful girl facing a great, glorious tiger? Una and the Lion

again, and all that! But this isn't that sort of thing; this is

just a great, ugly, endless wilderness of selfish, sweating,

vulgar competition!"

"That you want to keep me out of?"

"Exactly!" said Mr. Manning.

"In a sort of beautiful garden-close--wearing lovely dresses and

picking beautiful flowers?"

"Ah! If one could!"

"While those other girls trudge to business and those other women

let lodgings. And in reality even that magic garden-close

resolves itself into a villa at Morningside Park and my father

being more and more cross and overbearing at meals--and a general

feeling of insecurity and futility."

Mr. Manning relinquished his cup, and looked meaningly at Ann

Veronica. "There," he said, "you don't treat me fairly, Miss

Stanley. My garden-close would be a better thing than that."

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

IDEALS AND A REALITY

Part 1

And now for some weeks Ann Veronica was to test her market value

in the world. She went about in a negligent November London that

had become very dark and foggy and greasy and forbidding indeed,

and tried to find that modest but independent employment she had

so rashly assumed. She went about, intent-looking and

self-possessed, trim and fine, concealing her emotions whatever

they were, as the realities of her position opened out before

her. Her little bed-sitting-room was like a lair, and she went

out from it into this vast, dun world, with its smoke-gray

houses, its glaring streets of shops, its dark streets of homes,

its orange-lit windows, under skies of dull copper or muddy gray

or black, much as an animal goes out to seek food. She would

come back and write letters, carefully planned and written

letters, or read some book she had fetched from Mudie's--she had

invested a half-guinea with Mudie's--or sit over her fire and

think.

Slowly and reluctantly she came to realize that Vivie Warren was

what is called an "ideal." There were no such girls and no such

positions. No work that offered was at all of the quality she

had vaguely postulated for herself. With such qualifications as

she possessed, two chief channels of employment lay open, and

neither attracted her, neither seemed really to offer a

conclusive escape from that subjection to mankind against which,

in the person of her father, she was rebelling. One main avenue

was for her to become a sort of salaried accessory wife or

mother, to be a governess or an assistant schoolmistress, or a

very high type of governess-nurse. The other was to go into

business --into a photographer's reception-room, for example, or

a costumer's or hat-shop. The first set of occupations seemed to

her to be altogether too domestic and restricted; for the latter

she was dreadfully handicapped by her want of experience. And

also she didn't like them. She didn't like the shops, she didn't

like the other women's faces; she thought the smirking men in

frock-coats who dominated these establishments the most

intolerable persons she had ever had to face. One called her

very distinctly "My dear!"

Two secretarial posts did indeed seem to offer themselves in

which, at least, there was no specific exclusion of womanhood;

one was under a Radical Member of Parliament, and the other under

a Harley Street doctor, and both men declined her proffered

services with the utmost civility and admiration and terror.

There was also a curious interview at a big hotel with a

middle-aged, white-powdered woman, all covered with jewels and

reeking of scent, who wanted a Companion. She did not think Ann

Veronica would do as her companion.

And nearly all these things were fearfully ill-paid. They carried

no more than bare subsistence wages; and they demanded all her

time and energy. She had heard of women journalists, women

writers, and so forth; but she was not even admitted to the

presence of the editors she demanded to see, and by no means sure

that if she had been she could have done any work they might have

given her. One day she desisted from her search and went

unexpectedly to the Tredgold College. Her place was not filled;

she had been simply noted as absent, and she did a comforting day

of admirable dissection upon the tortoise. She was so

interested, and this was such a relief from the trudging anxiety

of her search for work, that she went on for a whole week as if

she was still living at home. Then a third secretarial opening

occurred and renewed her hopes again: a position as

amanuensis--with which some of the lighter duties of a nurse were

combined--to an infirm gentleman of means living at Twickenham,

and engaged upon a great literary research to prove that the

"Faery Queen" was really a treatise upon molecular chemistry

written in a peculiar and picturesquely handled cipher.