H. Wells - Ann Veronica

June sunshine and revived her childhood. She was saying good-bye

to childhood and home, and her making; she was going out into the

great, multitudinous world; this time there would be no

returning. She was at the end of girlhood and on the eve of a

woman's crowning experience. She visited the corner that had

been her own little garden--her forget-me-nots and candytuft had

long since been elbowed into insignificance by weeds; she visited

the raspberry-canes that had sheltered that first love affair

with the little boy in velvet, and the greenhouse where she had

been wont to read her secret letters. Here was the place behind

the shed where she had used to hide from Roddy's persecutions,

and here the border of herbaceous perennials under whose stems

was fairyland. The back of the house had been the Alps for

climbing, and the shrubs in front of it a Terai. The knots and

broken pale that made the garden-fence scalable, and gave access

to the fields behind, were still to be traced. And here against

a wall were the plum-trees. In spite of God and wasps and her

father, she had stolen plums; and once because of discovered

misdeeds, and once because she had realized that her mother was

dead, she had lain on her face in the unmown grass, beneath the

elm-trees that came beyond the vegetables, and poured out her

soul in weeping.

Remote little Ann Veronica! She would never know the heart of

that child again! That child had loved fairy princes with velvet

suits and golden locks, and she was in love with a real man named

Capes, with little gleams of gold on his cheek and a pleasant

voice and firm and shapely hands. She was going to him soon and

certainly, going to his strong, embracing arms. She was going

through a new world with him side by side. She had been so busy

with life that, for a vast gulf of time, as it seemed, she had

given no thought to those ancient, imagined things of her

childhood. Now, abruptly, they were real again, though very

distant, and she had come to say farewell to them across one

sundering year.

She was unusually helpful at breakfast, and unselfish about the

eggs: and then she went off to catch the train before her

father's. She did this to please him. He hated travelling

second-class with her--indeed, he never did--but he also disliked

travelling in the same train when his daughter was in an inferior

class, because of the look of the thing. So he liked to go by a

different train. And in the Avenue she had an encounter with

Ramage.

It was an odd little encounter, that left vague and dubitable

impressions in her mind. She was aware of him--a silk-hatted,

shiny-black figure on the opposite side of the Avenue; and then,

abruptly and startlingly, he crossed the road and saluted and

spoke to her.

"I MUST speak to you," he said. "I can't keep away from you."

She made some inane response. She was struck by a change in his

appearance. His eyes looked a little bloodshot to her; his face

had lost something of its ruddy freshness.

He began a jerky, broken conversation that lasted until they

reached the station, and left her puzzled at its drift and

meaning. She quickened her pace, and so did he, talking at her

slightly averted ear. She made lumpish and inadequate

interruptions rather than replies. At times he seemed to be

claiming pity from her; at times he was threatening her with her

check and exposure; at times he was boasting of his inflexible

will, and how, in the end, he always got what he wanted. He said

that his life was boring and stupid without her. Something or

other--she did not catch what--he was damned if he could stand.

He was evidently nervous, and very anxious to be impressive; his

projecting eyes sought to dominate. The crowning aspect of the

incident, for her mind, was the discovery that he and her

indiscretion with him no longer mattered very much. Its

importance had vanished with her abandonment of compromise. Even

her debt to him was a triviality now.

And of course! She had a brilliant idea. It surprised her she

hadn't thought of it before! She tried to explain that she was

going to pay him forty pounds without fail next week. She said

as much to him. She repeated this breathlessly.

"I was glad you did not send it back again," he said.

He touched a long-standing sore, and Ann Veronica found herself

vainly trying to explain--the inexplicable. "It's because I mean

to send it back altogether," she said.

He ignored her protests in order to pursue some impressive line

of his own.

"Here we are, living in the same suburb," he began. "We have to

be--modern."

Her heart leaped within her as she caught that phrase. That knot

also would be cut. Modern, indeed! She was going to be as

primordial as chipped flint.

Part 2

In the late afternoon, as Ann Veronica was gathering flowers for

the dinner-table, her father came strolling across the lawn

toward her with an affectation of great deliberation.

"I want to speak to you about a little thing, Vee," said Mr.

Stanley.

Ann Veronica's tense nerves started, and she stood still with her

eyes upon him, wondering what it might be that impended.

"You were talking to that fellow Ramage to-day--in the Avenue.

Walking to the station with him."

So that was it!

"He came and talked to me."

"Ye--e--es. "Mr. Stanley considered. "Well, I don't want you to

talk to him," he said, very firmly.

Ann Veronica paused before she answered. "Don't you think I

ought to?" she asked, very submissively.

"No." Mr. Stanley coughed and faced toward the house. "He is

not-- I don't like him. I think it inadvisable-- I don't want an

intimacy to spring up between you and a man of that type."

Ann Veronica reflected. "I HAVE--had one or two talks with him,

daddy."

"Don't let there be any more. I-- In fact, I dislike him

extremely."

"Suppose he comes and talks to me?"

"A girl can always keep a man at a distance if she cares to do

it. She-- She can snub him."

Ann Veronica picked a cornflower.

"I wouldn't make this objection," Mr. Stanley went on, "but there

are things--there are stories about Ramage. He's--He lives in a

world of possibilities outside your imagination. His treatment

of his wife is most unsatisfactory. Most unsatisfactory. A bad

man, in fact. A dissipated, loose-living man."

"I'll try not to see him again," said Ann Veronica. "I didn't

know you objected to him, daddy."

"Strongly," said Mr. Stanley, "very strongly."

The conversation hung. Ann Veronica wondered what her father

would do if she were to tell him the full story of her relations

with Ramage.

"A man like that taints a girl by looking at her, by his mere

conversation." He adjusted his glasses on his nose. There was

another little thing he had to say. "One has to be so careful of

one's friends and acquaintances," he remarked, by way of

transition. "They mould one insensibly." His voice assumed an

easy detached tone. "I suppose, Vee, you don't see much of those

Widgetts now?"

"I go in and talk to Constance sometimes."

"Do you?"

"We were great friends at school."

"No doubt. . . . Still--I don't know whether I quite

like--Something ramshackle about those people, Vee. While I am

talking about your friends, I feel--I think you ought to know how

I look at it." His voice conveyed studied moderation. "I don't