Ann Veronica

"The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every
well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even
ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge."

One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley came
down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to
have things out with her father that very evening. She had trembled on
the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely
she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had
been reached. She made up her mind in the train home that it should be
a decisive crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins with
her there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of this
crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.

She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to Morningside
Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in an attitude that
would certainly have distressed her mother to see, and horrified her
grandmother beyond measure; she sat with her knees up to her chin and
her hands clasped before them, and she was so lost in thought that
she discovered with a start, from a lettered lamp, that she was at
Morningside Park, and thought she was moving out of the station, whereas
she was only moving in. "Lord!" she said. She jumped up at once,
caught up a leather clutch containing notebooks, a fat text-book, and
a chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the
carriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and that she
had to traverse the full length of the platform past it again as the
result of her precipitation. "Sold again," she remarked. "Idiot!" She
raged inwardly while she walked along with that air of self-contained
serenity that is proper to a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty under
the eye of the world.

She walked down the station approach, past the neat, obtrusive offices
of the coal merchant and the house agent, and so to the wicket-gate by
the butcher's shop that led to the field path to her home. Outside the
post-office stood a no-hatted, blond young man in gray flannels, who was
elaborately affixing a stamp to a letter. At the sight of her he became
rigid and a singularly bright shade of pink. She made herself serenely
unaware of his existence, though it may be it was his presence that sent
her by the field detour instead of by the direct path up the Avenue.

"Umph!" he said, and regarded his letter doubtfully before consigning it
to the pillar-box. "Here goes," he said. Then he hovered undecidedly for
some seconds with his hands in his pockets and his mouth puckered to a
whistle before he turned to go home by the Avenue.

Ann Veronica forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and her
face resumed its expression of stern preoccupation. "It's either now or
never," she said to herself....

Morningside Park was a suburb that had not altogether, as people say,
come off. It consisted, like pre-Roman Gaul, of three parts. There was
first the Avenue, which ran in a consciously elegant curve from the
railway station into an undeveloped wilderness of agriculture, with big,
yellow brick villas on either side, and then there was the pavement, the
little clump of shops about the post-office, and under the railway arch
was a congestion of workmen's dwellings. The road from Surbiton and
Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in the
ditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of little
red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables and very
brassy window-blinds. Behind the Avenue was a little hill, and an
iron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a stile under an
elm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going back into the Avenue
again.

"It's either now or never," said Ann Veronica, again ascending this
stile. "Much as I hate rows, I've either got to make a stand or give in
altogether."

She seated herself in a loose and easy attitude and surveyed the
backs of the Avenue houses; then her eyes wandered to where the new
red-and-white villas peeped among the trees. She seemed to be making
some sort of inventory. "Ye Gods!" she said at last. "WHAT a place!

"Stuffy isn't the word for it.

"I wonder what he takes me for?"

When presently she got down from the stile a certain note of internal
conflict, a touch of doubt, had gone from her warm-tinted face. She had
now the clear and tranquil expression of one whose mind is made up. Her
back had stiffened, and her hazel eyes looked steadfastly ahead.

As she approached the corner of the Avenue the blond, no-hatted man in
gray flannels appeared. There was a certain air of forced fortuity in
his manner. He saluted awkwardly. "Hello, Vee!" he said.

"Hello, Teddy!" she answered.

He hung vaguely for a moment as she passed.

But it was clear she was in no mood for Teddys. He realized that he was
committed to the path across the fields, an uninteresting walk at the
best of times.

"Oh, dammit!" he remarked, "dammit!" with great bitterness as he faced
it.

Ann Veronica Stanley was twenty-one and a half years old. She had black
hair, fine eyebrows, and a clear complexion; and the forces that had
modelled her features had loved and lingered at their work and made them
subtle and fine. She was slender, and sometimes she seemed tall, and
walked and carried herself lightly and joyfully as one who commonly
and habitually feels well, and sometimes she stooped a little and
was preoccupied. Her lips came together with an expression between
contentment and the faintest shadow of a smile, her manner was one of
quiet reserve, and behind this mask she was wildly discontented and
eager for freedom and life.

She wanted to live. She was vehemently impatient—she did not clearly
know for what—to do, to be, to experience. And experience was slow in
coming. All the world about her seemed to be—how can one put it?—in
wrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer. The blinds
were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what
colors these gray swathings hid. She wanted to know. And there was no
intimation whatever that the blinds would ever go up or the windows or
doors be opened, or the chandeliers, that seemed to promise such a blaze
of fire, unveiled and furnished and lit. Dim souls flitted about her,
not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in undertones....

During her school days, especially her earlier school days, the world
had been very explicit with her, telling her what to do, what not to do,
giving her lessons to learn and games to play and interests of the most
suitable and various kinds. Presently she woke up to the fact that there
was a considerable group of interests called being in love and getting
married, with certain attractive and amusing subsidiary developments,
such as flirtation and "being interested" in people of the opposite sex.
She approached this field with her usual liveliness of apprehension. But
here she met with a check. These interests her world promptly, through
the agency of schoolmistresses, older school-mates, her aunt, and a
number of other responsible and authoritative people, assured her she
must on no account think about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moral
instruction mistress, was particularly explicit upon this score, and
they all agreed in indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds
ran on such matters, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dress
or bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike any
other group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly ashamed of.
Nevertheless, Ann Veronica found it a difficult matter not to think of
these things. However having a considerable amount of pride, she decided
she would disavow these undesirable topics and keep her mind away from
them just as far as she could, but it left her at the end of her school
days with that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at loose
ends.

The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no particular
place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a functionless
existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels, walks, and dusting
in her father's house. She thought study would be better. She was a
clever girl, the best of her year in the High School, and she made
a valiant fight for Somerville or Newnham but her father had met and
argued with a Somerville girl at a friend's dinner-table and he thought
that sort of thing unsexed a woman. He said simply that he wanted her to
live at home. There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhile
she went on at school. They compromised at length on the science course
at the Tredgold Women's College—she had already matriculated into
London University from school—she came of age, and she bickered with
her aunt for latch-key privileges on the strength of that and her season
ticket. Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind, thinly
disguised as literature and art. She read voraciously, and presently,
because of her aunt's censorship, she took to smuggling any books she
thought might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, and
she went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable friend
to accompany her. She passed her general science examination with double
honors and specialized in science. She happened to have an acute sense
of form and unusual mental lucidity, and she found in biology, and
particularly in comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest,
albeit the illumination it cast upon her personal life was not
altogether direct. She dissected well, and in a year she found herself
chafing at the limitations of the lady B. Sc. who retailed a store of
faded learning in the Tredgold laboratory. She had already realized that
this instructress was hopelessly wrong and foggy—it is the test of the
good comparative anatomist—upon the skull. She discovered a desire to
enter as a student in the Imperial College at Westminster, where Russell
taught, and go on with her work at the fountain-head.

She had asked about that already, and her father had replied, evasively:
"We'll have to see about that, little Vee; we'll have to see about
that." In that posture of being seen about the matter hung until she
seemed committed to another session at the Tredgold College, and in the
mean time a small conflict arose and brought the latch-key question, and
in fact the question of Ann Veronica's position generally, to an acute
issue.