Part 5

Yet Ann Veronica was thinking a very great deal about love. A dozen

shynesses and intellectual barriers were being outflanked or broken

down in her mind. All the influences about her worked with her own

predisposition and against all the traditions of her home and upbringing

to deal with the facts of life in an unabashed manner. Ramage, by a

hundred skilful hints had led her to realize that the problem of her own

life was inseparably associated with, and indeed only one special case

of, the problems of any woman’s life, and that the problem of a woman’s

life is love.

“A young man comes into life asking how best he may place himself,”

Ramage had said; “a woman comes into life thinking instinctively how

best she may give herself.”

She noted that as a good saying, and it germinated and spread tentacles

of explanation through her brain. The biological laboratory, perpetually

viewing life as pairing and breeding and selection, and again pairing

and breeding, seemed only a translated generalization of that assertion.

And all the talk of the Miniver people and the Widgett people seemed

always to be like a ship in adverse weather on the lee shore of love.

“For seven years,” said Ann Veronica, “I have been trying to keep myself

from thinking about love....

“I have been training myself to look askance at beautiful things.”

She gave herself permission now to look at this squarely. She made

herself a private declaration of liberty. “This is mere nonsense, mere

tongue-tied fear!” she said. “This is the slavery of the veiled life.

I might as well be at Morningside Park. This business of love is the

supreme affair in life, it is the woman’s one event and crisis that

makes up for all her other restrictions, and I cower--as we all

cower--with a blushing and paralyzed mind until it overtakes me!...

“I’ll be hanged if I do.”

But she could not talk freely about love, she found, for all that

manumission.

Ramage seemed always fencing about the forbidden topic, probing for

openings, and she wondered why she did not give him them. But something

instinctive prevented that, and with the finest resolve not to be

“silly” and prudish she found that whenever he became at all bold

in this matter she became severely scientific and impersonal, almost

entomological indeed, in her method; she killed every remark as he made

it and pinned it out for examination. In the biological laboratory that

was their invincible tone. But she disapproved more and more of her own

mental austerity. Here was an experienced man of the world, her friend,

who evidently took a great interest in this supreme topic and was

willing to give her the benefit of his experiences! Why should not she

be at her ease with him? Why should not she know things? It is hard

enough anyhow for a human being to learn, she decided, but it is a dozen

times more difficult than it need be because of all this locking of the

lips and thoughts.

She contrived to break down the barriers of shyness at last in one

direction, and talked one night of love and the facts of love with Miss

Miniver.

But Miss Miniver was highly unsatisfactory. She repeated phrases of Mrs.

Goopes’s: “Advanced people,” she said, with an air of great elucidation,

“tend to GENERALIZE love. ‘He prayeth best who loveth best--all things

both great and small.’ For my own part I go about loving.”

“Yes, but men;” said Ann Veronica, plunging; “don’t you want the love of

men?”

For some seconds they remained silent, both shocked by this question.

Miss Miniver looked over her glasses at her friend almost balefully.

“NO!” she said, at last, with something in her voice that reminded Ann

Veronica of a sprung tennis-racket.

“I’ve been through all that,” she went on, after a pause.

She spoke slowly. “I have never yet met a man whose intellect I could

respect.”

Ann Veronica looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and decided to

persist on principle.

“But if you had?” she said.

“I can’t imagine it,” said Miss Miniver. “And think, think”--her voice

sank--“of the horrible coarseness!”

“What coarseness?” said Ann Veronica.

“My dear Vee!” Her voice became very low. “Don’t you know?”

“Oh! I know--”

“Well--” Her face was an unaccustomed pink.

Ann Veronica ignored her friend’s confusion.

“Don’t we all rather humbug about the coarseness? All we women, I mean,”

said she. She decided to go on, after a momentary halt. “We pretend

bodies are ugly. Really they are the most beautiful things in the world.

We pretend we never think of everything that makes us what we are.”

“No,” cried Miss Miniver, almost vehemently. “You are wrong! I did not

think you thought such things. Bodies! Bodies! Horrible things! We are

souls. Love lives on a higher plane. We are not animals. If ever I

did meet a man I could love, I should love him”--her voice dropped

again--“platonically.”

She made her glasses glint. “Absolutely platonically,” she said.

“Soul to soul.”

She turned her face to the fire, gripped her hands upon her elbows, and

drew her thin shoulders together in a shrug. “Ugh!” she said.

Ann Veronica watched her and wondered about her.

“We do not want the men,” said Miss Miniver; “we do not want them, with

their sneers and loud laughter. Empty, silly, coarse brutes. Brutes!

They are the brute still with us! Science some day may teach us a way

to do without them. It is only the women matter. It is not every sort of

creature needs--these males. Some have no males.”

“There’s green-fly,” admitted Ann Veronica. “And even then--”

The conversation hung for a thoughtful moment.

Ann Veronica readjusted her chin on her hand. “I wonder which of us is

right,” she said. “I haven’t a scrap--of this sort of aversion.”

“Tolstoy is so good about this,” said Miss Miniver, regardless of her

friend’s attitude. “He sees through it all. The Higher Life and the

Lower. He sees men all defiled by coarse thoughts, coarse ways of living

cruelties. Simply because they are hardened by--by bestiality,

and poisoned by the juices of meat slain in anger and fermented

drinks--fancy! drinks that have been swarmed in by thousands and

thousands of horrible little bacteria!”

“It’s yeast,” said Ann Veronica--“a vegetable.”

“It’s all the same,” said Miss Miniver. “And then they are swollen up

and inflamed and drunken with matter. They are blinded to all fine

and subtle things--they look at life with bloodshot eyes and dilated

nostrils. They are arbitrary and unjust and dogmatic and brutish and

lustful.”

“But do you really think men’s minds are altered by the food they eat?”

“I know it,” said Miss Miniver. “Experte credo. When I am leading a true

life, a pure and simple life free of all stimulants and excitements, I

think--I think--oh! with pellucid clearness; but if I so much as take a

mouthful of meat--or anything--the mirror is all blurred.”