Part 2
Ann Veronica carried a light but business-like walking-stick.
She walked with an easy quickness down the Avenue and through the
proletarian portion of Morningside Park, and crossing these
fields came into a pretty overhung lane that led toward
Caddington and the Downs. And then her pace slackened. She
tucked her stick under her arm and re-read Manning's letter.
"Let me think," said Ann Veronica. "I wish this hadn't turned up
to-day of all days."
She found it difficult to begin thinking, and indeed she was
anything but clear what it was she had to think about.
Practically it was most of the chief interests in life that she
proposed to settle in this pedestrian meditation. Primarily it
was her own problem, and in particular the answer she had to give
to Mr. Manning's letter, but in order to get data for that she
found that she, having a logical and ordered mind, had to decide
upon the general relations of men to women, the objects and
conditions of marriage and its bearing upon the welfare of the
race, the purpose of the race, the purpose, if any, of
everything. . . .
"Frightful lot of things aren't settled," said Ann Veronica. In
addition, the Fadden Dance business, all out of proportion,
occupied the whole foreground of her thoughts and threw a color
of rebellion over everything. She kept thinking she was thinking
about Mr. Manning's proposal of marriage and finding she was
thinking of the dance.
For a time her efforts to achieve a comprehensive concentration
were dispersed by the passage of the village street of
Caddington, the passing of a goggled car-load of motorists, and
the struggles of a stable lad mounted on one recalcitrant horse
and leading another. When she got back to her questions again in
the monotonous high-road that led up the hill, she found the
image of Mr. Manning central in her mind. He stood there, large
and dark, enunciating, in his clear voice from beneath his large
mustache, clear flat sentences, deliberately kindly. He
proposed, he wanted to possess her! He loved her.
Ann Veronica felt no repulsion at the prospect. That Mr. Manning
loved her presented itself to her bloodlessly, stilled from any
imaginative quiver or thrill of passion or disgust. The
relationship seemed to have almost as much to do with blood and
body as a mortgage. It was something that would create a mutual
claim, a relationship. It was in another world from that in
which men will die for a kiss, and touching hands lights fires
that burn up lives--the world of romance, the world of
passionately beautiful things.
But that other world, in spite of her resolute exclusion of it,
was always looking round corners and peeping through chinks and
crannies, and rustling and raiding into the order in which she
chose to live, shining out of pictures at her, echoing in lyrics
and music; it invaded her dreams, it wrote up broken and
enigmatical sentences upon the passage walls of her mind. She
was aware of it now as if it were a voice shouting outside a
house, shouting passionate verities in a hot sunlight, a voice
that cries while people talk insincerely in a darkened room and
pretend not to hear. Its shouting now did in some occult manner
convey a protest that Mr. Manning would on no account do, though
he was tall and dark and handsome and kind, and thirty-five and
adequately prosperous, and all that a husband should be. But
there was, it insisted, no mobility in his face, no movement,
nothing about him that warmed. If Ann Veronica could have put
words to that song they would have been, "Hot-blooded marriage or
none!" but she was far too indistinct in this matter to frame any
words at all.
"I don't love him," said Ann Veronica, getting a gleam. "I don't
see that his being a good sort matters. That really settles about
that. . . . But it means no end of a row."
For a time she sat on a rail before leaving the road for the
downland turf. "But I wish," she said, "I had some idea what I
was really up to."
Her thoughts went into solution for a time, while she listened to
a lark singing.
"Marriage and mothering," said Ann Veronica, with her mind
crystallizing out again as the lark dropped to the nest in the
turf. "And all the rest of it perhaps is a song."
