H. Wells - Ann Veronica

was approached on one or two occasions, but avoided dexterously;

and they talked chiefly of letters and art and the censorship of

the English stage. Mr. Stanley was inclined to think the

censorship should be extended to the supply of what he styled

latter-day fiction; good wholesome stories were being ousted, he

said, by "vicious, corrupting stuff" that "left a bad taste in

the mouth." He declared that no book could be satisfactory that

left a bad taste in the mouth, however much it seized and

interested the reader at the time. He did not like it, he said,

with a significant look, to be reminded of either his books or

his dinners after he had done with them. Capes agreed with the

utmost cordiality.

"Life is upsetting enough, without the novels taking a share,"

said Mr. Stanley.

For a time Ann Veronica's attention was diverted by her aunt's

interest in the salted almonds.

"Quite particularly nice," said her aunt. "Exceptionally so."

When Ann Veronica could attend again she found the men were

discussing the ethics of the depreciation of house property

through the increasing tumult of traffic in the West End, and

agreeing with each other to a devastating extent. It came into

her head with real emotional force that this must be some

particularly fantastic sort of dream. It seemed to her that her

father was in some inexplicable way meaner-looking than she had

supposed, and yet also, as unaccountably, appealing. His tie had

demanded a struggle; he ought to have taken a clean one after his

first failure. Why was she noting things like this? Capes

seemed self-possessed and elaborately genial and commonplace, but

she knew him to be nervous by a little occasional clumsiness, by

the faintest shadow of vulgarity in the urgency of his

hospitality. She wished he could smoke and dull his nerves a

little. A gust of irrational impatience blew through her being.

Well, they'd got to the pheasants, and in a little while he would

smoke. What was it she had expected? Surely her moods were

getting a little out of hand.

She wished her father and aunt would not enjoy their dinner with

such quiet determination. Her father and her husband, who had

both been a little pale at their first encounter, were growing

now just faintly flushed. It was a pity people had to eat food.

"I suppose," said her father, "I have read at least half the

novels that have been at all successful during the last twenty

years. Three a week is my allowance, and, if I get short ones,

four. I change them in the morning at Cannon Street, and take my

book as I come down."

It occurred to her that she had never seen her father dining out

before, never watched him critically as an equal. To Capes he

was almost deferential, and she had never seen him deferential in

the old time, never. The dinner was stranger than she had ever

anticipated. It was as if she had grown right past her father

into something older and of infinitely wider outlook, as if he

had always been unsuspectedly a flattened figure, and now she had

discovered him from the other side.

It was a great relief to arrive at last at that pause when she

could say to her aunt, "Now, dear?" and rise and hold back the

curtain through the archway. Capes and her father stood up, and

her father made a belated movement toward the curtain. She

realized that he was the sort of man one does not think much

about at dinners. And Capes was thinking that his wife was a

supremely beautiful woman. He reached a silver cigar and

cigarette box from the sideboard and put it before his

father-in-law, and for a time the preliminaries of smoking

occupied them both. Then Capes flittered to the hearthrug and

poked the fire, stood up, and turned about. "Ann Veronica is

looking very well, don't you think?" he said, a little awkwardly.

"Very," said Mr. Stanley. "Very," and cracked a walnut

appreciatively.

"Life--things--I don't think her prospects now--Hopeful

outlook."

"You were in a difficult position," Mr. Stanley pronounced, and

seemed to hesitate whether he had not gone too far. He looked at

his port wine as though that tawny ruby contained the solution of

the matter. "All's well that ends well," he said; "and the less

one says about things the better."

"Of course," said Capes, and threw a newly lit cigar into the

fire through sheer nervousness. "Have some more port wine, sir?"

"It's a very sound wine," said Mr. Stanley, consenting with dignity.

"Ann Veronica has never looked quite so well, I think," said

Capes, clinging, because of a preconceived plan, to the

suppressed topic.

Part 3

At last the evening was over, and Capes and his wife had gone

down to see Mr. Stanley and his sister into a taxicab, and had

waved an amiable farewell from the pavement steps.

"Great dears!" said Capes, as the vehicle passed out of sight.

"Yes, aren't they?" said Ann Veronica, after a thoughtful pause.

And then, "They seem changed."

"Come in out of the cold," said Capes, and took her arm.

"They seem smaller, you know, even physically smaller," she said.

"You've grown out of them. . . . Your aunt liked the pheasant."

"She liked everything. Did you hear us through the archway,

talking cookery?"

They went up by the lift in silence.

"It's odd," said Ann Veronica, re-entering the flat.

"What's odd?"

"Oh, everything!"

She shivered, and went to the fire and poked it. Capes sat down

in the arm-chair beside her.

"Life's so queer," she said, kneeling and looking into the

flames. "I wonder--I wonder if we shall ever get like that."

She turned a firelit face to her husband. "Did you tell him?"

Capes smiled faintly. "Yes."

"How?"

"Well--a little clumsily."

"But how?"

"I poured him out some port wine, and I said--let me see--oh,

'You are going to be a grandfather!' "

"Yes. Was he pleased?"

"Calmly! He said--you won't mind my telling you?"

"Not a bit."

"He said, 'Poor Alice has got no end!' "

"Alice's are different," said Ann Veronica, after an interval.

"Quite different. She didn't choose her man. . . . Well, I told

aunt. . . . Husband of mine, I think we have rather overrated

the emotional capacity of those--those dears."

"What did your aunt say?"

"She didn't even kiss me. She said"--Ann Veronica shivered

again--" 'I hope it won't make you uncomfortable, my dear'--like

that--'and whatever you do, do be careful of your hair!' I

think--I judge from her manner--that she thought it was just a

little indelicate of us--considering everything; but she tried to

be practical and sympathetic and live down to our standards."

Capes looked at his wife's unsmiling face.

"Your father," he said, "remarked that all's well that ends well,

and that he was disposed to let bygones be bygones. He then

spoke with a certain fatherly kindliness of the past. . . ."

"And my heart has ached for him!"

"Oh, no doubt it cut him at the time. It must have cut him."

"We might even have--given it up for them!"

"I wonder if we could."

"I suppose all IS well that ends well. Somehow to-night--I don't

know."

"I suppose so. I'm glad the old sore is assuaged. Very glad.

But if we had gone under--!"

They regarded one another silently, and Ann Veronica had one of

her penetrating flashes.

"We are not the sort that goes under," said Ann Veronica, holding