Part 3

Ann Veronica’s father was a solicitor with a good deal of company

business: a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic, clean-shaven

man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose, iron-gray hair,

gray eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small, circular baldness at the

crown of his head. His name was Peter. He had had five children at

irregular intervals, of whom Ann Veronica was the youngest, so that as

a parent he came to her perhaps a little practised and jaded and

inattentive; and he called her his “little Vee,” and patted her

unexpectedly and disconcertingly, and treated her promiscuously as of

any age between eleven and eight-and-twenty. The City worried him a good

deal, and what energy he had left over he spent partly in golf, a game

he treated very seriously, and partly in the practices of microscopic

petrography.

He “went in” for microscopy in the unphilosophical Victorian manner as

his “hobby.” A birthday present of a microscope had turned his mind to

technical microscopy when he was eighteen, and a chance friendship with

a Holborn microscope dealer had confirmed that bent. He had remarkably

skilful fingers and a love of detailed processes, and he had become one

of the most dexterous amateur makers of rock sections in the world.

He spent a good deal more money and time than he could afford upon the

little room at the top of the house, in producing new lapidary apparatus

and new microscopic accessories and in rubbing down slices of rock to

a transparent thinness and mounting them in a beautiful and dignified

manner. He did it, he said, “to distract his mind.” His chief successes

he exhibited to the Lowndean Microscopical Society, where their high

technical merit never failed to excite admiration. Their scientific

value was less considerable, since he chose rocks entirely with a

view to their difficulty of handling or their attractiveness at

conversaziones when done. He had a great contempt for the sections the

“theorizers” produced. They proved all sorts of things perhaps, but they

were thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work. Yet an indiscriminating,

wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts of distinctions....

He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fiction with

chromatic titles, The Red Sword, The Black Helmet, The Purple Robe, also

in order “to distract his mind.” He read it in winter in the evening

after dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with a tendency to

monopolize the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair of dappled fawn-skin

slippers across the fender. She wondered occasionally why his mind

needed so much distraction. His favorite newspaper was the Times, which

he began at breakfast in the morning often with manifest irritation, and

carried off to finish in the train, leaving no other paper at home.

It occurred to Ann Veronica once that she had known him when he was

younger, but day had followed day, and each had largely obliterated the

impression of its predecessor. But she certainly remembered that when

she was a little girl he sometimes wore tennis flannels, and also rode a

bicycle very dexterously in through the gates to the front door. And

in those days, too, he used to help her mother with her gardening, and

hover about her while she stood on the ladder and hammered creepers to

the scullery wall.

It had been Ann Veronica’s lot as the youngest child to live in a home

that became less animated and various as she grew up. Her mother had

died when she was thirteen, her two much older sisters had married

off--one submissively, one insubordinately; her two brothers had gone

out into the world well ahead of her, and so she had made what she could

of her father. But he was not a father one could make much of.

His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest

quality; they were creatures, he thought, either too bad for a modern

vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably desirable, or too pure

and good for life. He made this simple classification of a large and

various sex to the exclusion of all intermediate kinds; he held that

the two classes had to be kept apart even in thought and remote from one

another. Women are made like the potter’s vessels--either for worship

or contumely, and are withal fragile vessels. He had never wanted

daughters. Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealed

his chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and had

sworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom. He was

a manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he had loved his

dark-eyed, dainty bright-colored, and active little wife with a real

vein of passion in his sentiment. But he had always felt (he had never

allowed himself to think of it) that the promptitude of their family

was a little indelicate of her, and in a sense an intrusion. He had,

however, planned brilliant careers for his two sons, and, with a certain

human amount of warping and delay, they were pursuing these. One was

in the Indian Civil Service and one in the rapidly developing motor

business. The daughters, he had hoped, would be their mother’s care.

He had no ideas about daughters. They happen to a man.

Of course a little daughter is a delightful thing enough. It runs about

gayly, it romps, it is bright and pretty, it has enormous quantities of

soft hair and more power of expressing affection than its brothers. It

is a lovely little appendage to the mother who smiles over it, and it

does things quaintly like her, gestures with her very gestures. It makes

wonderful sentences that you can repeat in the City and are good

enough for Punch. You call it a lot of nicknames--“Babs” and “Bibs” and

“Viddles” and “Vee”; you whack at it playfully, and it whacks you back.

It loves to sit on your knee. All that is jolly and as it should be.

But a little daughter is one thing and a daughter quite another. There

one comes to a relationship that Mr. Stanley had never thought out.

When he found himself thinking about it, it upset him so that he at once

resorted to distraction. The chromatic fiction with which he relieved

his mind glanced but slightly at this aspect of life, and never with any

quality of guidance. Its heroes never had daughters, they borrowed other

people’s. The one fault, indeed, of this school of fiction for him was

that it had rather a light way with parental rights. His instinct was in

the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property, bound

to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a comfort in his

declining years just as he thought fit. About this conception of

ownership he perceived and desired a certain sentimental glamour, he

liked everything properly dressed, but it remained ownership. Ownership

seemed only a reasonable return for the cares and expenses of a

daughter’s upbringing. Daughters were not like sons. He perceived,

however, that both the novels he read and the world he lived in

discountenanced these assumptions. Nothing else was put in their place,

and they remained sotto voce, as it were, in his mind. The new and

the old cancelled out; his daughters became quasi-independent

dependents--which is absurd. One married as he wished and one against

his wishes, and now here was Ann Veronica, his little Vee, discontented

with her beautiful, safe, and sheltering home, going about with hatless

friends to Socialist meetings and art-class dances, and displaying a

disposition to carry her scientific ambitions to unwomanly lengths. She

seemed to think he was merely the paymaster, handing over the means

of her freedom. And now she insisted that she MUST leave the chastened

security of the Tredgold Women’s College for Russell’s unbridled

classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in pirate costume and

spend the residue of the night with Widgett’s ramshackle girls in some

indescribable hotel in Soho!

He had done his best not to think about her at all, but the situation

and his sister had become altogether too urgent. He had finally put

aside The Lilac Sunbonnet, gone into his study, lit the gas fire, and

written the letter that had brought these unsatisfactory relations to a

head.