Part 7

“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.

“Solitary walks?”

“That’s the point of them. I think over all sorts of things.”

“Problems?”

“Sometimes quite difficult problems.”

“You’re lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother,

for instance, couldn’t. She had to do her thinking at home--under

inspection.”

She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of her

free young poise show in his face.

“I suppose things have changed?” she said.

“Never was such an age of transition.”

She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know. “Sufficient unto me is

the change thereof,” he said, with all the effect of an epigram.

“I must confess,” he said, “the New Woman and the New Girl intrigue me

profoundly. I am one of those people who are interested in women, more

interested than I am in anything else. I don’t conceal it. And the

change, the change of attitude! The way all the old clingingness

has been thrown aside is amazing. And all the old--the old trick of

shrinking up like a snail at a touch. If you had lived twenty years ago

you would have been called a Young Person, and it would have been your

chief duty in life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to

understand.”

“There’s quite enough still,” said Ann Veronica, smiling, “that one

doesn’t understand.”

“Quite. But your role would have been to go about saying, ‘I beg your

pardon’ in a reproving tone to things you understood quite well in your

heart and saw no harm in. That terrible Young Person! she’s vanished.

Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young Person!... I hope we may never

find her again.”

He rejoiced over this emancipation. “While that lamb was about every man

of any spirit was regarded as a dangerous wolf. We wore invisible chains

and invisible blinkers. Now, you and I can gossip at a gate, and Honi

soit qui mal y pense. The change has given man one good thing he never

had before,” he said. “Girl friends. And I am coming to believe the best

as well as the most beautiful friends a man can have are girl friends.”

He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:

“I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than to any man

alive.”

“I suppose we ARE more free than we were?” said Ann Veronica, keeping

the question general.

“Oh, there’s no doubt of it! Since the girls of the eighties broke

bounds and sailed away on bicycles--my young days go back to the very

beginnings of that--it’s been one triumphant relaxation.”

“Relaxation, perhaps. But are we any more free?”

“Well?”

“I mean we’ve long strings to tether us, but we are bound all the same.

A woman isn’t much freer--in reality.”

Mr. Ramage demurred.

“One runs about,” said Ann Veronica.

“Yes.”

“But it’s on condition one doesn’t do anything.”

“Do what?”

“Oh!--anything.”

He looked interrogation with a faint smile.

“It seems to me it comes to earning one’s living in the long run,” said

Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. “Until a girl can go away as a son does

and earn her independent income, she’s still on a string. It may be a

long string, long enough if you like to tangle up all sorts of people;

but there it is! If the paymaster pulls, home she must go. That’s what I

mean.”

Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that. He was a little impressed by

Ann Veronica’s metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed to Hetty

Widgett. “YOU wouldn’t like to be independent?” he asked, abruptly. “I

mean REALLY independent. On your own. It isn’t such fun as it seems.”

“Every one wants to be independent,” said Ann Veronica. “Every one. Man

or woman.”

“And you?”

“Rather!”

“I wonder why?”

“There’s no why. It’s just to feel--one owns one’s self.”

“Nobody does that,” said Ramage, and kept silence for a moment.

“But a boy--a boy goes out into the world and presently stands on his

own feet. He buys his own clothes, chooses his own company, makes his

own way of living.”

“You’d like to do that?”

“Exactly.”

“Would you like to be a boy?”

“I wonder! It’s out of the question, any way.”

Ramage reflected. “Why don’t you?”

“Well, it might mean rather a row.”

“I know--” said Ramage, with sympathy.

“And besides,” said Ann Veronica, sweeping that aspect aside, “what

could I do? A boy sails out into a trade or profession. But--it’s one

of the things I’ve just been thinking over. Suppose--suppose a girl

did want to start in life, start in life for herself--” She looked him

frankly in the eyes. “What ought she to do?”

“Suppose you--”

“Yes, suppose I--”

He felt that his advice was being asked. He became a little more

personal and intimate. “I wonder what you could do?” he said. “I should

think YOU could do all sorts of things....

“What ought you to do?” He began to produce his knowledge of the world

for her benefit, jerkily and allusively, and with a strong, rank flavor

of “savoir faire.” He took an optimist view of her chances. Ann Veronica

listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on the turf, and now and then she

asked a question or looked up to discuss a point. In the meanwhile,

as he talked, he scrutinized her face, ran his eyes over her careless,

gracious poise, wondered hard about her. He described her privately to

himself as a splendid girl. It was clear she wanted to get away from

home, that she was impatient to get away from home. Why? While the front

of his mind was busy warning her not to fall into the hopeless miseries

of underpaid teaching, and explaining his idea that for women of

initiative, quite as much as for men, the world of business had by far

the best chances, the back chambers of his brain were busy with the

problem of that “Why?”

His first idea as a man of the world was to explain her unrest by a

lover, some secret or forbidden or impossible lover. But he dismissed

that because then she would ask her lover and not him all these things.

Restlessness, then, was the trouble, simple restlessness: home bored

her. He could quite understand the daughter of Mr. Stanley being bored

and feeling limited. But was that enough? Dim, formless suspicions

of something more vital wandered about his mind. Was the young lady

impatient for experience? Was she adventurous? As a man of the world he

did not think it becoming to accept maidenly calm as anything more than

a mask. Warm life was behind that always, even if it slept. If it

was not an actual personal lover, it still might be the lover not yet

incarnate, not yet perhaps suspected....

He had diverged only a little from the truth when he said that his

chief interest in life was women. It wasn’t so much women as Woman that

engaged his mind. His was the Latin turn of thinking; he had fallen

in love at thirteen, and he was still capable--he prided himself--of

falling in love. His invalid wife and her money had been only the thin

thread that held his life together; beaded on that permanent relation

had been an inter-weaving series of other feminine experiences,

disturbing, absorbing, interesting, memorable affairs. Each one had

been different from the others, each had had a quality all its own, a

distinctive freshness, a distinctive beauty. He could not understand how

men could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful

research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing, these

complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and mounted to

the supremest, most passionate intimacy. All the rest of his existence

was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for it, worked for it, kept

himself in training for it.

So while he talked to this girl of work and freedom, his slightly

protuberant eyes were noting the gracious balance of her limbs and body

across the gate, the fine lines of her chin and neck. Her grave fine

face, her warm clear complexion, had already aroused his curiosity as he

had gone to and fro in Morningside Park, and here suddenly he was

near to her and talking freely and intimately. He had found her in

a communicative mood, and he used the accumulated skill of years in

turning that to account.

She was pleased and a little flattered by his interest and sympathy. She

became eager to explain herself, to show herself in the right light. He

was manifestly exerting his mind for her, and she found herself fully

disposed to justify his interest.

She, perhaps, displayed herself rather consciously as a fine

person unduly limited. She even touched lightly on her father’s

unreasonableness.

“I wonder,” said Ramage, “that more girls don’t think as you do and want

to strike out in the world.”

And then he speculated. “I wonder if you will?”

“Let me say one thing,” he said. “If ever you do and I can help you

in any way, by advice or inquiry or recommendation--You see, I’m no

believer in feminine incapacity, but I do perceive there is such a thing

as feminine inexperience. As a sex you’re a little under-trained--in

affairs. I’d take it--forgive me if I seem a little urgent--as a sort of

proof of friendliness. I can imagine nothing more pleasant in life than

to help you, because I know it would pay to help you. There’s something

about you, a little flavor of Will, I suppose, that makes one feel--good

luck about you and success....”

And while he talked and watched her as he talked, she answered, and

behind her listening watched and thought about him. She liked the

animated eagerness of his manner.

His mind seemed to be a remarkably full one; his knowledge of detailed

reality came in just where her own mind was most weakly equipped.

Through all he said ran one quality that pleased her--the quality of a

man who feels that things can be done, that one need not wait for the

world to push one before one moved. Compared with her father and Mr.

Manning and the men in “fixed” positions generally that she knew,

Ramage, presented by himself, had a fine suggestion of freedom, of

power, of deliberate and sustained adventure....

She was particularly charmed by his theory of friendship. It was really

very jolly to talk to a man in this way--who saw the woman in her and

did not treat her as a child. She was inclined to think that perhaps

for a girl the converse of his method was the case; an older man, a

man beyond the range of anything “nonsensical,” was, perhaps, the most

interesting sort of friend one could meet. But in that reservation it

may be she went a little beyond the converse of his view....

They got on wonderfully well together. They talked for the better part

of an hour, and at last walked together to the junction of highroad

and the bridle-path. There, after protestations of friendliness and

helpfulness that were almost ardent, he mounted a little clumsily and

rode off at an amiable pace, looking his best, making a leg with

his riding gaiters, smiling and saluting, while Ann Veronica turned

northward and so came to Micklechesil. There, in a little tea and

sweet-stuff shop, she bought and consumed slowly and absent-mindedly the

insufficient nourishment that is natural to her sex on such occasions.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE CRISIS