H. Wells - Ann Veronica

"He can't be more than thirty. He must have married when he was

quite a young man."

"Married?" said Ann Veronica.

"Didn't you know he was married?" asked Miss Klegg, and was

struck by a thought that made her glance quickly at her

companion.

Ann Veronica had no answer for a moment. She turned her head

away sharply. Some automaton within her produced in a quite

unfamiliar voice the remark, "They're playing football."

"It's too far for the ball to reach us," said Miss Klegg.

"I didn't know Mr. Capes was married," said Ann Veronica,

resuming the conversation with an entire disappearance of her

former lassitude.

"Oh yes," said Miss Klegg; "I thought every one knew."

"No," said Ann Veronica, offhandedly. "Never heard anything of

it."

"I thought every one knew. I thought every one had heard about

it."

"But why?"

"He's married--and, I believe, living separated from his wife.

There was a case, or something, some years ago."

"What case?"

"A divorce--or something--I don't know. But I have heard that he

almost had to leave the schools. If it hadn't been for Professor

Russell standing up for him, they say he would have had to

leave."

"Was he divorced, do you mean?"

"No, but he got himself mixed up in a divorce case. I forget the

particulars, but I know it was something very disagreeable. It

was among artistic people."

Ann Veronica was silent for a while.

"I thought every one had heard," said Miss Klegg. "Or I wouldn't

have said anything about it."

"I suppose all men," said Ann Veronica, in a tone of detached

criticism, "get some such entanglement. And, anyhow, it doesn't

matter to us." She turned abruptly at right angles to the path

they followed. "This is my way back to my side of the Park," she

said.

"I thought you were coming right across the Park."

"Oh no," said Ann Veronica; "I have some work to do. I just

wanted a breath of air. And they'll shut the gates presently.

It's not far from twilight."

Part 9

She was sitting brooding over her fire about ten o'clock that

night when a sealed and registered envelope was brought up to

her.

She opened it and drew out a letter, and folded within it were

the notes she had sent off to Ramage that day. The letter began:

"MY DEAREST GIRL,--I cannot let you do this foolish thing--"

She crumpled notes and letter together in her hand, and then with

a passionate gesture flung them into the fire. Instantly she

seized the poker and made a desperate effort to get them out

again. But she was only able to save a corner of the letter.

The twenty pounds burned with avidity.

She remained for some seconds crouching at the fender, poker in

hand.

"By Jove!" she said, standing up at last, "that about finishes

it, Ann Veronica!"

CHAPTER THE TENTH

THE SUFFRAGETTES

Part 1

"There is only one way out of all this," said Ann Veronica,

sitting up in her little bed in the darkness and biting at her

nails.

"I thought I was just up against Morningside Park and father, but

it's the whole order of things--the whole blessed order of

things. . . ."

She shivered. She frowned and gripped her hands about her knees

very tightly. Her mind developed into savage wrath at the

present conditions of a woman's life.

"I suppose all life is an affair of chances. But a woman's life

is all chance. It's artificially chance. Find your man, that's

the rule. All the rest is humbug and delicacy. He's the handle

of life for you. He will let you live if it pleases him. . . .

"Can't it be altered?

"I suppose an actress is free? . . ."

She tried to think of some altered state of affairs in which

these monstrous limitations would be alleviated, in which women

would stand on their own feet in equal citizenship with men. For

a time she brooded on the ideals and suggestions of the

Socialists, on the vague intimations of an Endowment of

Motherhood, of a complete relaxation of that intense individual

dependence for women which is woven into the existing social

order. At the back of her mind there seemed always one

irrelevant qualifying spectator whose presence she sought to

disregard. She would not look at him, would not think of him;

when her mind wavered, then she muttered to herself in the

darkness so as to keep hold of her generalizations.

"It is true. It is no good waiving the thing; it is true.

Unless women are never to be free, never to be even respected,

there must be a generation of martyrs. . . . Why shouldn't we be

martyrs? There's nothing else for most of us, anyhow. It's a

sort of blacklegging to want to have a life of one's own. . . ."

She repeated, as if she answered an objector: "A sort of

blacklegging.

"A sex of blacklegging clients."

Her mind diverged to other aspects, and another type of

womanhood.

"Poor little Miniver! What can she be but what she is? . . .

Because she states her case in a tangle, drags it through swamps

of nonsense, it doesn't alter the fact that she is right."

That phrase about dragging the truth through swamps of nonsense

she remembered from Capes. At the recollection that it was his,

she seemed to fall through a thin surface, as one might fall

through the crust of a lava into glowing depths. She wallowed

for a time in the thought of Capes, unable to escape from his

image and the idea of his presence in her life.

She let her mind run into dreams of that cloud paradise of an

altered world in which the Goopes and Minivers, the Fabians and

reforming people believed. Across that world was written in

letters of light, "Endowment of Motherhood." Suppose in some

complex yet conceivable way women were endowed, were no longer

economically and socially dependent on men. "If one was free,"

she said, "one could go to him. . . . This vile hovering to

catch a man's eye! . . . One could go to him and tell him one

loved him. I want to love him. A little love from him would be

enough. It would hurt no one. It would not burden him with any

obligation."

She groaned aloud and bowed her forehead to her knees. She

floundered deep. She wanted to kiss his feet. His feet would

have the firm texture of his hands.

Then suddenly her spirit rose in revolt. "I will not have this

slavery," she said. "I will not have this slavery."

She shook her fist ceilingward. "Do you hear!" she said

"whatever you are, wherever you are! I will not be slave to the

thought of any man, slave to the customs of any time. Confound

this slavery of sex! I am a man! I will get this under if I am

killed in doing it!"

She scowled into the cold blacknesses about her.

"Manning," she said, and contemplated a figure of inaggressive

persistence. "No!" Her thoughts had turned in a new direction.

"It doesn't matter," she said, after a long interval, "if they

are absurd. They mean something. They mean everything that

women can mean--except submission. The vote is only the

beginning, the necessary beginning. If we do not begin--"

She had come to a resolution. Abruptly she got out of bed,

smoothed her sheet and straightened her pillow and lay down, and

fell almost instantly asleep.

Part 2

The next morning was as dark and foggy as if it was mid-November

instead of early March. Ann Veronica woke rather later than

usual, and lay awake for some minutes before she remembered a

certain resolution she had taken in the small hours. Then