H. Wells - Ann Veronica

to be beaten gold just in order to make it a fitting setting for

yours. There you will be, in an inner temple. I want to enrich

it with hangings and gladden it with verses. I want to fill it

with fine and precious things. And by degrees, perhaps, that

maiden distrust of yours that makes you shrink from my kisses,

will vanish. . . . Forgive me if a certain warmth creeps into my

words! The Park is green and gray to-day, but I am glowing pink

and gold. . . . It is difficult to express these things."

Part 4

They sat with tea and strawberries and cream before them at a

little table in front of the pavilion in Regent's Park. Her

confession was still unmade. Manning leaned forward on the

table, talking discursively on the probable brilliance of their

married life. Ann Veronica sat back in an attitude of

inattention, her eyes on a distant game of cricket, her mind

perplexed and busy. She was recalling the circumstances under

which she had engaged herself to Manning, and trying to

understand a curious development of the quality of this

relationship.

The particulars of her engagement were very clear in her memory.

She had taken care he should have this momentous talk with her on

a garden-seat commanded by the windows of the house. They had

been playing tennis, with his manifest intention looming over

her.

"Let us sit down for a moment," he had said. He made his speech

a little elaborately. She plucked at the knots of her racket and

heard him to the end, then spoke in a restrained undertone.

"You ask me to be engaged to you, Mr. Manning," she began.

"I want to lay all my life at your feet."

"Mr. Manning, I do not think I love you. . . . I want to be very

plain with you. I have nothing, nothing that can possibly be

passion for you. I am sure. Nothing at all."

He was silent for some moments.

"Perhaps that is only sleeping," he said. "How can you know?"

"I think--perhaps I am rather a cold-blooded person."

She stopped. He remained listening attentively.

"You have been very kind to me," she said.

"I would give my life for you."

Her heart had warmed toward him. It had seemed to her that life

might be very good indeed with his kindliness and sacrifice about

her. She thought of him as always courteous and helpful, as

realizing, indeed, his ideal of protection and service, as

chivalrously leaving her free to live her own life, rejoicing

with an infinite generosity in every detail of her irresponsive

being. She twanged the catgut under her fingers.

"It seems so unfair," she said, "to take all you offer me and

give so little in return."

"It is all the world to me. And we are not traders looking at

equivalents."

"You know, Mr. Manning, I do not really want to marry."

"No."

"It seems so--so unworthy"--she picked among her phrases "of the

noble love you give--"

She stopped, through the difficulty she found in expressing

herself.

"But I am judge of that," said Manning.

"Would you wait for me?"

Manning was silent for a space. "As my lady wills."

"Would you let me go on studying for a time?"

"If you order patience."

"I think, Mr. Manning . . . I do not know. It is so difficult.

When I think of the love you give me--One ought to give you back

love."

"You like me?"

"Yes. And I am grateful to you. . . ."

Manning tapped with his racket on the turf through some moments

of silence. "You are the most perfect, the most glorious of

created things--tender, frank intellectual, brave, beautiful. I

am your servitor. I am ready to wait for you, to wait your

pleasure, to give all my life to winning it. Let me only wear

your livery. Give me but leave to try. You want to think for a

time, to be free for a time. That is so like you, Diana--Pallas

Athene! (Pallas Athene is better.) You are all the slender

goddesses. I understand. Let me engage myself. That is all I

ask."

She looked at him; his face, downcast and in profile, was

handsome and strong. Her gratitude swelled within her.

"You are too good for me," she said in a low voice.

"Then you--you will?"

A long pause.

"It isn't fair. . . ."

"But will you?"

"YES."

For some seconds he had remained quite still.

"If I sit here," he said, standing up before her abruptly, "I

shall have to shout. Let us walk about. Tum, tum, tirray, tum,

tum, tum, te-tum--that thing of Mendelssohn's! If making one

human being absolutely happy is any satisfaction to you--"

He held out his hands, and she also stood up.

He drew her close up to him with a strong, steady pull. Then

suddenly, in front of all those windows, he folded her in his

arms and pressed her to him, and kissed her unresisting face.

"Don't!" cried Ann Veronica, struggling faintly, and he released

her.

"Forgive me," he said. "But I am at singing-pitch."

She had a moment of sheer panic at the thing she had done. "Mr.

Manning," she said, "for a time--Will you tell no one? Will you

keep this--our secret? I'm doubtful-- Will you please not even

tell my aunt?"

"As you will," he said. "But if my manner tells! I cannot help

it if that shows. You only mean a secret for a little time?"

"Just for a little time," she said; "yes. . . ."

But the ring, and her aunt's triumphant eye, and a note of

approval in her father's manner, and a novel disposition in him

to praise Manning in a just, impartial voice had soon placed very

definite qualifications upon that covenanted secrecy.

Part 5

At first the quality of her relationship to Manning seemed moving

and beautiful to Ann Veronica. She admired and rather pitied

him, and she was unfeignedly grateful to him. She even thought

that perhaps she might come to love him, in spite of that faint

indefinable flavor of absurdity that pervaded his courtly

bearing. She would never love him as she loved Capes, of course,

but there are grades and qualities of love. For Manning it would

be a more temperate love altogether. Much more temperate; the

discreet and joyless love of a virtuous, reluctant, condescending

wife. She had been quite convinced that an engagement with him

and at last a marriage had exactly that quality of compromise

which distinguishes the ways of the wise. It would be the

wrappered world almost at its best. She saw herself building up

a life upon that--a life restrained, kindly, beautiful, a little

pathetic and altogether dignified; a life of great disciplines

and suppressions and extensive reserves. . .

But the Ramage affair needed clearing up, of course; it was a

flaw upon that project. She had to explain about and pay off

that forty pounds. . . .

Then, quite insensibly, her queenliness had declined. She was

never able to trace the changes her attitude had undergone, from

the time when she believed herself to be the pampered Queen of

Fortune, the crown of a good man's love (and secretly, but nobly,

worshipping some one else), to the time when she realized she was

in fact just a mannequin for her lover's imagination, and that he

cared no more for the realities of her being, for the things she

felt and desired, for the passions and dreams that might move

her, than a child cares for the sawdust in its doll. She was the

actress his whim had chosen to play a passive part. . . .

It was one of the most educational disillusionments in Ann

Veronica's career.

But did many women get anything better?