6
When Ann Veronica reached her little bed-sitting-room again, every nerve in her body was quivering
with shame and self-disgust.
She threw hat and coat on the bed and sat down before
the fire.
“And now,” she said, splintering the surviving piece
of coal into indignant flame-spurting fragments with one
dexterous blow, “what am I to do?
“I'm in a hole! —mess is a better word, expresses it
better . I'm in a mess —a nasty mess! a filthy mess!
Oh, no end of a mess! Do you hear, Ann Veronica? —
you're in a nasty, filthy, unforgivable mess!
“Haven't I just made a silly mess of things?
“Forty pounds! I haven't got twenty!”
She got up, stamped with her foot, and then, suddenly
remembering the lodger below, sat down and wrenched
off her boots.
“This is what comes of being a young woman up to
date. By Jove! I'm beginning to have my doubts
about freedom!
“You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly
young woman! The smeariness of the thing!
“The smeariness of this sort of thing! . . . Mauled
about!”
She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the
back of her hand. “Ugh!” she said.
“The young women of Jane Austen's time didn't get
into this sort of scrape! At least —one thinks so. . . . I
wonder if some of them did —and it didn't get reported.
Aunt Jane had her quiet moments. Most of them didn't,
anyhow. They were properly brought up, and sat still
and straight, and took the luck fate brought them as
gentlewomen should. And they had an idea of what men
were like behind all their nicety. They knew they were
all Bogey in disguise. I didn't! I didn't! After all —”
For a time her mind ran on daintiness and its
defensive restraints as though it was the one desirable
thing. That world of fine printed cambrics and escorted
maidens, of delicate secondary meanings and refined
allusiveness, presented itself to her imagination with the
brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed for many women
it is a lost paradise.
“I wonder if there is anything wrong with my
manners,” she said. “I wonder if I've been properly
brought up. If I had been quite quiet and white and
dignified, wouldn't it have been different? Would he
have dared? . . .”
For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica
was utterly disgusted with herself; she was wrung with
a passionate and belated desire to move gently, to speak
softly and ambiguously —to be, in effect, prim.
Horrible details recurred to her.
“Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in
his neck —deliberately to hurt him?”
She tried to sound the humorous note.
“Are you aware, Ann Veronica, you nearly throttled
that gentleman?”
Then she reviled her own foolish way of putting it.
“You ass and imbecile, Ann Veronica! You female
cad! Cad! Cad! . . . Why aren't you folded up clean
in lavender —as every young woman ought to be? What
have you been doing with yourself? . . .”
She raked into the fire with the poker.
“All of which doesn't help me in the slightest degree
to pay back that money.”
That night was the most intolerable one that Ann
Veronica had ever spent. She washed her face with
unwonted elaboration before she went to bed. This time,
there was no doubt, she did not sleep. The more she
disentangled the lines of her situation the deeper grew
her self-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of lying in
bed became unendurable, and she rolled out and marched
about her room and whispered abuse of herself —usually
until she hit against some article of furniture.
Then she would have quiet times, in which she would
say to herself, “Now look here! Let me think it all
out!”
For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts
of a woman's position in the world —the meagre realities
of such freedom as it permitted her, the almost
unavoidable obligation to some individual man under
which she must labor for even a foothold in the world.
She had flung away from her father's support with
the finest assumption of personal independence. And
here she was —in a mess because it had been impossible
for her to avoid leaning upon another man. She had
thought — What had she thought? That this dependence
of women was but an illusion which needed only
to be denied to vanish. She had denied it with vigor,
and here she was!
She did not so much exhaust this general question as
pass from it to her insoluble individual problem again:
“What am I to do?”
She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back
into Ramage's face. But she had spent nearly half of it,
and had no conception of how such a sum could be made
good again. She thought of all sorts of odd and
desperate expedients, and with passionate petulance
rejected them all.
She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing
insulting epithets for herself. She got up, drew up her
blind, and stared out of window at a dawn-cold vision
of chimneys for a time, and then went and sat on the
edge of her bed. What was the alternative to going
home? No alternative appeared in that darkness.
It seemed intolerable that she should go home and
admit herself beaten. She did most urgently desire to
save her face in Morningside Park, and for long hours
she could think of no way of putting it that would not be
in the nature of unconditional admission of defeat.
“I'd rather go as a chorus-girl,” she said.
She was not very clear about the position and duties
of a chorus-girl, but it certainly had the air of being a
last desperate resort. There sprang from that a vague
hope that perhaps she might extort a capitulation from
her father by a threat to seek that position, and then
with overwhelming clearness it came to her that whatever
happened she would never be able to tell her father
about her debt. The completest capitulation would not
wipe out that trouble. And she felt that if she went
home it was imperative to pay. She would always be
going to and fro up the Avenue, getting glimpses of
Ramage, seeing him in trains. . . .
For a time she promenaded the room.
“Why did I ever take that loan? An idiot girl in an
asylum would have known better than that!
“Vulgarity of soul and innocence of mind —the worst
of all conceivable combinations. I wish some one would
kill Ramage by accident! . . .
“But then they would find that check endorsed in his
bureau. . . .
“I wonder what he will do?” She tried to imagine
situations that might arise out of Ramage's antagonism,
for he had been so bitter and savage that she could not
believe that he would leave things as they were.
The next morning she went out with her post-office
savings bank-book, and telegraphed for a warrant to
draw out all the money she had in the world. It amounted
to two-and-twenty pounds. She addressed an envelope
to Ramage, and scrawled on a half-sheet of paper,
“The rest shall follow.” The money would be available
in the afternoon, and she would send him four five-pound notes. The rest she meant to keep for her
immediate necessities. A little relieved by this step
toward reinstatement, she went on to the Imperial College
to forget her muddle of problems for a time, if she could,
in the presence of Capes.