ANN VERONICA. H. G. Wells
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flavor of tobacco. They have no amenities, they scratch the mellow surface of things almost as if they did it on purpose; and Lady Palsworthy and Mrs. Pramlay lived for amenities and the mellowed surfaces of things. Ann Veronica was one of the few young people — and one must have young people just as one must have flowers — one could ask to a little gathering without the risk of a painful discord. Then the distant relationship to Miss Stanley gave them a slight but pleasant sense of proprietorship in the girl. They had their little dreams about her.
Mrs. Pramlay received them in the pretty chintz drawingroom, which opened by French windows on the trim garden, with its croquet lawn, its tennis-net in the middle distance, and its remote rose alley lined with smart dahlias and flaming sunflowers. Her eye met Miss Stanley’s understandingly, and she was if anything a trifle more affectionate in her greeting to Ann Veronica. Then Ann Veronica passed on toward the tea in the garden, which was dotted with the elite of Morningside Park society, and there she was pounced upon by Lady Palsworthy and given tea and led about. Across the lawn and hovering indecisively, Ann Veronica saw and immediately affected not to see Mr. Manning, Lady Palsworthy’s nephew, a tall young man of seven-and-thirty with a handsome, thoughtful, impassive face, a full black mustache, and a certain heavy luxuriousness of gesture. The party resolved itself for Ann Veronica into a game in which she manoeuvred unostentatiously and finally unsuccessfully to avoid talking alone with this gentleman.
Mr. Manning had shown on previous occasions that he found Ann Veronica interesting and that he wished to interest her. He was a civil servant of some standing, and after a previous conversation upon aesthetics of a sententious, nebulous, and sympathetic character, he had sent her a small volume, which he described as the fruits of his leisure and which was as a matter of fact rather carefully finished verse. It dealt with fine aspects of Mr. Manning’s feelings, and as Ann Veronica’s mind was still largely engaged with fundamentals and found no pleasure in metrical forms, she had not as yet cut its pages. So that as she saw him she remarked to herself very faintly but definitely, “Oh, golly!” and set up a campaign of avoidance that Mr. Manning at last broke down by coming directly at her as she talked with the vicar’s aunt about some of the details of the alleged smell of the new church lamps. He did not so much cut into this conversation as loom over it, for he was a tall, if rather studiously stooping, man.
The face that looked down upon Ann Veronica was full of amiable intention. “Splendid you are looking to-day, Miss Stanley,” he said. “How well and jolly you must be feeling.”
He beamed over the effect of this and shook hands with effusion, and Lady Palsworthy suddenly appeared as his confederate and disentangled the vicar’s aunt.
“I love this warm end of summer more than words can tell,” he said. “I’ve tried to make words tell it. It’s no good. Mild, you know, and boon. You want music.”
Ann Veronica agreed, and tried to make the manner of her assent cover a possible knowledge of a probable poem.
“Splendid it must be to be a composer. Glorious! The Pastoral. Beethoven; he’s the best of them. Don’t you think? Tum, tay, tum, tay.”
Ann Veronica did.
“What have you been doing since our last talk? Still cutting up rabbits and probing into things? I’ve often thought of that talk of ours — often.”
He did not appear to require any answer to his question.
“Often,” he repeated, a little heavily.
“Beautiful these autumn flowers are,” said Ann Veronica, in a wide, uncomfortable pause.
“Do come and see the Michaelmas daisies at the end of the garden,” said Mr. Manning, “they’re a dream.” And Ann Veronica found herself being carried off to an isolation even remoter and more conspicuous than the corner of the lawn, with the whole of the party aiding and abetting and glancing at them. “Damn!” said Ann Veronica to herself, rousing herself for a conflict.
Mr. Manning told her he loved beauty, and extorted a similar admission from her; he then expatiated upon his own love of beauty. He said that for him beauty justified life, that he could not imagine a good action that was not a beautiful one nor any beautiful thing that could be altogether bad. Ann Veronica hazarded an opinion that as a matter of history some very beautiful people had, to a quite considerable extent, been bad, but Mr. Manning questioned whether when they were bad they were really beautiful or when they were beautiful bad. Ann Veronica found her attention wandering a little as he told her that he was not ashamed to feel almost slavish in the presence of really beautiful people, and then they came to the Michaelmas daisies. They were really very fine and abundant, with a blaze of perennial sunflowers behind them.
“They make me want to shout,” said Mr. Manning, with a sweep of the arm.
“They’re very good this year,” said Ann Veronica, avoiding controversial matter.
“Either I want to shout,” said Mr. Manning, “when I see beautiful things, or else I want to weep.” He paused and looked at her, and said, with a sudden drop into a confidential undertone, “Or else I want to pray.”
“When is Michaelmas Day?” said Ann Veronica, a little abruptly.
“Heaven knows!” said Mr. Manning; and added, “the twenty-ninth.”
“I thought it was earlier,” said Ann Veronica. “Wasn’t Parliament to reassemble?”
He put out his hand and leaned against a tree and crossed his legs. “You’re not interested in politics?” he asked, almost with a note of protest.
“Well, rather,” said Ann Veronica. “It seems — It’s interesting.”
“Do you think so? I find my interest in that sort of thing decline and decline.”
“I’m curious. Perhaps because I don’t know. I suppose an intelligent person OUGHT to be interested in political affairs. They concern us all.”
“I wonder,” said Mr. Manning, with a baffling smile.
“I think they do. After all, they’re history in the making.”
“A sort of history,” said Mr. Manning; and repeated, “a sort of history. But look at these glorious daisies!”
“But don’t you think political questions ARE important?”
“I don’t think they are this afternoon, and I don’t think they are to you.”
Ann Veronica turned her back on the Michaelmas daisies, and faced toward the house with an air of a duty completed.
“Just come to that seat now you are here, Miss Stanley, and look down the other path; there’s a vista of just the common sort. Better even than these.”
Ann Veronica walked as he indicated.
“You know I’m oldfashioned, Miss Stanley. I don’t think women need to trouble about political questions.”
“I want a vote,” said Ann Veronica.
“Really!” said Mr. Manning, in an earnest voice, and waved his hand to the alley of mauve and purple. “I wish you didn’t.”
“Why not?” She turned on him.
“It jars. It jars with all my ideas. Women to me are something so serene, so fine, so feminine, and politics are so dusty, so sordid, so wearisome and quarrelsome. It seems to me a woman’s duty to be beautiful, to BE beautiful and to behave beautifully, and politics are by their very nature ugly. You see, I — I am a woman worshipper. I worshipped women long before I found any woman I might ever hope to worship. Long ago. And — the idea of committees, of hustings, of agenda-papers!”
“I don’t see why the responsibility of beauty should all be shifted on to the women,” said Ann Veronica, suddenly remembering a part of Miss Miniver’s discourse.
“It rests with them by the nature of things. Why should you who are queens come down