H. Wells - Ann Veronica

"A glass slipped from the table," he explained. . . . "Non. Fas

du tout. Non. . . . Niente. . . . Bitte! . . . Oui, dans la

note. . . . Presently. Presently." That conversation ended and

he turned to her again.

"I am going," she said grimly, with three hairpins in her mouth.

She took her hat from the peg in the corner and began to put it

on. He regarded that perennial miracle of pinning with wrathful

eyes.

"Look here, Ann Veronica," he began. "I want a plain word with

you about all this. Do you mean to tell me you didn't understand

why I wanted you to come here?"

"Not a bit of it," said Ann Veronica stoutly.

"You didn't expect that I should kiss you?"

"How was I to know that a man would--would think it was

possible--when there was nothing--no love?"

"How did I know there wasn't love?"

That silenced her for a moment. "And what on earth," he said,

"do you think the world is made of? Why do you think I have been

doing things for you? The abstract pleasure of goodness? Are

you one of the members of that great white sisterhood that takes

and does not give? The good accepting woman! Do you really

suppose a girl is entitled to live at free quarters on any man

she meets without giving any return?"

"I thought," said Ann Veronica, "you were my friend."

"Friend! What have a man and a girl in common to make them

friends? Ask that lover of yours! And even with friends, would

you have it all Give on one side and all Take on the other? . . .

Does HE know I keep you? . . . You won't have a man's lips near

you, but you'll eat out of his hand fast enough."

Ann Veronica was stung to helpless anger.

"Mr. Ramage," she cried, "you are outrageous! You understand

nothing. You are--horrible. Will you let me go out of this

room?"

"No," cried Ramage; "hear me out! I'll have that satisfaction,

anyhow. You women, with your tricks of evasion, you're a sex of

swindlers. You have all the instinctive dexterity of parasites.

You make yourself charming for help. You climb by disappointing

men. This lover of yours--"

"He doesn't know!" cried Ann Veronica.

"Well, you know."

Ann Veronica could have wept with vexation. Indeed, a note of

weeping broke her voice for a moment as she burst out, "You know

as well as I do that money was a loan!"

"Loan!"

"You yourself called it a loan!"

"Euphuism. We both understood that."

"You shall have every penny of it back."

"I'll frame it--when I get it."

"I'll pay you if I have to work at shirt-making at threepence an

hour."

"You'll never pay me. You think you will. It's your way of

glossing over the ethical position. It's the sort of way a woman

always does gloss over her ethical positions. You're all

dependents--all of you. By instinct. Only you good ones--shirk.

You shirk a straightforward and decent return for what you get

from us--taking refuge in purity and delicacy and such-like when

it comes to payment."

"Mr. Ramage," said Ann Veronica, "I want to go--NOW!"

Part 5

But she did not get away just then.

Ramage's bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggression. "Oh,

Ann Veronica!" he cried, "I cannot let you go like this! You

don't understand. You can't possibly understand!"

He began a confused explanation, a perplexing contradictory

apology for his urgency and wrath. He loved Ann Veronica, he

said; he was so mad to have her that he defeated himself, and did

crude and alarming and senseless things. His vicious abusiveness

vanished. He suddenly became eloquent and plausible. He did make

her perceive something of the acute, tormenting desire for her

that had arisen in him and possessed him. She stood, as it were,

directed doorward, with her eyes watching every movement,

listening to him, repelled by him and yet dimly understanding.

At any rate he made it very clear that night that there was an

ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must

shatter all her dreams of a way of living for women that would

enable them to be free and spacious and friendly with men, and

that was the passionate predisposition of men to believe that the

love of women can be earned and won and controlled and compelled.

He flung aside all his talk of help and disinterested friendship

as though it had never been even a disguise between them, as

though from the first it was no more than a fancy dress they had

put quite understandingly upon their relationship. He had set

out to win her, and she had let him start. And at the thought of

that other lover--he was convinced that that beloved person was a

lover, and she found herself unable to say a word to explain to

him that this other person, the person she loved, did not even

know of her love--Ramage grew angry and savage once more, and

returned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men do services for the

love of women, and the woman who takes must pay. Such was the

simple code that displayed itself in all his thoughts. He left

that arid rule clear of the least mist of refinement or delicacy.

That he should pay forty pounds to help this girl who preferred

another man was no less in his eyes than a fraud and mockery that

made her denial a maddening and outrageous disgrace to him. And

this though he was evidently passionately in love with her.

For a while he threatened her. "You have put all your life in my

hands," he declared. "Think of that check you endorsed. There

it is--against you. I defy you to explain it away. What do you

think people will make of that? What will this lover of yours

make of that?"

At intervals Ann Veronica demanded to go, declaring her undying

resolve to repay him at any cost, and made short movements

doorward.

But at last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened the door.

She emerged with a white face and wide-open eyes upon a little,

red-lit landing. She went past three keenly observant and

ostentatiously preoccupied waiters down the thick-carpeted

staircase and out of the Hotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory

of relationships, past a tall porter in blue and crimson, into a

cool, clear night.

Part 6

When Ann Veronica reached her little bed-sitting-room again,

every nerve in her body was quivering with shame and

self-disgust.

She threw hat and coat on the bed and sat down before the fire.

"And now," she said, splintering the surviving piece of coal into

indignant flame-spurting fragments with one dexterous blow, "what

am I to do?

"I'm in a hole!--mess is a better word, expresses it better .

I'm in a mess--a nasty mess! a filthy mess! Oh, no end of a mess!

Do you hear, Ann Veronica?--you're in a nasty, filthy,

unforgivable mess!

"Haven't I just made a silly mess of things?

"Forty pounds! I haven't got twenty!"

She got up, stamped with her foot, and then, suddenly remembering

the lodger below, sat down and wrenched off her boots.

"This is what comes of being a young woman up to date. By Jove!

I'm beginning to have my doubts about freedom!

"You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly young woman!

The smeariness of the thing!

"The smeariness of this sort of thing! . . . Mauled about!"

She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the back of

her hand. "Ugh!" she said.

"The young women of Jane Austen's time didn't get into this sort

of scrape! At least--one thinks so. . . . I wonder if some of

them did--and it didn't get reported. Aunt Jane had her quiet