1
ANN VERONICA had an impression that she did
not sleep at all that night, and at any rate she got
through an immense amount of feverish feeling and
thinking.
What was she going to do?
One main idea possessed her: she must get away
from home, she must assert herself at once or perish.
“Very well,” she would say, “then I must go.” To
remain, she felt, was to concede everything. And
she would have to go to-morrow. It was clear it must
be to-morrow. If she delayed a day she would delay
two days, if she delayed two days she would delay a
week, and after a week things would be adjusted to
submission forever. “I'll go,” she vowed to the night,
“or I'll die!” She made plans and estimated means
and resources. These and her general preparations
had perhaps a certain disproportion. She had a gold
watch, a very good gold watch that had been her
mother's, a pearl necklace that was also pretty good.
some unpretending rings, some silver bangles and a few
other such inferior trinkets, three pounds thirteen
shillings unspent of her dress and book allowance
and a few good salable books. So equipped, she
proposed to set up a separate establishment in the
world.
And then she would find work.
For most of a long and fluctuating night she was
fairly confident that she would find work; she knew
herself to be strong, intelligent, and capable by the
standards of most of the girls she knew. She was
not quite clear how she should find it, but she felt she
would. Then she would write and tell her father what
she had done, and put their relationship on a new
footing.
That was how she projected it, and in general terms
it seemed plausible and possible. But in between these
wider phases of comparative confidence were gaps of
disconcerting doubt, when the universe was presented
as making sinister and threatening faces at her, defying
her to defy, preparing a humiliating and shameful
overthrow. “I don't care,” said Ann Veronica to the
darkness; “I'll fight it.”
She tried to plan her proceedings in detail. The
only difficulties that presented themselves clearly to
her were the difficulties of getting away from Morningside
Park, and not the difficulties at the other end of
the journey. These were so outside her experience
that she found it possible to thrust them almost out
of sight by saying they would be “all right” in confident
tones to herself. But still she knew they were
not right, and at times they became a horrible obsession
as of something waiting for her round the corner. She
tried to imagine herself “getting something,” to project
herself as sitting down at a desk and writing, or as
returning after her work to some pleasantly equipped
and free and independent flat. For a time she furnished
the flat. But even with that furniture it remained
extremely vague, the possible good and the possible
evil as well! The possible evil! “I'll go,” said Ann
Veronica for the hundredth time. “I'll go. I don't
care
what happens.”
She awoke out of a doze, as though she had never
been sleeping. It was time to get up.
She sat on the edge of her bed and looked about
her, at her room, at the row of black-covered books
and the pig's skull. “I must take them,” she said,
to help herself over her own incredulity. “How shall
I get my luggage out of the house? . . .”
The figure of her aunt, a little distant, a little
propitiatory, behind the coffee things, filled her with a
sense of almost catastrophic adventure. Perhaps she
might never come back to that breakfast-room again.
Never! Perhaps some day, quite soon, she might
regret that breakfast-room. She helped herself to the
remainder of the slightly congealed bacon, and
reverted to the problem of getting her luggage out of the
house. She decided to call in the help of Teddy Widgett,
or, failing him, of one of his sisters.