Ann Veronica read this letter through with grave,
attentive eyes. Her interest grew as she read, a certain
distaste disappeared. Twice she smiled, but not
unkindly. Then she went back and mixed up the sheets
in a search for particular passages. Finally she fell
into reflection.
“Odd!” she said. “I suppose I shall have to write
an answer. It's so different from what one has been
led to expect.”
She became aware of her aunt, through the panes
of the greenhouse, advancing with an air of serene
unconsciousness from among the raspberry canes.
“No you don't!” said Ann Veronica, and walked
out at a brisk and business-like pace toward the house.
“I'm going for a long tramp, auntie,” she said.
“Alone, dear?”
“Yes, aunt. I've got a lot of things to think about.”
Miss Stanley reflected as Ann Veronica went toward
the house. She thought her niece very hard and very
self-possessed and self-confident. She ought to be
softened and tender and confidential at this phase of
her life. She seemed to have no idea whatever of the
emotional states that were becoming to her age and
position. Miss Stanley walked round the garden thinking,
and presently house and garden reverberated to
Ann Veronica's slamming of the front door.
“I wonder!” said Miss Stanley.
For a long time she surveyed a row of towering holly-hocks, as though they offered an explanation. Then
she went in and up-stairs, hesitated on the landing, and
finally, a little breathless and with an air of great dignity,
opened the door and walked into Ann Veronica's room.
It was a neat, efficient-looking room, with a writing-table placed with a business-like regard to the window,
and a bookcase surmounted by a pig's skull, a dissected
frog in a sealed bottle, and a pile of shiny, black-covered
note-books. In the corner of the room were two
hockey-sticks and a tennis-racket, and upon the walls
Ann Veronica, by means of autotypes, had indicated
her proclivities in art. But Miss Stanley took no
notice of these things. She walked straight across to
the wardrobe and opened it. There, hanging among
Ann Veronica's more normal clothing, was a skimpy
dress of red canvas, trimmed with cheap and tawdry
braid, and short —it could hardly reach below the knee.
On the same peg and evidently belonging to it was a
black velvet Zouave jacket. And then! a garment that
was conceivably a secondary skirt.
Miss Stanley hesitated, and took first one and then
another of the constituents of this costume off its peg
and surveyed it.
The third item she took with a trembling hand by
its waistbelt. As she raised it, its lower portion fell
apart into two baggy crimson masses.
“Trousers!” she whispered.
Her eyes travelled about the room as if in appeal
to the very chairs.
Tucked under the writing-table a pair of yellow
and gold Turkish slippers of a highly meretricious
quality caught her eye. She walked over to them
still carrying the trousers in her hands, and stooped
to examine them. They were ingenious disguises
of gilt paper destructively gummed, it would seem,
to Ann Veronicas' best dancing-slippers.
Then she reverted to the trousers.
“How can I tell him?” whispered
Miss Stanley.
