Part 1

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 very evening. She had trembled on

the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely

she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had

been reached. She made up her mind in the train home that it should be

a decisive crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins with

her there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of this

crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.

She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to Morningside

Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in an attitude that

would certainly have distressed her mother to see, and horrified her

grandmother beyond measure; she sat with her knees up to her chin and

her hands clasped before them, and she was so lost in thought that

she discovered with a start, from a lettered lamp, that she was at

Morningside Park, and thought she was moving out of the station, whereas

she was only moving in. “Lord!” she said. She jumped up at once,

caught up a leather clutch containing notebooks, a fat text-book, and

a chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the

carriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and that she

had to traverse the full length of the platform past it again as the

result of her precipitation. “Sold again,” she remarked. “Idiot!” She

raged inwardly while she walked along with that air of self-contained

serenity that is proper to a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty under

the eye of the world.

She walked down the station approach, past the neat, obtrusive offices

of the coal merchant and the house agent, and so to the wicket-gate by

the butcher’s shop that led to the field path to her home. Outside the

post-office stood a no-hatted, blond young man in gray flannels, who was

elaborately affixing a stamp to a letter. At the sight of her he became

rigid and a singularly bright shade of pink. She made herself serenely

unaware of his existence, though it may be it was his presence that sent

her by the field detour instead of by the direct path up the Avenue.

“Umph!” he said, and regarded his letter doubtfully before consigning it

to the pillar-box. “Here goes,” he said. Then he hovered undecidedly for

some seconds with his hands in his pockets and his mouth puckered to a

whistle before he turned to go home by the Avenue.

Ann Veronica forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and her

face resumed its expression of stern preoccupation. “It’s either now or

never,” she said to herself....

Morningside Park was a suburb that had not altogether, as people say,

come off. It consisted, like pre-Roman Gaul, of three parts. There was

first the Avenue, which ran in a consciously elegant curve from the

railway station into an undeveloped wilderness of agriculture, with big,

yellow brick villas on either side, and then there was the pavement, the

little clump of shops about the post-office, and under the railway arch

was a congestion of workmen’s dwellings. The road from Surbiton and

Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in the

ditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of little

red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables and very

brassy window-blinds. Behind the Avenue was a little hill, and an

iron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a stile under an

elm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going back into the Avenue

again.

“It’s either now or never,” said Ann Veronica, again ascending this

stile. “Much as I hate rows, I’ve either got to make a stand or give in

altogether.”

She seated herself in a loose and easy attitude and surveyed the

backs of the Avenue houses; then her eyes wandered to where the new

red-and-white villas peeped among the trees. She seemed to be making

some sort of inventory. “Ye Gods!” she said at last. “WHAT a place!

“Stuffy isn’t the word for it.

“I wonder what he takes me for?”

When presently she got down from the stile a certain note of internal

conflict, a touch of doubt, had gone from her warm-tinted face. She had

now the clear and tranquil expression of one whose mind is made up. Her

back had stiffened, and her hazel eyes looked steadfastly ahead.

As she approached the corner of the Avenue the blond, no-hatted man in

gray flannels appeared. There was a certain air of forced fortuity in

his manner. He saluted awkwardly. “Hello, Vee!” he said.

“Hello, Teddy!” she answered.

He hung vaguely for a moment as she passed.

But it was clear she was in no mood for Teddys. He realized that he was

committed to the path across the fields, an uninteresting walk at the

best of times.

“Oh, dammit!” he remarked, “dammit!” with great bitterness as he faced

it.