Part 1

And now for some weeks Ann Veronica was to test her market value in the

world. She went about in a negligent November London that had become

very dark and foggy and greasy and forbidding indeed, and tried to find

that modest but independent employment she had so rashly assumed. She

went about, intent-looking and self-possessed, trim and fine, concealing

her emotions whatever they were, as the realities of her position opened

out before her. Her little bed-sitting-room was like a lair, and she

went out from it into this vast, dun world, with its smoke-gray houses,

its glaring streets of shops, its dark streets of homes, its orange-lit

windows, under skies of dull copper or muddy gray or black, much as an

animal goes out to seek food. She would come back and write letters,

carefully planned and written letters, or read some book she had fetched

from Mudie’s--she had invested a half-guinea with Mudie’s--or sit over

her fire and think.

Slowly and reluctantly she came to realize that Vivie Warren was what

is called an “ideal.” There were no such girls and no such positions. No

work that offered was at all of the quality she had vaguely postulated

for herself. With such qualifications as she possessed, two chief

channels of employment lay open, and neither attracted her, neither

seemed really to offer a conclusive escape from that subjection to

mankind against which, in the person of her father, she was rebelling.

One main avenue was for her to become a sort of salaried accessory wife

or mother, to be a governess or an assistant schoolmistress, or a very

high type of governess-nurse. The other was to go into business--into a

photographer’s reception-room, for example, or a costumer’s or hat-shop.

The first set of occupations seemed to her to be altogether too domestic

and restricted; for the latter she was dreadfully handicapped by her

want of experience. And also she didn’t like them. She didn’t like the

shops, she didn’t like the other women’s faces; she thought the

smirking men in frock-coats who dominated these establishments the

most intolerable persons she had ever had to face. One called her very

distinctly “My dear!”

Two secretarial posts did indeed seem to offer themselves in which, at

least, there was no specific exclusion of womanhood; one was under

a Radical Member of Parliament, and the other under a Harley Street

doctor, and both men declined her proffered services with the utmost

civility and admiration and terror. There was also a curious interview

at a big hotel with a middle-aged, white-powdered woman, all covered

with jewels and reeking of scent, who wanted a Companion. She did not

think Ann Veronica would do as her companion.

And nearly all these things were fearfully ill-paid. They carried no

more than bare subsistence wages; and they demanded all her time and

energy. She had heard of women journalists, women writers, and so

forth; but she was not even admitted to the presence of the editors she

demanded to see, and by no means sure that if she had been she could

have done any work they might have given her. One day she desisted from

her search and went unexpectedly to the Tredgold College. Her place

was not filled; she had been simply noted as absent, and she did a

comforting day of admirable dissection upon the tortoise. She was so

interested, and this was such a relief from the trudging anxiety of her

search for work, that she went on for a whole week as if she was still

living at home. Then a third secretarial opening occurred and renewed

her hopes again: a position as amanuensis--with which some of the

lighter duties of a nurse were combined--to an infirm gentleman of means

living at Twickenham, and engaged upon a great literary research to

prove that the “Faery Queen” was really a treatise upon molecular

chemistry written in a peculiar and picturesquely handled cipher.