Part 5
She had sent her father a telegram from the East Strand post-office
worded thus:
| All | is | well | with | me |
|---------|-----------|----------|----------|---------|
| and | quite | safe | Veronica | |
-----------------------------------------------------
and afterward she had dined a la carte upon a cutlet, and had then set
herself to write an answer to Mr. Manning’s proposal of marriage. But
she had found it very difficult.
“DEAR MR. MANNING,” she had begun. So far it had been plain sailing,
and it had seemed fairly evident to go on: “I find it very difficult to
answer your letter.”
But after that neither ideas nor phrases had come and she had fallen
thinking of the events of the day. She had decided that she would spend
the next morning answering advertisements in the papers that abounded in
the writing-room; and so, after half an hour’s perusal of back numbers
of the Sketch in the drawing-room, she had gone to bed.
She found next morning, when she came to this advertisement answering,
that it was more difficult than she had supposed. In the first place
there were not so many suitable advertisements as she had expected.
She sat down by the paper-rack with a general feeling of resemblance
to Vivie Warren, and looked through the Morning Post and Standard and
Telegraph, and afterward the half-penny sheets. The Morning Post was
hungry for governesses and nursery governesses, but held out no other
hopes; the Daily Telegraph that morning seemed eager only for skirt
hands. She went to a writing-desk and made some memoranda on a sheet of
note-paper, and then remembered that she had no address as yet to which
letters could be sent.
She decided to leave this matter until the morrow and devote the morning
to settling up with Mr. Manning. At the cost of quite a number of torn
drafts she succeeded in evolving this:
“DEAR MR. MANNING,--I find it very difficult to answer your letter.
I hope you won’t mind if I say first that I think it does me an
extraordinary honor that you should think of any one like myself
so highly and seriously, and, secondly, that I wish it had not been
written.”
She surveyed this sentence for some time before going on. “I wonder,”
she said, “why one writes him sentences like that? It’ll have to go,”
she decided, “I’ve written too many already.” She went on, with a
desperate attempt to be easy and colloquial:
“You see, we were rather good friends, I thought, and now perhaps it
will be difficult for us to get back to the old friendly footing. But if
that can possibly be done I want it to be done. You see, the plain fact
of the case is that I think I am too young and ignorant for marriage.
I have been thinking these things over lately, and it seems to me that
marriage for a girl is just the supremest thing in life. It isn’t just
one among a number of important things; for her it is the important
thing, and until she knows far more than I know of the facts of life,
how is she to undertake it? So please; if you will, forget that you
wrote that letter, and forgive this answer. I want you to think of me
just as if I was a man, and quite outside marriage altogether.
“I do hope you will be able to do this, because I value men friends.
I shall be very sorry if I cannot have you for a friend. I think that
there is no better friend for a girl than a man rather older than
herself.
“Perhaps by this time you will have heard of the step I have taken in
leaving my home. Very likely you will disapprove highly of what I have
done--I wonder? You may, perhaps, think I have done it just in a fit of
childish petulance because my father locked me in when I wanted to go
to a ball of which he did not approve. But really it is much more
than that. At Morningside Park I feel as though all my growing up was
presently to stop, as though I was being shut in from the light of life,
and, as they say in botany, etiolated. I was just like a sort of dummy
that does things as it is told--that is to say, as the strings are
pulled. I want to be a person by myself, and to pull my own strings. I
had rather have trouble and hardship like that than be taken care of by
others. I want to be myself. I wonder if a man can quite understand that
passionate feeling? It is quite a passionate feeling. So I am already
no longer the girl you knew at Morningside Park. I am a young person
seeking employment and freedom and self-development, just as in quite
our first talk of all I said I wanted to be.
“I do hope you will see how things are, and not be offended with me or
frightfully shocked and distressed by what I have done.
“Very sincerely yours,
“ANN VERONICA STANLEY.”