Part 6

It was remarkable to Ann Veronica how completely Mr. Manning, in his

entirely different dialect, indorsed her brother Roddy’s view of things.

He came along, he said, just to call, with large, loud apologies,

radiantly kind and good. Miss Stanley, it was manifest, had given him

Ann Veronica’s address. The kindly faced landlady had failed to catch

his name, and said he was a tall, handsome gentleman with a great black

mustache. Ann Veronica, with a sigh at the cost of hospitality, made a

hasty negotiation for an extra tea and for a fire in the ground-floor

apartment, and preened herself carefully for the interview. In the

little apartment, under the gas chandelier, his inches and his stoop

were certainly very effective. In the bad light he looked at once

military and sentimental and studious, like one of Ouida’s guardsmen

revised by Mr. Haldane and the London School of Economics and finished

in the Keltic school.

“It’s unforgivable of me to call, Miss Stanley,” he said, shaking hands

in a peculiar, high, fashionable manner; “but you know you said we might

be friends.”

“It’s dreadful for you to be here,” he said, indicating the yellow

presence of the first fog of the year without, “but your aunt told me

something of what had happened. It’s just like your Splendid Pride to do

it. Quite!”

He sat in the arm-chair and took tea, and consumed several of the

extra cakes which she had sent out for and talked to her and expressed

himself, looking very earnestly at her with his deep-set eyes, and

carefully avoiding any crumbs on his mustache the while. Ann Veronica

sat firelit by her tea-tray with, quite unconsciously, the air of an

expert hostess.

“But how is it all going to end?” said Mr. Manning.

“Your father, of course,” he said, “must come to realize just how

Splendid you are! He doesn’t understand. I’ve seen him, and he doesn’t

a bit understand. _I_ didn’t understand before that letter. It makes me

want to be just everything I CAN be to you. You’re like some splendid

Princess in Exile in these Dreadful Dingy apartments!”

“I’m afraid I’m anything but a Princess when it comes to earning a

salary,” said Ann Veronica. “But frankly, I mean to fight this through

if I possibly can.”

“My God!” said Manning, in a stage-aside. “Earning a salary!”

“You’re like a Princess in Exile!” he repeated, overruling her. “You

come into these sordid surroundings--you mustn’t mind my calling them

sordid--and it makes them seem as though they didn’t matter.... I

don’t think they do matter. I don’t think any surroundings could throw a

shadow on you.”

Ann Veronica felt a slight embarrassment. “Won’t you have some more tea,

Mr. Manning?” she asked.

“You know--,” said Mr. Manning, relinquishing his cup without answering

her question, “when I hear you talk of earning a living, it’s as if I

heard of an archangel going on the Stock Exchange--or Christ selling

doves.... Forgive my daring. I couldn’t help the thought.”

“It’s a very good image,” said Ann Veronica.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

“But does it correspond with the facts of the case? You know, Mr.

Manning, all this sort of thing is very well as sentiment, but does it

correspond with the realities? Are women truly such angelic things and

men so chivalrous? You men have, I know, meant to make us Queens and

Goddesses, but in practice--well, look, for example, at the stream of

girls one meets going to work of a morning, round-shouldered, cheap, and

underfed! They aren’t queens, and no one is treating them as queens.

And look, again, at the women one finds letting lodgings.... I was

looking for rooms last week. It got on my nerves--the women I saw. Worse

than any man. Everywhere I went and rapped at a door I found behind it

another dreadful dingy woman--another fallen queen, I suppose--dingier

than the last, dirty, you know, in grain. Their poor hands!”

“I know,” said Mr. Manning, with entirely suitable emotion.

“And think of the ordinary wives and mothers, with their anxiety, their

limitations, their swarms of children!”

Mr. Manning displayed distress. He fended these things off from him with

the rump of his fourth piece of cake. “I know that our social order is

dreadful enough,” he said, “and sacrifices all that is best and most

beautiful in life. I don’t defend it.”

“And besides, when it comes to the idea of queens,” Ann Veronica went

on, “there’s twenty-one and a half million women to twenty million men.

Suppose our proper place is a shrine. Still, that leaves over a million

shrines short, not reckoning widows who re-marry. And more boys die than

girls, so that the real disproportion among adults is even greater.”

“I know,” said Mr Manning, “I know these Dreadful Statistics. I know

there’s a sort of right in your impatience at the slowness of Progress.

But tell me one thing I don’t understand--tell me one thing: How can you

help it by coming down into the battle and the mire? That’s the thing

that concerns me.”

“Oh, I’m not trying to help it,” said Ann Veronica. “I’m only arguing

against your position of what a woman should be, and trying to get

it clear in my own mind. I’m in this apartment and looking for work

because--Well, what else can I do, when my father practically locks me

up?”

“I know,” said Mr. Manning, “I know. Don’t think I can’t sympathize and

understand. Still, here we are in this dingy, foggy city. Ye gods! what

a wilderness it is! Every one trying to get the better of every one,

every one regardless of every one--it’s one of those days when every one

bumps against you--every one pouring coal smoke into the air and making

confusion worse confounded, motor omnibuses clattering and smelling,

a horse down in the Tottenham Court Road, an old woman at the corner

coughing dreadfully--all the painful sights of a great city, and here

you come into it to take your chances. It’s too valiant, Miss Stanley,

too valiant altogether!”

Ann Veronica meditated. She had had two days of employment-seeking now.

“I wonder if it is.”

“It isn’t,” said Mr. Manning, “that I mind Courage in a Woman--I love

and admire Courage. What could be more splendid than a beautiful girl

facing a great, glorious tiger? Una and the Lion again, and all that!

But this isn’t that sort of thing; this is just a great, ugly, endless

wilderness of selfish, sweating, vulgar competition!”

“That you want to keep me out of?”

“Exactly!” said Mr. Manning.

“In a sort of beautiful garden-close--wearing lovely dresses and picking

beautiful flowers?”

“Ah! If one could!”

“While those other girls trudge to business and those other women let

lodgings. And in reality even that magic garden-close resolves itself

into a villa at Morningside Park and my father being more and more

cross and overbearing at meals--and a general feeling of insecurity and

futility.”

Mr. Manning relinquished his cup, and looked meaningly at Ann Veronica.

“There,” he said, “you don’t treat me fairly, Miss Stanley. My

garden-close would be a better thing than that.”

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

IDEALS AND A REALITY