Part 4
MY DEAR VEE, he wrote.
These daughters! He gnawed his pen and reflected, tore the sheet up, and
began again.
“MY DEAR VERONICA,--Your aunt tells me you have involved yourself in
some arrangement with the Widgett girls about a Fancy Dress Ball in
London. I gather you wish to go up in some fantastic get-up, wrapped
about in your opera cloak, and that after the festivities you propose to
stay with these friends of yours, and without any older people in your
party, at an hotel. Now I am sorry to cross you in anything you have set
your heart upon, but I regret to say--”
“H’m,” he reflected, and crossed out the last four words.
“--but this cannot be.”
“No,” he said, and tried again: “but I must tell you quite definitely
that I feel it to be my duty to forbid any such exploit.”
“Damn!” he remarked at the defaced letter; and, taking a fresh sheet, he
recopied what he had written. A certain irritation crept into his manner
as he did so.
“I regret that you should ever have proposed it,” he went on.
He meditated, and began a new paragraph.
“The fact of it is, and this absurd project of yours only brings it to
a head, you have begun to get hold of some very queer ideas about what a
young lady in your position may or may not venture to do. I do not think
you quite understand my ideals or what is becoming as between father and
daughter. Your attitude to me--”
He fell into a brown study. It was so difficult to put precisely.
“--and your aunt--”
For a time he searched for the mot juste. Then he went on:
“--and, indeed, to most of the established things in life is, frankly,
unsatisfactory. You are restless, aggressive, critical with all
the crude unthinking criticism of youth. You have no grasp upon the
essential facts of life (I pray God you never may), and in your rash
ignorance you are prepared to dash into positions that may end in
lifelong regret. The life of a young girl is set about with prowling
pitfalls.”
He was arrested for a moment by an indistinct picture of Veronica
reading this last sentence. But he was now too deeply moved to trace
a certain unsatisfactoriness to its source in a mixture of metaphors.
“Well,” he said, argumentatively, “it IS. That’s all about it. It’s time
she knew.”
“The life of a young girl is set about with prowling pitfalls, from
which she must be shielded at all costs.”
His lips tightened, and he frowned with solemn resolution.
“So long as I am your father, so long as your life is entrusted to my
care, I feel bound by every obligation to use my authority to check this
odd disposition of yours toward extravagant enterprises. A day will come
when you will thank me. It is not, my dear Veronica, that I think there
is any harm in you; there is not. But a girl is soiled not only by evil
but by the proximity of evil, and a reputation for rashness may do
her as serious an injury as really reprehensible conduct. So do please
believe that in this matter I am acting for the best.”
He signed his name and reflected. Then he opened the study door and
called “Mollie!” and returned to assume an attitude of authority on the
hearthrug, before the blue flames and orange glow of the gas fire.
His sister appeared.
She was dressed in one of those complicated dresses that are all lace
and work and confused patternings of black and purple and cream about
the body, and she was in many ways a younger feminine version of the
same theme as himself. She had the same sharp nose--which, indeed, only
Ann Veronica, of all the family, had escaped. She carried herself well,
whereas her brother slouched, and there was a certain aristocratic
dignity about her that she had acquired through her long engagement to
a curate of family, a scion of the Wiltshire Edmondshaws. He had died
before they married, and when her brother became a widower she had
come to his assistance and taken over much of the care of his youngest
daughter. But from the first her rather old-fashioned conception of life
had jarred with the suburban atmosphere, the High School spirit and the
memories of the light and little Mrs. Stanley, whose family had been by
any reckoning inconsiderable--to use the kindliest term. Miss Stanley
had determined from the outset to have the warmest affection for her
youngest niece and to be a second mother in her life--a second and a
better one; but she had found much to battle with, and there was much in
herself that Ann Veronica failed to understand. She came in now with an
air of reserved solicitude.
Mr. Stanley pointed to the letter with a pipe he had drawn from his
jacket pocket. “What do you think of that?” he asked.
She took it up in her many-ringed hands and read it judicially. He
filled his pipe slowly.
“Yes,” she said at last, “it is firm and affectionate.”
“I could have said more.”
“You seem to have said just what had to be said. It seems to me exactly
what is wanted. She really must not go to that affair.”
She paused, and he waited for her to speak.
“I don’t think she quite sees the harm of those people or the sort of
life to which they would draw her,” she said. “They would spoil every
chance.”
“She has chances?” he said, helping her out.
“She is an extremely attractive girl,” she said; and added, “to some
people. Of course, one doesn’t like to talk about things until there are
things to talk about.”
“All the more reason why she shouldn’t get herself talked about.”
“That is exactly what I feel.”
Mr. Stanley took the letter and stood with it in his hand thoughtfully
for a time. “I’d give anything,” he remarked, “to see our little Vee
happily and comfortably married.”
He gave the note to the parlormaid the next morning in an inadvertent,
casual manner just as he was leaving the house to catch his London
train. When Ann Veronica got it she had at first a wild, fantastic idea
that it contained a tip.