2
Ann Veronica carried a light but business-like walking-stick. She walked with an easy quickness down the
Avenue and through the proletarian portion of Morningside
Park, and crossing these fields came into a pretty
overhung lane that led toward Caddington and the
Downs. And then her pace slackened. She tucked
her stick under her arm and re-read Manning's letter.
“Let me think,” said Ann Veronica.
“I wish this hadn't turned up to-day of all days.”
She found it difficult to begin thinking, and indeed
she was anything but clear what it was she had to think
about. Practically it was most of the chief interests
in life that she proposed to settle in this pedestrian
meditation. Primarily it was her own problem, and in
particular the answer she had to give to Mr. Manning's
letter, but in order to get data for that she found that she,
having a logical and ordered mind, had to decide upon
the general relations of men to women, the objects and
conditions of marriage and its bearing upon the welfare
of the race, the purpose of the race, the purpose, if any,
of everything. . . .
“Frightful lot of things aren't settled,” said Ann
Veronica.
In addition, the Fadden Dance business, all out of
proportion, occupied the whole foreground of her thoughts
and threw a color of rebellion over everything. She
kept thinking she was thinking about Mr. Manning's
proposal of marriage and finding she was thinking of
the dance.
For a time her efforts to achieve a comprehensive
concentration were dispersed by the passage of the
village street of Caddington, the passing of a goggled
car-load of motorists, and the struggles of a stable
lad mounted on one recalcitrant horse and leading
another. When she got back to her questions again
in the monotonous high-road that led up the hill, she
found the image of Mr. Manning central in her mind.
He stood there, large and dark, enunciating, in his
clear voice from beneath his large mustache, clear flat
sentences, deliberately kindly. He proposed, he wanted
to possess her! He loved her.
Ann Veronica felt no repulsion at the prospect.
That Mr. Manning loved her presented itself to her
bloodlessly, stilled from any imaginative quiver or
thrill of passion or disgust. The relationship seemed
to have almost as much to do with blood and body
as a mortgage. It was something that would create
a mutual claim, a relationship. It was in another
world from that in which men will die for a kiss, and
touching hands lights fires that burn up lives —the world
of romance, the world of passionately beautiful things.
But that other world, in spite of her resolute exclusion
of it, was always looking round corners and peeping
through chinks and crannies, and rustling and raiding
into the order in which she chose to live, shining out
of pictures at her, echoing in lyrics and music; it invaded
her dreams, it wrote up broken and enigmatical sentences
upon the passage walls of her mind. She was aware of
it now as if it were a voice shouting outside a house,
shouting passionate verities in a hot sunlight, a voice
that cries while people talk insincerely in a darkened
room and pretend not to hear. Its shouting now did
in some occult manner convey a protest that Mr. Manning
would on no account do, though he was tall and dark
and handsome and kind, and thirty-five and adequately
prosperous, and all that a husband should be. But
there was, it insisted, no mobility in his face, no movement,
nothing about him that warmed. If Ann Veronica
could have put words to that song they would have
been, “Hot-blooded marriage or none!” but she was far
too indistinct in this matter to frame any words at all.
“I don't love him,” said Ann Veronica, getting
a gleam. “I don't see that his being a good sort matters.
That really settles about that. . . . But it means no end
of a row.”
For a time she sat on a rail before leaving the road
for the downland turf. “But I wish,” she said, “I had
some idea what I was really up to.”
Her thoughts went into solution for a time, while
she listened to a lark singing.
“Marriage and mothering,” said Ann Veronica, with
her mind crystallizing out again as the lark dropped to
the nest in the turf. “And all the rest of it perhaps is a
song.”
