H. Wells: Ann Veronica

deal, and what energy he had left over he spent partly in golf, a

game he treated very seriously, and partly in the practices of

microscopic petrography.

He "went in" for microscopy in the unphilosophical Victorian

manner as his "hobby." A birthday present of a microscope had

turned his mind to technical microscopy when he was eighteen, and

a chance friendship with a Holborn microscope dealer had

confirmed that bent. He had remarkably skilful fingers and a

love of detailed processes, and he had become one of the most

dexterous amateur makers of rock sections in the world. He spent

a good deal more money and time than he could afford upon the

little room at the top of the house, in producing new lapidary

apparatus and new microscopic accessories and in rubbing down

slices of rock to a transparent thinness and mounting them in a

beautiful and dignified manner. He did it, he said, "to distract

his mind." His chief successes he exhibited to the Lowndean

Microscopical Society, where their high technical merit never

failed to excite admiration. Their scientific value was less

considerable, since he chose rocks entirely with a view to their

difficulty of handling or their attractiveness at conversaziones

when done. He had a great contempt for the sections the

"theorizers" produced. They proved all sorts of things perhaps,

but they were thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work. Yet an

indiscriminating, wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts

of distinctions....

He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fiction with

chromatic titles, The Red Sword, The Black Helmet, The Purple

Robe, also in order "to distract his mind." He read it in winter

in the evening after dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with

a tendency to monopolize the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair

of dappled fawn-skin slippers across the fender. She wondered

occasionally why his mind needed so much distraction. His

favorite newspaper was the Times, which he began at breakfast in

the morning often with manifest irritation, and carried off to

finish in the train, leaving no other paper at home.

It occurred to Ann Veronica once that she had known him when he

was younger, but day had followed day, and each had largely

obliterated the impression of its predecessor. But she certainly

remembered that when she was a little girl he sometimes wore

tennis flannels, and also rode a bicycle very dexterously in

through the gates to the front door. And in those days, too, he

used to help her mother with her gardening, and hover about her

while she stood on the ladder and hammered creepers to the

scullery wall.

It had been Ann Veronica's lot as the youngest child to live in a

home that became less animated and various as she grew up. Her

mother had died when she was thirteen, her two much older sisters

had married off--one submissively, one insubordinately; her two

brothers had gone out into the world well ahead of her, and so

she had made what she could of her father. But he was not a

father one could make much of.

His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest

quality; they were creatures, he thought, either too bad for a

modern vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably

desirable, or too pure and good for life. He made this simple

classification of a large and various sex to the exclusion of all

intermediate kinds; he held that the two classes had to be kept

apart even in thought and remote from one another. Women are

made like the potter's vessels--either for worship or contumely,

and are withal fragile vessels. He had never wanted daughters.

Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealed his

chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and had

sworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom.

He was a manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he

had loved his dark-eyed, dainty bright-colored, and active little

wife with a real vein of passion in his sentiment. But he had

always felt (he had never allowed himself to think of it) that

the promptitude of their family was a little indelicate of her,

and in a sense an intrusion. He had, however, planned brilliant

careers for his two sons, and, with a certain human amount of

warping and delay, they were pursuing these. One was in the

Indian Civil Service and one in the rapidly developing motor

business. The daughters, he had hoped, would be their mother's

care.

He had no ideas about daughters. They happen to a man.

Of course a little daughter is a delightful thing enough. It runs

about gayly, it romps, it is bright and pretty, it has enormous

quantities of soft hair and more power of expressing affection

than its brothers. It is a lovely little appendage to the mother

who smiles over it, and it does things quaintly like her,

gestures with her very gestures. It makes wonderful sentences

that you can repeat in the City and are good enough for Punch.

You call it a lot of nicknames--"Babs" and "Bibs" and "Viddles"

and "Vee"; you whack at it playfully, and it whacks you back. It

loves to sit on your knee. All that is jolly and as it should

be.

But a little daughter is one thing and a daughter quite another.

There one comes to a relationship that Mr. Stanley had never

thought out. When he found himself thinking about it, it upset

him so that he at once resorted to distraction. The chromatic

fiction with which he relieved his mind glanced but slightly at

this aspect of life, and never with any quality of guidance. Its

heroes never had daughters, they borrowed other people's. The

one fault, indeed, of this school of fiction for him was that it

had rather a light way with parental rights. His instinct was in

the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property,

bound to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a

comfort in his declining years just as he thought fit. About

this conception of ownership he perceived and desired a certain

sentimental glamour, he liked everything properly dressed, but it

remained ownership. Ownership seemed only a reasonable return

for the cares and expenses of a daughter's upbringing. Daughters

were not like sons. He perceived, however, that both the novels

he read and the world he lived in discountenanced these

assumptions. Nothing else was put in their place, and they

remained sotto voce, as it were, in his mind. The new and the

old cancelled out; his daughters became quasi-independent

dependents--which is absurd. One married as he wished and one

against his wishes, and now here was Ann Veronica, his little

Vee, discontented with her beautiful, safe, and sheltering home,

going about with hatless friends to Socialist meetings and

art-class dances, and displaying a disposition to carry her

scientific ambitions to unwomanly lengths. She seemed to think

he was merely the paymaster, handing over the means of her

freedom. And now she insisted that she MUST leave the chastened

security of the Tredgold Women's College for Russell's unbridled

classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in pirate costume

and spend the residue of the night with Widgett's ramshackle

girls in some indescribable hotel in Soho!

He had done his best not to think about her at all, but the

situation and his sister had become altogether too urgent. He