Part 2
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 lingered at their work and made them
subtle and fine. She was slender, and sometimes she seemed tall, and
walked and carried herself lightly and joyfully as one who commonly
and habitually feels well, and sometimes she stooped a little and
was preoccupied. Her lips came together with an expression between
contentment and the faintest shadow of a smile, her manner was one of
quiet reserve, and behind this mask she was wildly discontented and
eager for freedom and life.
She wanted to live. She was vehemently impatient--she did not clearly
know for what--to do, to be, to experience. And experience was slow in
coming. All the world about her seemed to be--how can one put it?--in
wrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer. The blinds
were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what
colors these gray swathings hid. She wanted to know. And there was no
intimation whatever that the blinds would ever go up or the windows or
doors be opened, or the chandeliers, that seemed to promise such a blaze
of fire, unveiled and furnished and lit. Dim souls flitted about her,
not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in undertones....
During her school days, especially her earlier school days, the world
had been very explicit with her, telling her what to do, what not to do,
giving her lessons to learn and games to play and interests of the most
suitable and various kinds. Presently she woke up to the fact that there
was a considerable group of interests called being in love and getting
married, with certain attractive and amusing subsidiary developments,
such as flirtation and “being interested” in people of the opposite sex.
She approached this field with her usual liveliness of apprehension. But
here she met with a check. These interests her world promptly, through
the agency of schoolmistresses, older school-mates, her aunt, and a
number of other responsible and authoritative people, assured her she
must on no account think about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moral
instruction mistress, was particularly explicit upon this score, and
they all agreed in indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds
ran on such matters, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dress
or bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike any
other group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly ashamed of.
Nevertheless, Ann Veronica found it a difficult matter not to think of
these things. However having a considerable amount of pride, she decided
she would disavow these undesirable topics and keep her mind away from
them just as far as she could, but it left her at the end of her school
days with that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at loose
ends.
The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no particular
place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a functionless
existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels, walks, and dusting
in her father’s house. She thought study would be better. She was a
clever girl, the best of her year in the High School, and she made
a valiant fight for Somerville or Newnham but her father had met and
argued with a Somerville girl at a friend’s dinner-table and he thought
that sort of thing unsexed a woman. He said simply that he wanted her to
live at home. There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhile
she went on at school. They compromised at length on the science course
at the Tredgold Women’s College--she had already matriculated into
London University from school--she came of age, and she bickered with
her aunt for latch-key privileges on the strength of that and her season
ticket. Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind, thinly
disguised as literature and art. She read voraciously, and presently,
because of her aunt’s censorship, she took to smuggling any books she
thought might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, and
she went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable friend
to accompany her. She passed her general science examination with double
honors and specialized in science. She happened to have an acute sense
of form and unusual mental lucidity, and she found in biology, and
particularly in comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest,
albeit the illumination it cast upon her personal life was not
altogether direct. She dissected well, and in a year she found herself
chafing at the limitations of the lady B. Sc. who retailed a store of
faded learning in the Tredgold laboratory. She had already realized that
this instructress was hopelessly wrong and foggy--it is the test of the
good comparative anatomist--upon the skull. She discovered a desire to
enter as a student in the Imperial College at Westminster, where Russell
taught, and go on with her work at the fountain-head.
She had asked about that already, and her father had replied, evasively:
“We’ll have to see about that, little Vee; we’ll have to see about
that.” In that posture of being seen about the matter hung until she
seemed committed to another session at the Tredgold College, and in the
mean time a small conflict arose and brought the latch-key question, and
in fact the question of Ann Veronica’s position generally, to an acute
issue.
In addition to the various business men, solicitors, civil servants,
and widow ladies who lived in the Morningside Park Avenue, there was a
certain family of alien sympathies and artistic quality, the Widgetts,
with which Ann Veronica had become very friendly. Mr. Widgett was a
journalist and art critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suit
and “art” brown ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday
morning, travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly
despised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the station.
He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three daughters with
peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found adorable. Two of these
had been her particular intimates at the High School, and had done much
to send her mind exploring beyond the limits of the available literature
at home. It was a cheerful, irresponsible, shamelessly hard-up family in
the key of faded green and flattened purple, and the girls went on from
the High School to the Fadden Art School and a bright, eventful life of
art student dances, Socialist meetings, theatre galleries, talking about
work, and even, at intervals, work; and ever and again they drew Ann
Veronica from her sound persistent industry into the circle of these
experiences. They had asked her to come to the first of the two great
annual Fadden Dances, the October one, and Ann Veronica had accepted
with enthusiasm. And now her father said she must not go.
He had “put his foot down,” and said she must not go.
Going involved two things that all Ann Veronica’s tact had been
ineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father. Her usual dignified
reserve had availed her nothing. One point was that she was to wear
fancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair’s bride, and the other was that
she was to spend whatever vestiges of the night remained after the dance
was over in London with the Widgett girls and a select party in “quite a
decent little hotel” near Fitzroy Square.
“But, my dear!” said Ann Veronica’s aunt.
“You see,” said Ann Veronica, with the air of one who shares a
difficulty, “I’ve promised to go. I didn’t realize--I don’t see how I
can get out of it now.”
Then it was her father issued his ultimatum. He had conveyed it to her,
not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to her a singularly
ignoble method of prohibition. “He couldn’t look me in the face and say
it,” said Ann Veronica.
“But of course it’s aunt’s doing really.”
And thus it was that as Ann Veronica neared the gates of home, she said
to herself: “I’ll have it out with him somehow. I’ll have it out with
him. And if he won’t--”
But she did not give even unspoken words to the alternative at that
time.