2
Miss Stanley emerged from the study and stood
watching Ann Veronica descend.
The girl was flushed with excitement, bright-eyed,
and braced for a struggle; her aunt had never seen her
looking so fine or so pretty. Her fancy dress, save for the
green-gray stockings, the pseudo-Turkish slippers, and
baggy silk trousered ends natural to a Corsair's bride,
was hidden in a large black-silk-hooded opera-cloak.
Beneath the hood it was evident that her rebellious hair
was bound up with red silk, and fastened by some de-
vice in her ears (unless she had them pierced, which was
too dreadful a thing to suppose!) were long brass filigree
earrings.
“I'm just off, aunt,” said Ann Veronica.
“Your father is in the study and wishes to speak to
you.”
Ann Veronica hesitated, and then stood in the open
doorway and regarded her father's stern presence. She
spoke with an entirely false note of cheerful off-handedness. “I'm just in time to say good-bye before I go,
father. I'm going up to London with the Widgetts to
that ball.”
“Now look here, Ann Veronica,” said Mr. Stanley,
“just a moment. You are not going to that
ball!”
Ann Veronica tried a less genial, more dignified note.
“I thought we had discussed that, father.”
“You are not going to that ball! You are not going
out of this house in that get-up!”
Ann Veronica tried yet more earnestly to treat him,
as she would treat any man, with an insistence upon her
due of masculine respect. “You see,” she said, very
gently, “I am going. I am sorry to seem to
disobey
you, but I am. I wish” —she found she had embarked
on a bad sentence — “I wish we needn't have quarrelled.”
She stopped abruptly, and turned about toward the
front door. In a moment he was beside her. “I don't
think you can have heard me, Vee,” he said, with
intensely controlled fury. “I said you were” —he shouted —
“not to go!”
She made, and overdid, an immense effort to be a
princess. She tossed her head, and, having no further
words, moved toward the door. Her father intercepted
her, and for a moment she and he struggled with their
hands upon the latch. A common rage flushed their
faces. “Let go!” she gasped at him, a blaze of anger.
“Veronica!” cried Miss Stanley, warningly, and,
“Peter!”
For a moment they seemed on the verge of an
altogether desperate scuffle. Never for a moment had
violence come between these two since long ago he had,
in spite of her mother's protest in the background,
carried her kicking and squalling to the nursery for
some forgotten crime. With something near to horror
they found themselves thus confronted.
The door was fastened by a catch and a latch with an
inside key, to which at night a chain and two bolts were
added. Carefully abstaining from thrusting against
each other, Ann Veronica and her father began an
absurdly desperate struggle, the one to open the door,
the other to keep it fastened. She seized the key, and
he grasped her hand and squeezed it roughly and painfully
between the handle and the ward as she tried to
turn it. His grip twisted her wrist. She cried out with
the pain of it.
A wild passion of shame and self-disgust swept over
her. Her spirit awoke in dismay to an affection in ruins,
to the immense undignified disaster that had come to
them.
Abruptly she desisted, recoiled, and turned and fled
up-stairs.
She made noises between weeping and laughter as
she went. She gained her room, and slammed her door
and locked it as though she feared violence and pursuit.
“Oh God!” she cried, “Oh God!” and flung aside her
opera-cloak, and for a time walked about the room —a
Corsair's bride at a crisis of emotion. “Why can't he
reason with me,” she said, again and again, “instead of
doing this?”
