Part 1

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 lay on the breakfast-table

from Mr. Manning, and that her aunt focussed a brightly tactful

disregard upon this throughout the meal. Ann Veronica had come down

thinking of nothing in the world but her inflexible resolution to go to

the dance in the teeth of all opposition. She did not know Mr. Manning’s

handwriting, and opened his letter and read some lines before its import

appeared. Then for a time she forgot the Fadden affair altogether.

With a well-simulated unconcern and a heightened color she finished her

breakfast.

She was not obliged to go to the Tredgold College, because as yet the

College had not settled down for the session. She was supposed to be

reading at home, and after breakfast she strolled into the vegetable

garden, and having taken up a position upon the staging of a disused

greenhouse that had the double advantage of being hidden from the

windows of the house and secure from the sudden appearance of any one,

she resumed the reading of Mr. Manning’s letter.

Mr. Manning’s handwriting had an air of being clear without being easily

legible; it was large and rather roundish, with a lack of definition

about the letters and a disposition to treat the large ones as

liberal-minded people nowadays treat opinions, as all amounting to the

same thing really--a years-smoothed boyish rather than an adult hand.

And it filled seven sheets of notepaper, each written only on one side.

“MY DEAR MISS STANLEY,” it began,--“I hope you will forgive my

bothering you with a letter, but I have been thinking very much over our

conversation at Lady Palsworthy’s, and I feel there are things I want

to say to you so much that I cannot wait until we meet again. It is the

worst of talk under such social circumstances that it is always getting

cut off so soon as it is beginning; and I went home that afternoon

feeling I had said nothing--literally nothing--of the things I had meant

to say to you and that were coursing through my head. They were things I

had meant very much to talk to you about, so that I went home vexed and

disappointed, and only relieved myself a little by writing a few verses.

I wonder if you will mind very much when I tell you they were suggested

by you. You must forgive the poet’s license I take. Here is one verse.

The metrical irregularity is intentional, because I want, as it were, to

put you apart: to change the lilt and the mood altogether when I speak

of you.

“‘A SONG OF LADIES AND MY LADY

“‘Saintly white and a lily is Mary,

Margaret’s violets, sweet and shy;

Green and dewy is Nellie-bud fairy,

Forget-me-nots live in Gwendolen’s eye.

Annabel shines like a star in the darkness,

Rosamund queens it a rose, deep rose;

But the lady I love is like sunshine in April weather,

She gleams and gladdens, she warms--and goes.’

“Crude, I admit. But let that verse tell my secret. All bad

verse--originally the epigram was Lang’s, I believe--is written in a

state of emotion.

“My dear Miss Stanley, when I talked to you the other afternoon of work

and politics and such-like things, my mind was all the time resenting it

beyond measure. There we were discussing whether you should have a vote,

and I remembered the last occasion we met it was about your prospects of

success in the medical profession or as a Government official such as a

number of women now are, and all the time my heart was crying out within

me, ‘Here is the Queen of your career.’ I wanted, as I have never wanted

before, to take you up, to make you mine, to carry you off and set you

apart from all the strain and turmoil of life. For nothing will ever

convince me that it is not the man’s share in life to shield, to

protect, to lead and toil and watch and battle with the world at large.

I want to be your knight, your servant, your protector, your--I dare

scarcely write the word--your husband. So I come suppliant. I am

five-and-thirty, and I have knocked about in the world and tasted the

quality of life. I had a hard fight to begin with to win my way into the

Upper Division--I was third on a list of forty-seven--and since then I

have found myself promoted almost yearly in a widening sphere of social

service. Before I met you I never met any one whom I felt I could

love, but you have discovered depths in my own nature I had scarcely

suspected. Except for a few early ebullitions of passion, natural to

a warm and romantic disposition, and leaving no harmful

after-effects--ebullitions that by the standards of the higher truth I

feel no one can justly cast a stone at, and of which I for one am by no

means ashamed--I come to you a pure and unencumbered man. I love you.

In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property and

further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you a life

of wide and generous refinement, travel, books, discussion, and easy

relations with a circle of clever and brilliant and thoughtful people

with whom my literary work has brought me into contact, and of which,

seeing me only as you have done alone in Morningside Park, you can have

no idea. I have a certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic,

and I belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of

the day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of affairs,

artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally, mingle together

in the easiest and most delightful intercourse. That is my real milieu,

and one that I am convinced you would not only adorn but delight in.

“I find it very hard to write this letter. There are so many things

I want to tell you, and they stand on such different levels, that

the effect is necessarily confusing and discordant, and I find myself

doubting if I am really giving you the thread of emotion that should run

through all this letter. For although I must confess it reads very much

like an application or a testimonial or some such thing as that, I can

assure you I am writing this in fear and trembling with a sinking heart.

My mind is full of ideas and images that I have been cherishing and

accumulating--dreams of travelling side by side, of lunching quietly

together in some jolly restaurant, of moonlight and music and all that

side of life, of seeing you dressed like a queen and shining in some

brilliant throng--mine; of your looking at flowers in some old-world

garden, our garden--there are splendid places to be got down in Surrey,

and a little runabout motor is quite within my means. You know they say,

as, indeed, I have just quoted already, that all bad poetry is written

in a state of emotion, but I have no doubt that this is true of bad

offers of marriage. I have often felt before that it is only when one

has nothing to say that one can write easy poetry. Witness Browning. And

how can I get into one brief letter the complex accumulated desires of

what is now, I find on reference to my diary, nearly sixteen months of

letting my mind run on you--ever since that jolly party at Surbiton,

where we raced and beat the other boat. You steered and I rowed stroke.

My very sentences stumble and give way. But I do not even care if I am

absurd. I am a resolute man, and hitherto when I have wanted a thing I

have got it; but I have never yet wanted anything in my life as I have

wanted you. It isn’t the same thing. I am afraid because I love you, so

that the mere thought of failure hurts. If I did not love you so much I

believe I could win you by sheer force of character, for people tell me

I am naturally of the dominating type. Most of my successes in life have

been made with a sort of reckless vigor.

“Well, I have said what I had to say, stumblingly and badly, and baldly.

But I am sick of tearing up letters and hopeless of getting what I have

to say better said. It would be easy enough for me to write an eloquent

letter about something else. Only I do not care to write about anything

else. Let me put the main question to you now that I could not put the

other afternoon. Will you marry me, Ann Veronica?

“Very sincerely yours,

“HUBERT MANNING.”

Ann Veronica read this letter through with grave, attentive eyes.

Her interest grew as she read, a certain distaste disappeared. Twice she

smiled, but not unkindly. Then she went back and mixed up the sheets in

a search for particular passages. Finally she fell into reflection.

“Odd!” she said. “I suppose I shall have to write an answer. It’s so

different from what one has been led to expect.”

She became aware of her aunt, through the panes of the greenhouse,

advancing with an air of serene unconsciousness from among the raspberry

canes.

“No you don’t!” said Ann Veronica, and walked out at a brisk and

business-like pace toward the house.

“I’m going for a long tramp, auntie,” she said.

“Alone, dear?”

“Yes, aunt. I’ve got a lot of things to think about.”

Miss Stanley reflected as Ann Veronica went toward the house. She

thought her niece very hard and very self-possessed and self-confident.

She ought to be softened and tender and confidential at this phase of

her life. She seemed to have no idea whatever of the emotional states

that were becoming to her age and position. Miss Stanley walked round

the garden thinking, and presently house and garden reverberated to Ann

Veronica’s slamming of the front door.

“I wonder!” said Miss Stanley.

For a long time she surveyed a row of towering holly-hocks, as though

they offered an explanation. Then she went in and up-stairs, hesitated

on the landing, and finally, a little breathless and with an air of

great dignity, opened the door and walked into Ann Veronica’s room. It

was a neat, efficient-looking room, with a writing-table placed with a

business-like regard to the window, and a bookcase surmounted by a

pig’s skull, a dissected frog in a sealed bottle, and a pile of

shiny, black-covered note-books. In the corner of the room were two

hockey-sticks and a tennis-racket, and upon the walls Ann Veronica,

by means of autotypes, had indicated her proclivities in art. But Miss

Stanley took no notice of these things. She walked straight across to

the wardrobe and opened it. There, hanging among Ann Veronica’s more

normal clothing, was a skimpy dress of red canvas, trimmed with cheap

and tawdry braid, and short--it could hardly reach below the knee. On

the same peg and evidently belonging to it was a black velvet Zouave

jacket. And then! a garment that was conceivably a secondary skirt.

Miss Stanley hesitated, and took first one and then another of the

constituents of this costume off its peg and surveyed it.

The third item she took with a trembling hand by its waistbelt. As she

raised it, its lower portion fell apart into two baggy crimson masses.

“TROUSERS!” she whispered.

Her eyes travelled about the room as if in appeal to the very chairs.

Tucked under the writing-table a pair of yellow and gold Turkish

slippers of a highly meretricious quality caught her eye. She walked

over to them still carrying the trousers in her hands, and stooped to

examine them. They were ingenious disguises of gilt paper destructively

gummed, it would seem, to Ann Veronicas’ best dancing-slippers.

Then she reverted to the trousers.

“How CAN I tell him?” whispered Miss Stanley.