Part 3
Her mind got back to the Fadden Ball.
She meant to go, she meant to go, she meant to go. Nothing would
stop her, and she was prepared to face the consequences. Suppose
her father turned her out of doors! She did not care, she meant
to go. She would just walk out of the house and go. . . .
She thought of her costume in some detail and with considerable
satisfaction, and particularly of a very jolly property dagger
with large glass jewels in the handle, that reposed in a drawer
in her room. She was to be a Corsair's Bride. "Fancy stabbing a
man for jealousy!" she thought. "You'd have to think how to get
in between his bones."
She thought of her father, and with an effort dismissed him from
her mind.
She tried to imagine the collective effect of the Fadden Ball;
she had never seen a fancy-dress gathering in her life. Mr.
Manning came into her thoughts again, an unexpected, tall, dark,
self-contained presence at the Fadden. One might suppose him
turning up; he knew a lot of clever people, and some of them
might belong to the class. What would he come as?
Presently she roused herself with a guilty start from the task of
dressing and re-dressing Mr. Manning in fancy costume, as though
he was a doll. She had tried him as a Crusader, in which guise
he seemed plausible but heavy--"There IS something heavy about
him; I wonder if it's his mustache?"--and as a Hussar, which made
him preposterous, and as a Black Brunswicker, which was better,
and as an Arab sheik. Also she had tried him as a dragoman and
as a gendarme, which seemed the most suitable of all to his
severely handsome, immobile profile. She felt he would tell
people the way, control traffic, and refuse admission to public
buildings with invincible correctness and the very finest
explicit feelings possible. For each costume she had devised a
suitable form of matrimonial refusal. "Oh, Lord!" she said,
discovering what she was up to, and dropped lightly from the
fence upon the turf and went on her way toward the crest.
"I shall never marry," said Ann Veronica, resolutely; "I'm not
the sort. That's why it's so important I should take my own line
now."
