H. Wells - Ann Veronica

so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the

paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in

direct relation to that rightness, absurd.

Very central in Miss Miniver's universe were the Goopes. The

Goopes were the oddest little couple conceivable, following a

fruitarian career upon an upper floor in Theobald's Road. They

were childless and servantless, and they had reduced simple

living to the finest of fine arts. Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica

gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his

wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian cookery,

vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis,

and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management

of a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very

furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes

when at home dressed simply in a pajama-shaped suit of canvas

sacking tied with brown ribbons, while his wife wore a purple

djibbah with a richly embroidered yoke. He was a small, dark,

reserved man, with a large inflexible-looking convex forehead,

and his wife was very pink and high-spirited, with one of those

chins that pass insensibly into a full, strong neck. Once a

week, every Saturday, they had a little gathering from nine till

the small hours, just talk and perhaps reading aloud and

fruitarian refreshments--chestnut sandwiches buttered with nut

tose, and so forth--and lemonade and unfermented wine; and to one

of these symposia Miss Miniver after a good deal of preliminary

solicitude, conducted Ann Veronica.

She was introduced, perhaps a little too obviously for her taste,

as a girl who was standing out against her people, to a gathering

that consisted of a very old lady with an extremely wrinkled skin

and a deep voice who was wearing what appeared to Ann Veronica's

inexperienced eye to be an antimacassar upon her head, a shy,

blond young man with a narrow forehead and glasses, two

undistinguished women in plain skirts and blouses, and a

middle-aged couple, very fat and alike in black, Mr. and Mrs.

Alderman Dunstable, of the Borough Council of Marylebone. These

were seated in an imperfect semicircle about a very

copper-adorned fireplace, surmounted by a carved wood

inscription:

"DO IT NOW."

And to them were presently added a roguish-looking young man,

with reddish hair, an orange tie, and a fluffy tweed suit, and

others who, in Ann Veronica's memory, in spite of her efforts to

recall details, remained obstinately just "others."

The talk was animated, and remained always brilliant in form even

when it ceased to be brilliant in substance. There were moments

when Ann Veronica rather more than suspected the chief speakers

to be, as school-boys say, showing off at her.

They talked of a new substitute for dripping in vegetarian

cookery that Mrs. Goopes was convinced exercised an exceptionally

purifying influence on the mind. And then they talked of

Anarchism and Socialism, and whether the former was the exact

opposite of the latter or only a higher form. The reddish-haired

young man contributed allusions to the Hegelian philosophy that

momentarily confused the discussion. Then Alderman Dunstable,

who had hitherto been silent, broke out into speech and went off

at a tangent, and gave his personal impressions of quite a number

of his fellow-councillors. He continued to do this for the rest

of the evening intermittently, in and out, among other topics. He

addressed himself chiefly to Goopes, and spoke as if in reply to

long-sustained inquiries on the part of Goopes into the personnel

of the Marylebone Borough Council. "If you were to ask me," he

would say, "I should say Blinders is straight. An ordinary type,

of course--"

Mrs. Dunstable's contributions to the conversation were entirely

in the form of nods; whenever Alderman Dunstable praised or

blamed she nodded twice or thrice, according to the requirements

of his emphasis. And she seemed always to keep one eye on Ann

Veronica's dress. Mrs. Goopes disconcerted the Alderman a little

by abruptly challenging the roguish-looking young man in the

orange tie (who, it seemed, was the assistant editor of New

Ideas) upon a critique of Nietzsche and Tolstoy that had appeared

in his paper, in which doubts had been cast upon the perfect

sincerity of the latter. Everybody seemed greatly concerned about

the sincerity of Tolstoy.

Miss Miniver said that if once she lost her faith in Tolstoy's

sincerity, nothing she felt would really matter much any more,

and she appealed to Ann Veronica whether she did not feel the

same; and Mr. Goopes said that we must distinguish between

sincerity and irony, which was often indeed no more than

sincerity at the sublimated level.

Alderman Dunstable said that sincerity was often a matter of

opportunity, and illustrated the point to the fair young man with

an anecdote about Blinders on the Dust Destructor Committee,

during which the young man in the orange tie succeeded in giving

the whole discussion a daring and erotic flavor by questioning

whether any one could be perfectly sincere in love.

Miss Miniver thought that there was no true sincerity except in

love, and appealed to Ann Veronica, but the young man in the

orange tie went on to declare that it was quite possible to be

sincerely in love with two people at the same time, although

perhaps on different planes with each individual, and deceiving

them both. But that brought Mrs. Goopes down on him with the

lesson Titian teaches so beautifully in his "Sacred and Profane

Love," and became quite eloquent upon the impossibility of any

deception in the former.

Then they discoursed on love for a time, and Alderman Dunstable,

turning back to the shy, blond young man and speaking in

undertones of the utmost clearness, gave a brief and confidential

account of an unfounded rumor of the bifurcation of the

affections of Blinders that had led to a situation of some

unpleasantness upon the Borough Council.

The very old lady in the antimacassar touched Ann Veronica's arm

suddenly, and said, in a deep, arch voice:

"Talking of love again; spring again, love again. Oh! you young

people!"

The young man with the orange tie, in spite of Sisyphus-like

efforts on the part of Goopes to get the topic on to a higher

plane, displayed great persistence in speculating upon the

possible distribution of the affections of highly developed

modern types.

The old lady in the antimacassar said, abruptly, "Ah! you young

people, you young people, if you only knew!" and then laughed and

then mused in a marked manner; and the young man with the narrow

forehead and glasses cleared his throat and asked the young man

in the orange tie whether he believed that Platonic love was

possible. Mrs. Goopes said she believed in nothing else, and

with that she glanced at Ann Veronica, rose a little abruptly,

and directed Goopes and the shy young man in the handing of

refreshments.

But the young man with the orange tie remained in his place,

disputing whether the body had not something or other which he

called its legitimate claims. And from that they came back by way

of the Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection to Tolstoy again.

So the talk went on. Goopes, who had at first been a little

reserved, resorted presently to the Socratic method to restrain