H. Wells - Ann Veronica

moments. Most of them didn't, anyhow. They were properly

brought up, and sat still and straight, and took the luck fate

brought them as gentlewomen should. And they had an idea of what

men were like behind all their nicety. They knew they were all

Bogey in disguise. I didn't! I didn't! After all--"

For a time her mind ran on daintiness and its defensive

restraints as though it was the one desirable thing. That world

of fine printed cambrics and escorted maidens, of delicate

secondary meanings and refined allusiveness, presented itself to

her imagination with the brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed

for many women it is a lost paradise.

"I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners," she said.

"I wonder if I've been properly brought up. If I had been quite

quiet and white and dignified, wouldn't it have been different?

Would he have dared? . . ."

For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica was utterly

disgusted with herself; she was wrung with a passionate and

belated desire to move gently, to speak softly and

ambiguously--to be, in effect, prim.

Horrible details recurred to her.

"Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in his

neck--deliberately to hurt him?"

She tried to sound the humorous note.

"Are you aware, Ann Veronica, you nearly throttled that

gentleman?"

Then she reviled her own foolish way of putting it.

"You ass and imbecile, Ann Veronica! You female cad! Cad! Cad!

. . . Why aren't you folded up clean in lavender--as every young

woman ought to be? What have you been doing with yourself? . .

."

She raked into the fire with the poker.

"All of which doesn't help me in the slightest degree to pay back

that money."

That night was the most intolerable one that Ann Veronica had

ever spent. She washed her face with unwonted elaboration before

she went to bed. This time, there was no doubt, she did not

sleep. The more she disentangled the lines of her situation the

deeper grew her self-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of

lying in bed became unendurable, and she rolled out and marched

about her room and whispered abuse of herself--usually until she

hit against some article of furniture.

Then she would have quiet times, in which she would say to

herself, "Now look here! Let me think it all out!"

For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a

woman's position in the world--the meagre realities of such

freedom as it permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to

some individual man under which she must labor for even a

foothold in the world. She had flung away from her father's

support with the finest assumption of personal independence. And

here she was--in a mess because it had been impossible for her to

avoid leaning upon another man. She had thought--What had she

thought? That this dependence of women was but an illusion which

needed only to be denied to vanish. She had denied it with

vigor, and here she was!

She did not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it

to her insoluble individual problem again: "What am I to do?"

She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back into

Ramage's face. But she had spent nearly half of it, and had no

conception of how such a sum could be made good again. She

thought of all sorts of odd and desperate expedients, and with

passionate petulance rejected them all.

She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing insulting

epithets for herself. She got up, drew up her blind, and stared

out of window at a dawn-cold vision of chimneys for a time, and

then went and sat on the edge of her bed. What was the

alternative to going home? No alternative appeared in that

darkness.

It seemed intolerable that she should go home and admit herself

beaten. She did most urgently desire to save her face in

Morningside Park, and for long hours she could think of no way of

putting it that would not be in the nature of unconditional

admission of defeat.

"I'd rather go as a chorus-girl," she said.

She was not very clear about the position and duties of a

chorus-girl, but it certainly had the air of being a last

desperate resort. There sprang from that a vague hope that

perhaps she might extort a capitulation from her father by a

threat to seek that position, and then with overwhelming

clearness it came to her that whatever happened she would never

be able to tell her father about her debt. The completest

capitulation would not wipe out that trouble. And she felt that

if she went home it was imperative to pay. She would always be

going to and fro up the Avenue, getting glimpses of Ramage,

seeing him in trains. . . .

For a time she promenaded the room.

"Why did I ever take that loan? An idiot girl in an asylum would

have known better than that!

"Vulgarity of soul and innocence of mind--the worst of all

conceivable combinations. I wish some one would kill Ramage by

accident! . . .

"But then they would find that check endorsed in his bureau. . .

.

"I wonder what he will do?" She tried to imagine situations that

might arise out of Ramage's antagonism, for he had been so bitter

and savage that she could not believe that he would leave things

as they were.

The next morning she went out with her post-office savings

bank-book, and telegraphed for a warrant to draw out all the

money she had in the world. It amounted to two-and-twenty

pounds. She addressed an envelope to Ramage, and scrawled on a

half-sheet of paper, "The rest shall follow." The money would be

available in the afternoon, and she would send him four five-

pound notes. The rest she meant to keep for her immediate

necessities. A little relieved by this step toward

reinstatement, she went on to the Imperial College to forget her

muddle of problems for a time, if she could, in the presence of

Capes.

Part 7

For a time the biological laboratory was full of healing virtue.

Her sleepless night had left her languid but not stupefied, and

for an hour or so the work distracted her altogether from her

troubles.

Then, after Capes had been through her work and had gone on, it

came to her that the fabric of this life of hers was doomed to

almost immediate collapse; that in a little while these studies

would cease, and perhaps she would never set eyes on him again.

After that consolations fled.

The overnight nervous strain began to tell; she became

inattentive to the work before her, and it did not get on. She

felt sleepy and unusually irritable. She lunched at a creamery

in Great Portland Street, and as the day was full of wintry

sunshine, spent the rest of the lunch-hour in a drowsy gloom,

which she imagined to be thought upon the problems of her

position, on a seat in Regent's Park. A girl of fifteen or

sixteen gave her a handbill that she regarded as a tract until

she saw "Votes for Women" at the top. That turned her mind to

the more generalized aspects of her perplexities again. She had

never been so disposed to agree that the position of women in the

modern world is intolerable.

Capes joined the students at tea, and displayed himself in an

impish mood that sometimes possessed him. He did not notice that

Ann Veronica was preoccupied and heavy-eyed. Miss Klegg raised

the question of women's suffrage, and he set himself to provoke a

duel between her and Miss Garvice. The youth with the hair