Part 3

She dismissed the first hotels she passed, she scarcely knew why, mainly

perhaps from the mere dread of entering them, and crossed Waterloo

Bridge at a leisurely pace. It was high afternoon, there was no great

throng of foot-passengers, and many an eye from omnibus and pavement

rested gratefully on her fresh, trim presence as she passed young

and erect, with the light of determination shining through the quiet

self-possession of her face. She was dressed as English girls do dress

for town, without either coquetry or harshness: her collarless blouse

confessed a pretty neck, her eyes were bright and steady, and her dark

hair waved loosely and graciously over her ears....

It seemed at first the most beautiful afternoon of all time to her,

and perhaps the thrill of her excitement did add a distinctive and

culminating keenness to the day. The river, the big buildings on the

north bank, Westminster, and St. Paul’s, were rich and wonderful with

the soft sunshine of London, the softest, the finest grained, the most

penetrating and least emphatic sunshine in the world. The very carts

and vans and cabs that Wellington Street poured out incessantly upon

the bridge seemed ripe and good in her eyes. A traffic of copious barges

slumbered over the face of the river-barges either altogether stagnant

or dreaming along in the wake of fussy tugs; and above circled, urbanely

voracious, the London seagulls. She had never been there before at that

hour, in that light, and it seemed to her as if she came to it all for

the first time. And this great mellow place, this London, now was hers,

to struggle with, to go where she pleased in, to overcome and live in.

“I am glad,” she told herself, “I came.”

She marked an hotel that seemed neither opulent nor odd in a little side

street opening on the Embankment, made up her mind with an effort, and,

returning by Hungerford Bridge to Waterloo, took a cab to this chosen

refuge with her two pieces of luggage. There was just a minute’s

hesitation before they gave her a room.

The young lady in the bureau said she would inquire, and Ann Veronica,

while she affected to read the appeal on a hospital collecting-box upon

the bureau counter, had a disagreeable sense of being surveyed from

behind by a small, whiskered gentleman in a frock-coat, who came out of

the inner office and into the hall among a number of equally observant

green porters to look at her and her bags. But the survey was

satisfactory, and she found herself presently in Room No. 47,

straightening her hat and waiting for her luggage to appear.

“All right so far,” she said to herself....