H. Wells - Ann Veronica

the young man with the orange tie, and bent his forehead over

him, and brought out at last very clearly from him that the body

was only illusion and everything nothing but just spirit and

molecules of thought. It became a sort of duel at last between

them, and all the others sat and listened--every one, that is,

except the Alderman, who had got the blond young man into a

corner by the green-stained dresser with the aluminum things, and

was sitting with his back to every one else, holding one hand

over his mouth for greater privacy, and telling him, with an

accent of confidential admission, in whispers of the chronic

struggle between the natural modesty and general inoffensiveness

of the Borough Council and the social evil in Marylebone.

So the talk went on, and presently they were criticising

novelists, and certain daring essays of Wilkins got their due

share of attention, and then they were discussing the future of

the theatre. Ann Veronica intervened a little in the novelist

discussion with a defence of Esmond and a denial that the Egoist

was obscure, and when she spoke every one else stopped talking

and listened. Then they deliberated whether Bernard Shaw ought

to go into Parliament. And that brought them to vegetarianism

and teetotalism, and the young man in the orange tie and Mrs.

Goopes had a great set-to about the sincerity of Chesterton and

Belloc that was ended by Goopes showing signs of resuming the

Socratic method.

And at last Ann Veronica and Miss Miniver came down the dark

staircase and out into the foggy spaces of the London squares,

and crossed Russell Square, Woburn Square, Gordon Square, making

an oblique route to Ann Veronica's lodging. They trudged along a

little hungry, because of the fruitarian refreshments, and

mentally very active. And Miss Miniver fell discussing whether

Goopes or Bernard Shaw or Tolstoy or Doctor Tumpany or Wilkins

the author had the more powerful and perfect mind in existence at

the present time. She was clear there were no other minds like

them in all the world.

Part 4

Then one evening Ann Veronica went with Miss Miniver into the

back seats of the gallery at Essex Hall, and heard and saw the

giant leaders of the Fabian Society who are re-making the world:

Bernard Shaw and Toomer and Doctor Tumpany and Wilkins the

author, all displayed upon a platform. The place was crowded,

and the people about her were almost equally made up of very

good-looking and enthusiastic young people and a great variety of

Goopes-like types. In the discussion there was the oddest

mixture of things that were personal and petty with an idealist

devotion that was fine beyond dispute. In nearly every speech

she heard was the same implication of great and necessary changes

in the world--changes to be won by effort and sacrifice indeed,

but surely to be won. And afterward she saw a very much larger

and more enthusiastic gathering, a meeting of the advanced

section of the woman movement in Caxton Hall, where the same note

of vast changes in progress sounded; and she went to a soiree of

the Dress Reform Association and visited a Food Reform

Exhibition, where imminent change was made even alarmingly

visible. The women's meeting was much more charged with

emotional force than the Socialists'. Ann Veronica was carried

off her intellectual and critical feet by it altogether, and

applauded and uttered cries that subsequent reflection failed to

endorse. "I knew you would feel it," said Miss Miniver, as they

came away flushed and heated. "I knew you would begin to see how

it all falls into place together."

It did begin to fall into place together. She became more and

more alive, not so much to a system of ideas as to a big diffused

impulse toward change, to a great discontent with and criticism

of life as it is lived, to a clamorous confusion of ideas for

reconstruction--reconstruction of the methods of business, of

economic development, of the rules of property, of the status of

children, of the clothing and feeding and teaching of every one;

she developed a quite exaggerated consciousness of a multitude of

people going about the swarming spaces of London with their minds

full, their talk and gestures full, their very clothing charged

with the suggestion of the urgency of this pervasive project of

alteration. Some indeed carried themselves, dressed themselves

even, rather as foreign visitors from the land of "Looking

Backward" and "News from Nowhere" than as the indigenous

Londoners they were. For the most part these were detached

people: men practising the plastic arts, young writers, young men

in employment, a very large proportion of girls and women--self-

supporting women or girls of the student class. They made a

stratum into which Ann Veronica was now plunged up to her neck;

it had become her stratum.

None of the things they said and did were altogether new to Ann

Veronica, but now she got them massed and alive, instead of by

glimpses or in books--alive and articulate and insistent. The

London backgrounds, in Bloomsbury and Marylebone, against which

these people went to and fro, took on, by reason of their gray

facades, their implacably respectable windows and window-blinds,

their reiterated unmeaning iron railings, a stronger and stronger

suggestion of the flavor of her father at his most obdurate

phase, and of all that she felt herself fighting against.

She was already a little prepared by her discursive reading and

discussion under the Widgett influence for ideas and "movements,"

though temperamentally perhaps she was rather disposed to resist

and criticise than embrace them. But the people among whom she

was now thrown through the social exertions of Miss Miniver and

the Widgetts--for Teddy and Hetty came up from Morningside Park

and took her to an eighteen-penny dinner in Soho and introduced

her to some art students, who were also Socialists, and so opened

the way to an evening of meandering talk in a studio--carried

with them like an atmosphere this implication, not only that the

world was in some stupid and even obvious way WRONG, with which

indeed she was quite prepared to agree, but that it needed only a

few pioneers to behave as such and be thoroughly and

indiscriminately "advanced," for the new order to achieve itself.

When ninety per cent. out of the ten or twelve people one meets

in a month not only say but feel and assume a thing, it is very

hard not to fall into the belief that the thing is so.

Imperceptibly almost Ann Veronica began to acquire the new

attitude, even while her mind still resisted the felted ideas

that went with it. And Miss Miniver began to sway her.

The very facts that Miss Miniver never stated an argument

clearly, that she was never embarrassed by a sense of

self-contradiction, and had little more respect for consistency

of statement than a washerwoman has for wisps of vapor, which

made Ann Veronica critical and hostile at their first encounter

in Morningside Park, became at last with constant association the

secret of Miss Miniver's growing influence. The brain tires of

resistance, and when it meets again and again, incoherently

active, the same phrases, the same ideas that it has already

slain, exposed and dissected and buried, it becomes less and less

energetic to repeat the operation. There must be something, one