7
“And what are you doing here, young lady,” he said,
looking up at her face, “wandering alone so far from
home?”
“I like long walks,” said Ann Veronica, looking
down on him.
“Solitary walks?”
“That's the point of them. I think over all sorts of
things.”
“Problems?”
“Sometimes quite difficult problems.”
“You're lucky to live in an age when you can do so.
Your mother, for instance, couldn't. She had to do
her thinking at home —under inspection.”
She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his
admiration of her free young poise show in his face.
“I suppose things have changed?” she said.
“Never was such an age of transition.”
She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know.
“Sufficient unto me is the change thereof,” he said,
with all the effect of an epigram.
“I must confess,” he said, “the New Woman and the
New Girl intrigue me profoundly. I am one of those
people who are interested in women, more interested
than I am in anything else. I don't conceal it. And
the change, the change of attitude! The way all the
old clingingness has been thrown aside is amazing. And
all the old —the old trick of shrinking up like a snail at
a touch. If you had lived twenty years ago you would
have been called a Young Person, and it would have
been your chief duty in life not to know, never to have
heard of, and never to understand.”
“There's quite enough still,” said Ann Veronica,
smiling, “that one doesn't understand.”
“Quite. But your rôle would have been to go about
saying, `I beg your pardon' in a reproving tone to
things you understood quite well in your heart and saw
no harm in. That terrible Young Person! she's vanished.
Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young Person! . . . I hope
we may never find her again.”
He rejoiced over this emancipation. “While that
lamb was about every man of any spirit was regarded
as a dangerous wolf. We wore invisible chains and
invisible blinkers. Now, you and I can gossip at a gate,
and Honi soit qui mal y pense. The change has given
man one good thing he never had before,” he said.
“Girl friends. And I am coming to believe the best as
well as the most beautiful friends a man can have are
girl friends.”
He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:
“I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than
to any man alive.”
“I suppose we are more free than we
were?” said
Ann Veronica, keeping the question general.
“Oh, there's no doubt of it! Since the girls of the
eighties broke bounds and sailed away on bicycles —my
young days go back to the very beginnings of that —it's
been one triumphant relaxation.”
“Relaxation, perhaps. But are we any more free?”
“Well?”
“I mean we've long strings to tether us, but we are
bound all the same. A woman isn't much freer —in
reality.”
Mr. Ramage demurred.
“One runs about,” said Ann Veronica.
“Yes.”
“But it's on condition one doesn't do anything.”
“Do what?”
“Oh! —anything.”
He looked interrogation with a faint smile.
“It seems to me it comes to earning one's living in the
long run,” said Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. “Until a
girl can go away as a son does and earn her independent
income, she's still on a string. It may be a long string,
long enough if you like to tangle up all sorts of people;
but there it is! If the paymaster pulls, home she must
go. That's what I mean.”
Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that. He was a
little impressed by Ann Veronica's metaphor of the
string, which, indeed, she owed to Hetty Widgett.
“You wouldn't like to be independent?” he
asked,
abruptly. “I mean really independent. On
your own.
It isn't such fun as it seems.”
“Every one wants to be independent,” said Ann
Veronica. “Every one. Man or woman.”
“And you?”
“Rather!”
“I wonder why?”
“There's no why. It's just to feel —one owns one's
self.”
“Nobody does that,” said Ramage, and kept silence
for a moment.
“But a boy —a boy goes out into the world and presently
stands on his own feet. He buys his own clothes,
chooses his own company, makes his own way of living.”
“You'd like to do that?”
“Exactly.”
“Would you like to be a boy?”
“I wonder! It's out of the question, any way.”
Ramage reflected. “Why don't you?”
“Well, it might mean rather a row.”
“I know —” said Ramage, with sympathy.
“And besides,” said Ann Veronica, sweeping that
aspect aside, “what could I do? A boy sails out into
a trade or profession. But —it's one of the things I've
just been thinking over. Suppose —suppose a girl did
want to start in life, start in life for herself —” She
looked him frankly in the eyes. “What ought she to
do?”
“Suppose you —”
“Yes, suppose I —”
He felt that his advice was being asked. He became
a little more personal and intimate. “I wonder what
you could do?” he said. “I should think
you could do
all sorts of things. . . .
“What ought you to do?” He began to produce his
knowledge of the world for her benefit, jerkily and
allusively, and with a strong, rank flavor of “savoir
faire.” He took an optimist view of her chances. Ann
Veronica listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on the
turf, and now and then she asked a question or looked
up to discuss a point. In the meanwhile, as he talked, he
scrutinized her face, ran his eyes over her careless,
gracious poise, wondered hard about her. He described
her privately to himself as a splendid girl. It was clear
she wanted to get away from home, that she was
impatient to get away from home. Why? While the front
of his mind was busy warning her not to fall into the
hopeless miseries of underpaid teaching, and explaining
his idea that for women of initiative, quite as much as
for men, the world of business had by far the best chances,
the back chambers of his brain were busy with the
problem of that “Why?”
His first idea as a man of the world was to explain her
unrest by a lover, some secret or forbidden or impossible
lover. But he dismissed that because then she would
ask her lover and not him all these things. Restlessness,
then, was the trouble, simple restlessness: home
bored her. He could quite understand the daughter of
Mr. Stanley being bored and feeling limited. But was
that enough? Dim, formless suspicions of something
more vital wandered about his mind. Was the young
lady impatient for experience? Was she adventurous?
As a man of the world he did not think it becoming to
accept maidenly calm as anything more than a mask.
Warm life was behind that always, even if it slept. If
it was not an actual personal lover, it still might be the
lover not yet incarnate, not yet perhaps suspected. . . .
He had diverged only a little from the truth when he
said that his chief interest in life was women. It wasn't
so much women as Woman that engaged his mind. His
was the Latin turn of thinking; he had fallen in love at
thirteen, and he was still capable —he prided himself —
of falling in love. His invalid wife and her money had
been only the thin thread that held his life together;
beaded on that permanent relation had been an inter-weaving series of other feminine experiences, disturbing,
absorbing, interesting, memorable affairs. Each one
had been different from the others, each had had a
quality all its own, a distinctive freshness, a distinctive
beauty. He could not understand how men could live
ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful
research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing,
these complex, fascinating expeditions that began in
interest and mounted to the supremest, most passionate
intimacy. All the rest of his existence was subordinate
to this pursuit; he lived for it, worked for it, kept
himself in training for it.
So while he talked to this girl of work and freedom, his
slightly protuberant eyes were noting the gracious
balance of her limbs and body across the gate, the fine
lines of her chin and neck. Her grave fine face, her
warm clear complexion, had already aroused his curiosity
as he had gone to and fro in Morningside Park, and here
suddenly he was near to her and talking freely and
intimately. He had found her in a communicative mood,
and he used the accumulated skill of years in turning
that to account.
She was pleased and a little flattered by his interest
and sympathy. She became eager to explain herself,
to show herself in the right light. He was manifestly
exerting his mind for her, and she found herself fully
disposed to justify his interest.
She, perhaps, displayed herself rather consciously as
a fine person unduly limited. She even touched lightly
on her father's unreasonableness.
“I wonder,” said Ramage, “that more girls don't
think as you do and want to strike out in the world.”
And then he speculated. “I wonder if you will?”
“Let me say one thing,” he said. “If ever you do
and I can help you in any way, by advice or inquiry or
recommendation — You see, I'm no believer in feminine
incapacity, but I do perceive there is such a thing as
feminine inexperience. As a sex you're a little under-trained —in affairs. I'd take it —forgive me if I seem a
little urgent —as a sort of proof of friendliness. I can
imagine nothing more pleasant in life than to help you,
because I know it would pay to help you. There's something
about you, a little flavor of Will, I suppose, that
makes one feel —good luck about you and success. . . .”
And while he talked and watched her as he talked, she
answered, and behind her listening watched and thought
about him. She liked the animated eagerness of his
manner.
His mind seemed to be a remarkably full one; his
knowledge of detailed reality came in just where her own
mind was most weakly equipped. Through all he said
ran one quality that pleased her —the quality of a man
who feels that things can be done, that one need not wait
for the world to push one before one moved. Compared
with her father and Mr. Manning and the men in “fixed”
positions generally that she knew, Ramage, presented by
himself, had a fine suggestion of freedom, of power, of
deliberate and sustained adventure. . . .
She was particularly charmed by his theory of friendship.
It was really very jolly to talk to a man in this
way —who saw the woman in her and did not treat her
as a child. She was inclined to think that perhaps for a
girl the converse of his method was the case; an older
man, a man beyond the range of anything “nonsensical,”
was, perhaps, the most interesting sort of friend one could
meet. But in that reservation it may be she went a little
beyond the converse of his view. . . .
They got on wonderfully well together. They talked
for the better part of an hour, and at last walked
together to the junction of highroad and the bridle-path.
There, after protestations of friendliness and helpfulness
that were almost ardent, he mounted a little clumsily
and rode off at an amiable pace, looking his best, making
a leg with his riding gaiters, smiling and saluting, while
Ann Veronica turned northward and so came to Micklechesil.
There, in a little tea and sweet-stuff shop, she
bought and consumed slowly and absent-mindedly the
insufficient nourishment that is natural to her sex on
such occasions.