Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story

One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to have things out with her father that ver...

Ann Veronica Stanley was twenty-one and a half years old. She had black hair, fine eyebrows, and a clear complexion; and the forces that had modelled her features had loved and lin...

Ann Veronica’s father was a solicitor with a good deal of company business: a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic, clean-shaven man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a s...

MY DEAR VEE, he wrote. These daughters! He gnawed his pen and reflected, tore the sheet up, and began again. “MY DEAR VERONICA,--Your aunt tells me you have involved yourself in ...

Ann Veronica’s resolve to have things out with her father was not accomplished without difficulty. He was not due from the City until about six, and so she went and played Badmint...

He became quite sure, by a sort of accumulation of reflection, as the day wore on. He found his youngest daughter intrusive in his thoughts all through the morning, and still more ...

At the end of dinner that evening Ann Veronica began: “Father!” Her father looked at her over his glasses and spoke with grave deliberation; “If there is anything you want to say ...

“Are you coming to the Fadden Dance, Ann Veronica?” asked Constance Widgett. Ann Veronica considered her answer. “I mean to,” she replied. “You are making your dress?” “Such as ...

As Ann Veronica went back along the Avenue to her aunt she became aware of a light-footed pursuer running. Teddy overtook her, a little out of breath, his innocent face flushed, hi...

The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that afternoon had at first much the same relation to the Widgett conversation that a plaster statue of Mr. Gladstone would have to a carel...

Two days after came the day of the Crisis, the day of the Fadden Dance. It would have been a crisis anyhow, but it was complicated in Ann Veronica’s mind by the fact that a letter ...

Ann Veronica carried a light but business-like walking-stick. She walked with an easy quickness down the Avenue and through the proletarian portion of Morningside Park, and crossin...

Her mind got back to the Fadden Ball. She meant to go, she meant to go, she meant to go. Nothing would stop her, and she was prepared to face the consequences. Suppose her father ...

Ann Veronica’s ideas of marriage were limited and unsystematic. Her teachers and mistresses had done their best to stamp her mind with an ineradicable persuasion that it was tremen...

The Gwen affair happened when she was away at school at Marticombe-on-Sea, a term before she went to the High School, and was never very clear to her. Her mother missed writing fo...

These were Ann Veronica’s leading cases in the question of marriage. They were the only real marriages she had seen clearly. For the rest, she derived her ideas of the married stat...

“And what are you doing here, young lady,” he said, looking up at her face, “wandering alone so far from home?” “I like long walks,” said Ann Veronica, looking down on him. “Soli...

We left Miss Stanley with Ann Veronica’s fancy dress in her hands and her eyes directed to Ann Veronica’s pseudo-Turkish slippers. When Mr. Stanley came home at a quarter to six--...

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 ...

There presently came a phase in which she said: “I WON’T stand it even now. I will go to-night.” She went as far as her door, then turned to the window. She opened this and scramb...

At eight that evening Miss Stanley tapped at Ann Veronica’s bedroom door. “I’ve brought you up some dinner, Vee,” she said. Ann Veronica was lying on her bed in a darkling room s...

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 ...

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 ...

She dismissed the first hotels she passed, she scarcely knew why, mainly perhaps from the mere dread of entering them, and crossed Waterloo Bridge at a leisurely pace. It was high ...

But presently, as she sat on the one antimacassared red silk chair and surveyed her hold-all and bag in that tidy, rather vacant, and dehumanized apartment, with its empty wardrobe...

She had sent her father a telegram from the East Strand post-office worded thus: | All | is | well | with | me | |---------|-----------|---------...

In the afternoon she resumed her search for apartments. The intoxicating sense of novelty had given place to a more business-like mood. She drifted northward from the Strand, and c...

The next morning opened calmly, and Ann Veronica sat in her own room, her very own room, and consumed an egg and marmalade, and read the advertisements in the Daily Telegraph. Then...

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 q...

In the afternoon the task of expostulation was taken up by Mr. Stanley in person. Her father’s ideas of expostulation were a little harsh and forcible, and over the claret-colored ...

The next day her aunt came again and expostulated, and was just saying it was “an unheard-of thing” for a girl to leave her home as Ann Veronica had done, when her father arrived, ...

After the interview Ann Veronica considered herself formally cut off from home. If nothing else had clinched that, the purse had. Nevertheless there came a residuum of expostulati...

It was remarkable to Ann Veronica how completely Mr. Manning, in his entirely different dialect, indorsed her brother Roddy’s view of things. He came along, he said, just to call, ...

And now for some weeks Ann Veronica was to test her market value in the world. She went about in a negligent November London that had become very dark and foggy and greasy and forb...

Now, while Ann Veronica was taking these soundings in the industrial sea, and measuring herself against the world as it is, she was also making extensive explorations among the ide...

Miss Miniver let Ann Veronica into her peculiar levels of the world with so enthusiastic a generosity that it seemed ingratitude to remain critical. Indeed, almost insensibly Ann V...

Then one evening Ann Veronica went with Miss Miniver into the back seats of the gallery at Essex Hall, and heard and saw the giant leaders of the Fabian Society who are re-making t...

In the beginning of December Ann Veronica began to speculate privately upon the procedure of pawning. She had decided that she would begin with her pearl necklace. She spent a very...

Before Christmas Ann Veronica had gone to Ramage again and accepted this offer she had at first declined. Many little things had contributed to that decision. The chief influence ...

That was two days before Christmas Eve. The next morning came a compact letter from her father. “MY DEAR DAUGHTER,” it ran,--“Here, on the verge of the season of forgiveness I hol...

January found Ann Veronica a student in the biological laboratory of the Central Imperial College that towers up from among the back streets in the angle between Euston Road and Gr...

The next few weeks were a time of the very liveliest thought and growth for Ann Veronica. The crowding impressions of the previous weeks seemed to run together directly her mind le...

For a time Ann Veronica’s family had desisted from direct offers of a free pardon; they were evidently waiting for her resources to come to an end. Neither father, aunt, nor brothe...

It was by imperceptible degrees that Capes became important in Ann Veronica’s thoughts. But then he began to take steps, and, at last, strides to something more and more like predo...

Yet Ann Veronica was thinking a very great deal about love. A dozen shynesses and intellectual barriers were being outflanked or broken down in her mind. All the influences about h...

Then, arising she knew not how, like a new-born appetite, came a craving in Ann Veronica for the sight and sound of beauty. It was as if her aesthetic sense had become inflamed. H...

Then one day a little thing happened that clothed itself in significance. She had been working upon a ribbon of microtome sections of the developing salamander, and he came to see...

And as she sat on her bed that night, musing and half-undressed, she began to run one hand down her arm and scrutinize the soft flow of muscle under her skin. She thought of the ma...

The realization that she was in love flooded Ann Veronica’s mind, and altered the quality of all its topics. She began to think persistently of Capes, and it seemed to her now tha...

One afternoon, soon after Ann Veronica’s great discovery, a telegram came into the laboratory for her. It ran: --------------------------------------------------- | Bo...

They had their explanations the next evening, but they were explanations in quite other terms than Ann Veronica had anticipated, quite other and much more startling and illuminatin...

Each of them stared at the other, set in a universe that had changed its system of values with kaleidoscopic completeness. She was flushed, and her eyes were bright and angry; her ...

Interpretation came pouring down upon her almost blindingly; she understood now the room, the waiter, the whole situation. She understood. She leaped to a world of shabby knowledge...

But she did not get away just then. Ramage’s bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggression. “Oh, Ann Veronica!” he cried, “I cannot let you go like this! You don’t understand. Y...

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 befo...

For a time the biological laboratory was full of healing virtue. Her sleepless night had left her languid but not stupefied, and for an hour or so the work distracted her altogethe...

“Why should I ever come back?” she said to herself, as she went down the staircase. She went to the post-office and drew out and sent off her money to Ramage. And then she came ou...

She was sitting brooding over her fire about ten o’clock that night when a sealed and registered envelope was brought up to her. She opened it and drew out a letter, and folded wi...

“There is only one way out of all this,” said Ann Veronica, sitting up in her little bed in the darkness and biting at her nails. “I thought I was just up against Morningside Park...

The next morning was as dark and foggy as if it was mid-November instead of early March. Ann Veronica woke rather later than usual, and lay awake for some minutes before she rememb...

Ann Veronica’s first impression of Kitty Brett was that she was aggressive and disagreeable; her next that she was a person of amazing persuasive power. She was perhaps three-and-t...

It was not Ann Veronica’s fault that the night’s work should have taken upon itself the forms of wild burlesque. She was in deadly earnest in everything she did. It seemed to her t...

So Ann Veronica, enterprising and a little dubious as ever, mingled with the stream of history and wrote her Christian name upon the police-court records of the land. But out of a...

The first night in prison she found it impossible to sleep. The bed was hard beyond any experience of hers, the bed-clothes coarse and insufficient, the cell at once cold and stuff...

“Now,” said Ann Veronica, after the half-hour of exercise, and sitting on the uncomfortable wooden seat without a back that was her perch by day, “it’s no good staying here in a so...

She had some idea of putting these subtle and difficult issues to the chaplain when she was warned of his advent. But she had not reckoned with the etiquette of Canongate. She got ...

After a day or so she thought more steadily. She found herself in a phase of violent reaction against the suffrage movement, a phase greatly promoted by one of those unreasonable o...

One afternoon, while everything was still, the wardress heard her cry out suddenly and alarmingly, and with great and unmistakable passion, “Why in the name of goodness did I burn ...

She sat regarding her dinner. The meat was coarse and disagreeably served. “I suppose some one makes a bit on the food,” she said.... “One has such ridiculous ideas of the wicked...

One day the idea of self-sacrifice came into her head, and she made, she thought, some important moral discoveries. It came with an extreme effect of re-discovery, a remarkable no...

Ann Veronica made a strenuous attempt to carry out her good resolutions. She meditated long and carefully upon her letter to her father before she wrote it, and gravely and deliber...

Her aunt came to meet her outside Canongate, and, being a little confused between what was official and what was merely a rebellious slight upon our national justice, found herself...

When Ann Veronica found herself in her father’s study that evening it seemed to her for a moment as though all the events of the past six months had been a dream. The big gray spac...

It was, perhaps, the natural consequence of a long and tiring and exciting day that Ann Veronica should pass a broken and distressful night, a night in which the noble and self-sub...

Pursuant to some altogether private calculations she did not go up to the Imperial College until after mid-day, and she found the laboratory deserted, even as she desired. She went...

Capes lit things wonderfully for Ann Veronica all that afternoon, he was so friendly, so palpably interested in her, and glad to have her back with him. Tea in the laboratory was a...

The steps by which Ann Veronica determined to engage herself to marry Manning were never very clear to her. A medley of motives warred in her, and it was certainly not one of the l...

For a time that ring set with sapphires seemed to be, after all, the satisfactory solution of Ann Veronica’s difficulties. It was like pouring a strong acid over dulled metal. A ta...

When at last she did so, the sapphire ring took on a new quality in the imagination of Capes. It ceased to be the symbol of liberty and a remote and quite abstracted person, and be...

There was one serious flaw in Ann Veronica’s arrangements for self-rehabilitation, and that was Ramage. He hung over her--he and his loan to her and his connection with her and tha...

They sat with tea and strawberries and cream before them at a little table in front of the pavilion in Regent’s Park. Her confession was still unmade. Manning leaned forward on the...

At first the quality of her relationship to Manning seemed moving and beautiful to Ann Veronica. She admired and rather pitied him, and she was unfeignedly grateful to him. She eve...

They walked a long way that afternoon. They crossed the Park to the westward, and then turned back and walked round the circle about the Royal Botanical Gardens and then southwardl...

Spring had held back that year until the dawn of May, and then spring and summer came with a rush together. Two days after this conversation between Manning and Ann Veronica, Capes...

Before Capes could answer her in any way the door at the end of the laboratory opened noisily and Miss Klegg appeared. She went to her own table and sat down. At the sound of the d...

For a time they walked in silence through the back streets that lead southward from the College. Capes bore a face of infinite perplexity. “The thing I feel most disposed to say, ...

Capes made no answer for a time. “My mind is full of confused stuff,” he said at length. “I’ve been thinking--all the afternoon. Oh, and weeks and months of thought and feeling th...

The next morning she waited in the laboratory at the lunch-hour in the reasonable certainty that he would come to her. “Well, you have thought it over?” he said, sitting down besi...

They spent the next Sunday in Richmond Park, and mingled the happy sensation of being together uninterruptedly through the long sunshine of a summer’s day with the ample discussion...

It was rather less than a week after that walk that Capes came and sat down beside Ann Veronica for their customary talk in the lunch hour. He took a handful of almonds and raisins...

They decided to go to Switzerland at the session’s end. “We’ll clean up everything tidy,” said Capes.... For her pride’s sake, and to save herself from long day-dreams and an unap...

In the late afternoon, as Ann Veronica was gathering flowers for the dinner-table, her father came strolling across the lawn toward her with an affectation of great deliberation. ...

She dressed carefully for dinner in a black dress that her father liked, and that made her look serious and responsible. Dinner was quite uneventful. Her father read a draft prospe...

Next day Ann Veronica and Capes felt like newborn things. It seemed to them they could never have been really alive before, but only dimly anticipating existence. They sat face to ...

Capes thought. “It’s odd--I have no doubt in my mind that what we are doing is wrong,” he said. “And yet I do it without compunction.” “I never felt so absolutely right,” said A...

Later they loitered along a winding path above the inn, and made love to one another. Their journey had made them indolent, the afternoon was warm, and it seemed impossible to brea...

They lay side by side in a shallow nest of turf and mosses among bowlders and stunted bushes on a high rock, and watched the day sky deepen to evening between the vast precipices o...

Presently it occurred to Ann Veronica to ask about the journey he had planned. He had his sections of the Siegfried map folded in his pocket, and he squatted up with his legs cross...

Most of the things that he had planned they did. But they climbed more than he had intended because Ann Veronica proved rather a good climber, steady-headed and plucky, rather dari...

As they came back from that day’s climb--it was up the Mittaghorn--they had to cross a shining space of wet, steep rocks between two grass slopes that needed a little care. There w...

They found themselves next day talking love to one another high up on some rocks above a steep bank of snow that overhung a precipice on the eastern side of the Fee glacier. By thi...

“All sorts of things we’re going to do,” said Capes; “all sorts of times we’re going to have. Sooner or later we’ll certainly do something to clean those prisons you told me about-...

“To think,” he cried, “you are ten years younger than I!... There are times when you make me feel a little thing at your feet--a young, silly, protected thing. Do you know, Ann Ver...

They sat for a time without speaking a word, in an enormous shining globe of mutual satisfaction. “Well,” said Capes, at length, “we’ve to go down, Ann Veronica. Life waits for us...

About four years and a quarter later--to be exact, it was four years and four months--Mr. and Mrs. Capes stood side by side upon an old Persian carpet that did duty as a hearthrug ...

They received the guests in their pretty little hall with genuine effusion. Miss Stanley threw aside a black cloak to reveal a discreet and dignified arrangement of brown silk, and...

At last the evening was over, and Capes and his wife had gone down to see Mr. Stanley and his sister into a taxicab, and had waved an amiable farewell from the pavement steps. “Gr...