H. Wells - Ann Veronica

relief, and assumed an easier position on the edge of her table.

"But if you weren't keen on the suffrage business, why on earth

did you go to prison?"

Ann Veronica reflected. "It was a phase," she said.

He smiled. "It's a new phase in the life history," he remarked.

"Everybody seems to have it now. Everybody who's going to develop

into a woman."

"There's Miss Garvice."

"She's coming on," said Capes. "And, you know, you're altering

us all. I'M shaken. The campaign's a success." He met her

questioning eye, and repeated, "Oh! it IS a success. A man is so

apt to--to take women a little too lightly. Unless they remind

him now and then not to. . . . YOU did."

"Then I didn't waste my time in prison altogether?"

"It wasn't the prison impressed me. But I liked the things you

said here. I felt suddenly I understood you--as an intelligent

person. If you'll forgive my saying that, and implying what goes

with it. There's something--puppyish in a man's usual attitude

to women. That is what I've had on my conscience. . . . I don't

think we're altogether to blame if we don't take some of your lot

seriously. Some of your sex, I mean. But we smirk a little, I'm

afraid, habitually when we talk to you. We smirk, and we're a

bit--furtive."

He paused, with his eyes studying her gravely. "You, anyhow,

don't deserve it," he said.

Their colloquy was ended abruptly by the apparition of Miss Klegg

at the further door. When she saw Ann Veronica she stood for a

moment as if entranced, and then advanced with outstretched

hands. "Veronique!" she cried with a rising intonation, though

never before had she called Ann Veronica anything but Miss

Stanley, and seized her and squeezed her and kissed her with

profound emotion. "To think that you were going to do it--and

never said a word! You are a little thin, but except for that

you look--you look better than ever. Was it VERY horrible? I

tried to get into the police-court, but the crowd was ever so

much too big, push as I would. . . .

"I mean to go to prison directly the session is over," said Miss

Klegg. "Wild horses--not if they have all the mounted police in

London--shan't keep me out."

Part 6

Capes lit things wonderfully for Ann Veronica all that afternoon,

he was so friendly, so palpably interested in her, and glad to

have her back with him. Tea in the laboratory was a sort of

suffragette reception. Miss Garvice assumed a quality of

neutrality, professed herself almost won over by Ann Veronica's

example, and the Scotchman decided that if women had a

distinctive sphere it was, at any rate, an enlarging sphere, and

no one who believed in the doctrine of evolution could logically

deny the vote to women "ultimately," however much they might be

disposed to doubt the advisability of its immediate concession.

It was a refusal of expediency, he said, and not an absolute

refusal. The youth with his hair like Russell cleared his throat

and said rather irrelevantly that he knew a man who knew Thomas

Bayard Simmons, who had rioted in the Strangers' Gallery, and

then Capes, finding them all distinctly pro-Ann Veronica, if not

pro-feminist, ventured to be perverse, and started a vein of

speculation upon the Scotchman's idea--that there were still

hopes of women evolving into something higher.

He was unusually absurd and ready, and all the time it seemed to

Ann Veronica as a delightful possibility, as a thing not indeed

to be entertained seriously, but to be half furtively felt, that

he was being so agreeable because she had come back again. She

returned home through a world that was as roseate as it had been

gray overnight.

But as she got out of the train at Morningside Park Station she

had a shock. She saw, twenty yards down the platform, the shiny

hat and broad back and inimitable swagger of Ramage. She dived

at once behind the cover of the lamp-room and affected serious

trouble with her shoe-lace until he was out of the station, and

then she followed slowly and with extreme discretion until the

bifurcation of the Avenue from the field way insured her escape.

Ramage went up the Avenue, and she hurried along the path with a

beating heart and a disagreeable sense of unsolved problems in

her mind.

"That thing's going on," she told herself. "Everything goes on,

confound it! One doesn't change anything one has set going by

making good resolutions."

And then ahead of her she saw the radiant and welcoming figure of

Manning. He came as an agreeable diversion from an insoluble

perplexity. She smiled at the sight of him, and thereat his

radiation increased.

"I missed the hour of your release," he said, "but I was at the

Vindicator Restaurant. You did not see me, I know. I was among

the common herd in the place below, but I took good care to see

you."

"Of course you're converted?" she said.

"To the view that all those Splendid Women in the movement ought

to have votes. Rather! Who could help it?"

He towered up over her and smiled down at her in his fatherly

way.

"To the view that all women ought to have votes whether they like

it or not."

He shook his head, and his eyes and the mouth under the black

mustache wrinkled with his smile. And as he walked by her side

they began a wrangle that was none the less pleasant to Ann

Veronica because it served to banish a disagreeable

preoccupation. It seemed to her in her restored geniality that

she liked Manning extremely. The brightness Capes had diffused

over the world glorified even his rival.

Part 7

The steps by which Ann Veronica determined to engage herself to

marry Manning were never very clear to her. A medley of motives

warred in her, and it was certainly not one of the least of these

that she knew herself to be passionately in love with Capes; at

moments she had a giddy intimation that he was beginning to feel

keenly interested in her. She realized more and more the quality

of the brink upon which she stood--the dreadful readiness with

which in certain moods she might plunge, the unmitigated

wrongness and recklessness of such a self-abandonment. "He must

never know," she would whisper to herself, "he must never know.

Or else--Else it will be impossible that I can be his friend."

That simple statement of the case was by no means all that went

on in Ann Veronica's mind. But it was the form of her ruling

determination; it was the only form that she ever allowed to see

daylight. What else was there lurked in shadows and deep places;

if in some mood of reverie it came out into the light, it was

presently overwhelmed and hustled back again into hiding. She

would never look squarely at these dream forms that mocked the

social order in which she lived, never admit she listened to the

soft whisperings in her ear. But Manning seemed more and more

clearly indicated as a refuge, as security. Certain simple

purposes emerged from the disingenuous muddle of her feelings and

desires. Seeing Capes from day to day made a bright eventfulness

that hampered her in the course she had resolved to follow. She

vanished from the laboratory for a week, a week of oddly

interesting days. . . .

When she renewed her attendance at the Imperial College the third

finger of her left hand was adorned with a very fine old ring

with dark blue sapphires that had once belonged to a great-aunt