Part 2

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 crossing these fields came into a

pretty overhung lane that led toward Caddington and the Downs. And

then her pace slackened. She tucked her stick under her arm and re-read

Manning’s letter.

“Let me think,” said Ann Veronica. “I wish this hadn’t turned up to-day

of all days.”

She found it difficult to begin thinking, and indeed she was anything

but clear what it was she had to think about. Practically it was most

of the chief interests in life that she proposed to settle in this

pedestrian meditation. Primarily it was her own problem, and in

particular the answer she had to give to Mr. Manning’s letter, but in

order to get data for that she found that she, having a logical and

ordered mind, had to decide upon the general relations of men to women,

the objects and conditions of marriage and its bearing upon the

welfare of the race, the purpose of the race, the purpose, if any, of

everything....

“Frightful lot of things aren’t settled,” said Ann Veronica. In

addition, the Fadden Dance business, all out of proportion, occupied

the whole foreground of her thoughts and threw a color of rebellion

over everything. She kept thinking she was thinking about Mr. Manning’s

proposal of marriage and finding she was thinking of the dance.

For a time her efforts to achieve a comprehensive concentration were

dispersed by the passage of the village street of Caddington, the

passing of a goggled car-load of motorists, and the struggles of a

stable lad mounted on one recalcitrant horse and leading another. When

she got back to her questions again in the monotonous high-road that led

up the hill, she found the image of Mr. Manning central in her mind.

He stood there, large and dark, enunciating, in his clear voice from

beneath his large mustache, clear flat sentences, deliberately kindly.

He proposed, he wanted to possess her! He loved her.

Ann Veronica felt no repulsion at the prospect. That Mr. Manning loved

her presented itself to her bloodlessly, stilled from any imaginative

quiver or thrill of passion or disgust. The relationship seemed to have

almost as much to do with blood and body as a mortgage. It was something

that would create a mutual claim, a relationship. It was in another

world from that in which men will die for a kiss, and touching hands

lights fires that burn up lives--the world of romance, the world of

passionately beautiful things.

But that other world, in spite of her resolute exclusion of it, was

always looking round corners and peeping through chinks and crannies,

and rustling and raiding into the order in which she chose to live,

shining out of pictures at her, echoing in lyrics and music; it invaded

her dreams, it wrote up broken and enigmatical sentences upon the

passage walls of her mind. She was aware of it now as if it were a

voice shouting outside a house, shouting passionate verities in a hot

sunlight, a voice that cries while people talk insincerely in a darkened

room and pretend not to hear. Its shouting now did in some occult manner

convey a protest that Mr. Manning would on no account do, though he

was tall and dark and handsome and kind, and thirty-five and adequately

prosperous, and all that a husband should be. But there was, it

insisted, no mobility in his face, no movement, nothing about him that

warmed. If Ann Veronica could have put words to that song they

would have been, “Hot-blooded marriage or none!” but she was far too

indistinct in this matter to frame any words at all.

“I don’t love him,” said Ann Veronica, getting a gleam. “I don’t see

that his being a good sort matters. That really settles about that....

But it means no end of a row.”

For a time she sat on a rail before leaving the road for the downland

turf. “But I wish,” she said, “I had some idea what I was really up to.”

Her thoughts went into solution for a time, while she listened to a lark

singing.

“Marriage and mothering,” said Ann Veronica, with her mind crystallizing

out again as the lark dropped to the nest in the turf. “And all the rest

of it perhaps is a song.”