2
She found the younger generation of the Widgetts
engaged in languid reminiscences, and all, as they
expressed it, a “bit decayed.” Every one became
tremendously animated when they heard that Ann
Veronica had failed them because she had been, as
she expressed it, “locked in.”
“My God!” said Teddy, more impressively than ever.
“But what are you going to do?” asked Hetty.
“What can one do?” asked Ann Veronica. “Would
you stand it? I'm going to clear out.”
“Clear out?” cried Hetty.
“Go to London,” said Ann Veronica.
She had expected sympathetic admiration, but
instead the whole Widgett family, except Teddy,
expressed a common dismay. “But how can you?”
asked Constance. “Who will you stop with?”
“I shall go on my own. Take a room!”
“I say!” said Constance. “But who's going to pay
for the room?”
“I've got money,” said Ann Veronica. “Anything
is better than this —this stifled life down here.”
And seeing that Hetty and Constance were obviously
developing objections, she plunged at once into a
demand for help. “I've got nothing in the world to
pack with except a toy size portmanteau. Can you lend
me some stuff?”
“You are a chap!” said Constance,
and warmed
only slowly from the idea of dissuasion to the idea
of help. But they did what they could for her. They
agreed to lend her their hold-all and a large, formless
bag which they called the communal trunk. And Teddy
declared himself ready to go to the ends of the earth
for her, and carry her luggage all the way.
Hetty, looking out of the window —she always
smoked her after-breakfast cigarette at the window
for the benefit of the less advanced section of Morningside
Park society —and trying not to raise objections,
saw Miss Stanley going down toward the shops.
“If you must go on with it,” said Hetty, “now's
your time.” And Ann Veronica at once went back
with the hold-all, trying not to hurry indecently but
to keep up her dignified air of being a wronged person
doing the right thing at a smart trot, to pack. Teddy
went round by the garden backs and dropped the
bag over the fence. All this was exciting and
entertaining. Her aunt returned before the packing was
done, and Ann Veronica lunched with an uneasy sense
of bag and hold-all packed up-stairs and inadequately
hidden from chance intruders by the valance of the bed.
She went down, flushed and light-hearted, to the
Widgetts' after lunch to make some final arrangements
and then, as soon as her aunt had retired to lie down
for her usual digestive hour, took the risk of the servants
having the enterprise to report her proceedings and
carried her bag and hold-all to the garden gate, whence
Teddy, in a state of ecstatic service, bore them to the
railway station. Then she went up-stairs again, dressed
herself carefully for town, put on her most businesslike-looking hat, and with a wave of emotion she found
it hard to control, walked down to catch the 3.17 up-train.
Teddy handed her into the second-class compartment
her season-ticket warranted, and declared she was
“simply splendid.” “If you want anything,” he said,
“or get into any trouble, wire me. I'd come back from
the ends of the earth. I'd do anything, Vee. It's
horrible to think of you!”
“You're an awful brick, Teddy!” she said.
“Who wouldn't be for you?”
The train began to move. “You're splendid!” said
Teddy, with his hair wild in the wind. “Good luck!
Good luck!”
She waved from the window until the bend hid him.
She found herself alone in the train asking herself
what she must do next, and trying not to think of
herself as cut off from home or any refuge whatever from
the world she had resolved to face. She felt smaller
and more adventurous even than she had expected to
feel. “Let me see,” she said to herself, trying to control
a slight sinking of the heart, “I am going to take a room
in a lodging-house because that is cheaper. . . . But
perhaps I had better get a room in an hotel to-night and
look round. . . .
“It's bound to be all right,” she said.
But her heart kept on sinking. What hotel should she
go to? If she told a cabman to drive to an hotel, any
hotel, what would he do —or say? He might drive to
something dreadfully expensive, and not at all the quiet
sort of thing she required. Finally she decided that
even for an hotel she must look round, and that meanwhile
she would “book” her luggage at Waterloo. She
told the porter to take it to the booking-office, and it
was only after a disconcerting moment or so that she
found she ought to have directed him to go to the cloak-room. But that was soon put right, and she walked out
into London with a peculiar exaltation of mind, an
exaltation that partook of panic and defiance, but was
chiefly a sense of vast unexampled release
She inhaled a deep breath of air —London air.
