Part 1

They decided to go to Switzerland at the session’s end. “We’ll clean up

everything tidy,” said Capes....

For her pride’s sake, and to save herself from long day-dreams and an

unappeasable longing for her lover, Ann Veronica worked hard at her

biology during those closing weeks. She was, as Capes had said, a

hard young woman. She was keenly resolved to do well in the school

examination, and not to be drowned in the seas of emotion that

threatened to submerge her intellectual being.

Nevertheless, she could not prevent a rising excitement as the dawn of

the new life drew near to her--a thrilling of the nerves, a secret

and delicious exaltation above the common circumstances of

existence. Sometimes her straying mind would become astonishingly

active--embroidering bright and decorative things that she could say to

Capes; sometimes it passed into a state of passive acquiescence, into

a radiant, formless, golden joy. She was aware of people--her aunt,

her father, her fellow-students, friends, and neighbors--moving about

outside this glowing secret, very much as an actor is aware of the dim

audience beyond the barrier of the footlights. They might applaud, or

object, or interfere, but the drama was her very own. She was going

through with that, anyhow.

The feeling of last days grew stronger with her as their number

diminished. She went about the familiar home with a clearer and clearer

sense of inevitable conclusions. She became exceptionally considerate

and affectionate with her father and aunt, and more and more concerned

about the coming catastrophe that she was about to precipitate upon

them. Her aunt had a once exasperating habit of interrupting her work

with demands for small household services, but now Ann Veronica rendered

them with a queer readiness of anticipatory propitiation. She was

greatly exercised by the problem of confiding in the Widgetts; they were

dears, and she talked away two evenings with Constance without broaching

the topic; she made some vague intimations in letters to Miss Miniver

that Miss Miniver failed to mark. But she did not bother her head very

much about her relations with these sympathizers.

And at length her penultimate day in Morningside Park dawned for her.

She got up early, and walked about the garden in the dewy June sunshine

and revived her childhood. She was saying good-bye to childhood and

home, and her making; she was going out into the great, multitudinous

world; this time there would be no returning. She was at the end of

girlhood and on the eve of a woman’s crowning experience. She visited

the corner that had been her own little garden--her forget-me-nots and

candytuft had long since been elbowed into insignificance by weeds; she

visited the raspberry-canes that had sheltered that first love affair

with the little boy in velvet, and the greenhouse where she had been

wont to read her secret letters. Here was the place behind the shed

where she had used to hide from Roddy’s persecutions, and here the

border of herbaceous perennials under whose stems was fairyland. The

back of the house had been the Alps for climbing, and the shrubs

in front of it a Terai. The knots and broken pale that made the

garden-fence scalable, and gave access to the fields behind, were still

to be traced. And here against a wall were the plum-trees. In spite of

God and wasps and her father, she had stolen plums; and once because of

discovered misdeeds, and once because she had realized that her mother

was dead, she had lain on her face in the unmown grass, beneath the

elm-trees that came beyond the vegetables, and poured out her soul in

weeping.

Remote little Ann Veronica! She would never know the heart of that child

again! That child had loved fairy princes with velvet suits and golden

locks, and she was in love with a real man named Capes, with little

gleams of gold on his cheek and a pleasant voice and firm and shapely

hands. She was going to him soon and certainly, going to his strong,

embracing arms. She was going through a new world with him side by side.

She had been so busy with life that, for a vast gulf of time, as it

seemed, she had given no thought to those ancient, imagined things of

her childhood. Now, abruptly, they were real again, though very distant,

and she had come to say farewell to them across one sundering year.

She was unusually helpful at breakfast, and unselfish about the eggs:

and then she went off to catch the train before her father’s. She did

this to please him. He hated travelling second-class with her--indeed,

he never did--but he also disliked travelling in the same train when his

daughter was in an inferior class, because of the look of the thing.

So he liked to go by a different train. And in the Avenue she had an

encounter with Ramage.

It was an odd little encounter, that left vague and dubitable

impressions in her mind. She was aware of him--a silk-hatted,

shiny-black figure on the opposite side of the Avenue; and then,

abruptly and startlingly, he crossed the road and saluted and spoke to

her.

“I MUST speak to you,” he said. “I can’t keep away from you.”

She made some inane response. She was struck by a change in his

appearance. His eyes looked a little bloodshot to her; his face had lost

something of its ruddy freshness.

He began a jerky, broken conversation that lasted until they reached the

station, and left her puzzled at its drift and meaning. She quickened

her pace, and so did he, talking at her slightly averted ear. She made

lumpish and inadequate interruptions rather than replies. At times he

seemed to be claiming pity from her; at times he was threatening her

with her check and exposure; at times he was boasting of his inflexible

will, and how, in the end, he always got what he wanted. He said that

his life was boring and stupid without her. Something or other--she

did not catch what--he was damned if he could stand. He was evidently

nervous, and very anxious to be impressive; his projecting eyes sought

to dominate. The crowning aspect of the incident, for her mind, was the

discovery that he and her indiscretion with him no longer mattered very

much. Its importance had vanished with her abandonment of compromise.

Even her debt to him was a triviality now.

And of course! She had a brilliant idea. It surprised her she hadn’t

thought of it before! She tried to explain that she was going to pay

him forty pounds without fail next week. She said as much to him. She

repeated this breathlessly.

“I was glad you did not send it back again,” he said.

He touched a long-standing sore, and Ann Veronica found herself vainly

trying to explain--the inexplicable. “It’s because I mean to send it

back altogether,” she said.

He ignored her protests in order to pursue some impressive line of his

own.

“Here we are, living in the same suburb,” he began. “We have to

be--modern.”

Her heart leaped within her as she caught that phrase. That knot also

would be cut. Modern, indeed! She was going to be as primordial as

chipped flint.