After the interview Ann Veronica considered herself formally cut off from home. If nothing else had clinched that, the purse had.
Nevertheless there came a residuum of expostulations. Her brother Roddy, who was in the motor line, came to expostulate; her sister Alice wrote. And Mr. Manning called.
Her sister Alice seemed to have developed a religious sense away there in Yorkshire, and made appeals that had no meaning for Ann Veronica’s mind. She exhorted Ann Veronica not to become one of “those unsexed intellectuals, neither man nor woman.”
Ann Veronica meditated over that phrase. “That’s HIM,” said Ann Veronica, in sound, idiomatic English. “Poor old Alice!”
Her brother Roddy came to her and demanded tea, and asked her to state a case. “Bit thick on the old man, isn’t it?” said Roddy, who had developed a bluff, straightforward style in the motor shop.
“Mind my smoking?” said Roddy. “I don’t see quite what your game is, Vee, but I suppose you’ve got a game on somewhere.
“Rummy lot we are!” said Roddy. “Alice—Alice gone dotty, and all over kids. Gwen—I saw Gwen the other day, and the paint’s thicker than ever. Jim is up to the neck in Mahatmas and Theosophy and Higher Thought and rot— writes letters worse than Alice. And now YOU’RE on the war-path. I believe I’m the only sane member of the family left. The G.V.‘s as mad as any of you, in spite of all his respectability; not a bit of him straight anywhere, not one bit.”
“Straight?”
“Not a bit of it! He’s been out after eight per cent. since the beginning. Eight per cent.! He’ll come a cropper one of these days, if you ask me. He’s been near it once or twice already. That’s got his nerves to rags. I suppose we’re all human beings really, but what price the sacred Institution of the Family! Us as a bundle! Eh? … I don’t half disagree with you, Vee, really; only thing is, I don’t see how you’re going to pull it off. A home MAY be a sort of cage, but still—it’s a home. Gives you a right to hang on to the old man until he busts—practically. Jolly hard life for a girl, getting a living. Not MY affair.”
He asked questions and listened to her views for a time.
“I’d chuck this lark right off if I were you, Vee,” he said. “I’m five years older than you, and no end wiser, being a man. What you’re after is too risky. It’s a damned hard thing to do. It’s all very handsome starting out on your own, but it’s too damned hard. That’s my opinion, if you ask me. There’s nothing a girl can do that isn’t sweated to the bone. You square the G.V., and go home before you have to. That’s my advice. If you don’t eat humble-pie now you may live to fare worse later.
That was the quintessence of her brother Roddy.
He played variations on this theme for the better part of an hour.
“You go home,” he said, at parting; “you go home. It’s all very fine and all that, Vee, this freedom, but it isn’t going to work.
The world isn’t ready for girls to start out on their own yet; that’s the plain fact of the case. Babies and females have got to keep hold of somebody or go under—anyhow, for the next few generations. You go home and wait a century, Vee, and then try again. Then you may have a bit of a chance. Now you haven’t the ghost of one—not if you play the game fair.”
Part 6
It was remarkable to Ann Veronica how completely Mr. Manning, in his entirely different dialect, indorsed her brother Roddy’s view of things. He came along, he said, just to call, with large, loud apologies, radiantly kind and good. Miss Stanley, it was manifest, had given him Ann Veronica’s address. The kindly faced landlady had failed to catch his name, and said he was a tall, handsome gentleman with a great black mustache. Ann Veronica, with a sigh at the cost of hospitality, made a hasty negotiation for an extra tea and for a fire in the ground-floor apartment, and preened herself carefully for the interview. In the little apartment, under the gas chandelier, his inches and his stoop were certainly very effective. In the bad light he looked at once military and sentimental and studious, like one of Ouida’s guardsmen revised by Mr. Haldane and the London School of Economics and finished in the Keltic school.
“It’s unforgivable of me to call, Miss Stanley,” he said, shaking hands in a peculiar, high, fashionable manner; “but you know you said we might be friends.”
“It’s dreadful for you to be here,” he said, indicating the yellow presence of the first fog of the year without, “but your aunt told me something of what had happened. It’s just like your Splendid Pride to do it. Quite!”
He sat in the arm-chair and took tea, and consumed several of the extra cakes which she had sent out for and talked to her and expressed himself, looking very earnestly at her with his deep-set eyes, and carefully avoiding any crumbs on his mustache the while. Ann Veronica sat firelit by her tea-tray with, quite unconsciously, the air of an expert hostess.
“But how is it all going to end?” said Mr. Manning.
“Your father, of course,” he said, “must come to realize just how Splendid you are! He doesn’t understand. I’ve seen him, and he doesn’t a bit understand.
“I’m afraid I’m anything but a Princess when it comes to earning a salary,” said Ann Veronica. “But frankly, I mean to fight this through if I possibly can.”
“My God!” said Manning, in a stage-aside. “Earning a salary!”
“You’re like a Princess in Exile!” he repeated, overruling her. “You come into these sordid surroundings—you mustn’t mind my calling them sordid—and it makes them seem as though they didn’t matter… . I don’t think they do matter. I don’t think any surroundings could throw a shadow on you.”
