H. Wells - Ann Veronica

mind, of course, your seeing her sometimes, still there are

differences--differences in social atmospheres. One gets drawn

into things. Before you know where you are you find yourself in

a complication. I don't want to influence you

unduly--But--They're artistic people, Vee. That's the fact about

them. We're different."

"I suppose we are," said Vee, rearranging the flowers in her

hand.

"Friendships that are all very well between school-girls don't

always go on into later life. It's--it's a social difference."

"I like Constance very much."

"No doubt. Still, one has to be reasonable. As you admitted to

me--one has to square one's self with the world. You don't know.

With people of that sort all sorts of things may happen. We

don't want things to happen."

Ann Veronica made no answer.

A vague desire to justify himself ruffled her father. "I may seem

unduly--anxious. I can't forget about your sister. It's that

has always made me--SHE, you know, was drawn into a set--didn't

discriminate Private theatricals."

Ann Veronica remained anxious to hear more of her sister's story

from her father's point of view, but he did not go on. Even so

much allusion as this to that family shadow, she felt, was an

immense recognition of her ripening years. She glanced at him.

He stood a little anxious and fussy, bothered by the

responsibility of her, entirely careless of what her life was or

was likely to be, ignoring her thoughts and feelings, ignorant of

every fact of importance in her life, explaining everything he

could not understand in her as nonsense and perversity, concerned

only with a terror of bothers and undesirable situations. "We

don't want things to happen!" Never had he shown his daughter so

clearly that the womenkind he was persuaded he had to protect and

control could please him in one way, and in one way only, and

that was by doing nothing except the punctual domestic duties and

being nothing except restful appearances. He had quite enough to

see to and worry about in the City without their doing things. He

had no use for Ann Veronica; he had never had a use for her since

she had been too old to sit upon his knee. Nothing but the

constraint of social usage now linked him to her. And the less

"anything" happened the better. The less she lived, in fact, the

better. These realizations rushed into Ann Veronica's mind and

hardened her heart against him. She spoke slowly. "I may not

see the Widgetts for some little time, father," she said. "I

don't think I shall."

"Some little tiff?"

"No; but I don't think I shall see them."

Suppose she were to add, "I am going away!"

"I'm glad to hear you say it," said Mr. Stanley, and was so

evidently pleased that Ann Veronica's heart smote her.

"I am very glad to hear you say it," he repeated, and refrained

from further inquiry. "I think we are growing sensible," he

said. "I think you are getting to understand me better."

He hesitated, and walked away from her toward the house. Her

eyes followed him. The curve of his shoulders, the very angle of

his feet, expressed relief at her apparent obedience. "Thank

goodness!" said that retreating aspect, "that's said and over.

Vee's all right. There's nothing happened at all!" She didn't

mean, he concluded, to give him any more trouble ever, and he was

free to begin a fresh chromatic novel--he had just finished the

Blue Lagoon, which he thought very beautiful and tender and

absolutely irrelevant to Morningside Park--or work in peace at

his microtome without bothering about her in the least.

The immense disillusionment that awaited him! The devastating

disillusionment! She had a vague desire to run after him, to

state her case to him, to wring some understanding from him of

what life was to her. She felt a cheat and a sneak to his

unsuspecting retreating back.

"But what can one do?" asked Ann Veronica.

Part 3

She dressed carefully for dinner in a black dress that her father

liked, and that made her look serious and responsible. Dinner

was quite uneventful. Her father read a draft prospectus warily,

and her aunt dropped fragments of her projects for managing while

the cook had a holiday. After dinner Ann Veronica went into the

drawing-room with Miss Stanley, and her father went up to his den

for his pipe and pensive petrography. Later in the evening she

heard him whistling, poor man!

She felt very restless and excited. She refused coffee, though

she knew that anyhow she was doomed to a sleepless night. She

took up one of her father's novels and put it down again, fretted

up to her own room for some work, sat on her bed and meditated

upon the room that she was now really abandoning forever, and

returned at length with a stocking to darn. Her aunt was making

herself cuffs out of little slips of insertion under the newly

lit lamp.

Ann Veronica sat down in the other arm-chair and darned badly for

a minute or so. Then she looked at her aunt, and traced with a

curious eye the careful arrangement of her hair, her sharp nose,

the little drooping lines of mouth and chin and cheek.

Her thought spoke aloud. "Were you ever in love, aunt?" she

asked.

Her aunt glanced up startled, and then sat very still, with hands

that had ceased to work. "What makes you ask such a question,

Vee?" she said.

"I wondered."

Her aunt answered in a low voice: "I was engaged to him, dear,

for seven years, and then he died."

Ann Veronica made a sympathetic little murmur.

"He was in holy orders, and we were to have been married when he

got a living. He was a Wiltshire Edmondshaw, a very old family."

She sat very still.

Ann Veronica hesitated with a question that had leaped up in her

mind, and that she felt was cruel. "Are you sorry you waited,

aunt?" she said.

Her aunt was a long time before she answered. "His stipend

forbade it," she said, and seemed to fall into a train of

thought. "It would have been rash and unwise," she said at the

end of a meditation. "What he had was altogether insufficient."

Ann Veronica looked at the mildly pensive gray eyes and the

comfortable, rather refined face with a penetrating curiosity.

Presently her aunt sighed deeply and looked at the clock. "Time

for my Patience," she said. She got up, put the neat cuffs she

had made into her work-basket, and went to the bureau for the

little cards in the morocco case. Ann Veronica jumped up to get

her the card-table. "I haven't seen the new Patience, dear," she

said. "May I sit beside you?"

"It's a very difficult one," said her aunt. "Perhaps you will

help me shuffle?"

Ann Veronica did, and also assisted nimbly with the arrangements

of the rows of eight with which the struggle began. Then she sat

watching the play, sometimes offering a helpful suggestion,

sometimes letting her attention wander to the smoothly shining

arms she had folded across her knees just below the edge of the

table. She was feeling extraordinarily well that night, so that

the sense of her body was a deep delight, a realization of a

gentle warmth and strength and elastic firmness. Then she

glanced at the cards again, over which her aunt's many-ringed

hand played, and then at the rather weak, rather plump face that

surveyed its operations.

It came to Ann Veronica that life was wonderful beyond measure.

It seemed incredible that she and her aunt were, indeed,