2
Then it was the expostulations really began.
From first to last, on this occasion, her aunt
expostulated for about two hours. “But, my dear,” she
began, “it is Impossible! It is quite out of the Question.
You simply can't.” And to that, through vast
rhetorical meanderings, she clung. It reached her only
slowly that Ann Veronica was standing to her resolution.
“How will you live?” she appealed. “Think of what
people will say!” That became a refrain. “Think of
what Lady Palsworthy will say! Think of what” —
So-and-so — “will say! What are we to tell people?
“Besides, what am I to tell your father?”
At first it had not been at all clear to Ann Veronica
that she would refuse to return home; she had had some
dream of a capitulation that should leave her an enlarged
and defined freedom, but as her aunt put this aspect
and that of her flight to her, as she wandered illogically
and inconsistently from one urgent consideration to
another, as she mingled assurances and aspects and
emotions, it became clearer and clearer to the girl that there
could be little or no change in the position of things if
she returned. “And what will Mr. Manning think?”
said her aunt.
“I don't care what any one thinks,” said Ann Veronica.
“I can't imagine what has come over you,” said her
aunt. “I can't conceive what you want. You foolish
girl!”
Ann Veronica took that in silence. At the back of
her mind, dim and yet disconcerting, was the perception
that she herself did not know what she wanted. And
yet she knew it was not fair to call her a foolish
girl.
“Don't you care for Mr. Manning?” said her aunt.
“I don't see what he has to do with my coming to
London?”
“He —he worships the ground you tread on. You
don't deserve it, but he does. Or at least he did the
day before yesterday. And here you are!”
Her aunt opened all the fingers of her gloved hand
in a rhetorical gesture. “It seems to me all madness —
madness! Just because your father —wouldn't let you
disobey him!”
