Part 5
She had sent her father a telegram from the East Strand
post-office worded thus:
| All | is | well | with | me |
|---------|-----------|----------|----------|---------|
| and | quite | safe | Veronica | |
-----------------------------------------------------
and afterward she had dined a la carte upon a cutlet, and had
then set herself to write an answer to Mr. Manning's proposal of
marriage. But she had found it very difficult.
"DEAR MR. MANNING, she had begun. So far it had been plain
sailing, and it had seemed fairly evident to go on: "I find it
very difficult to answer your letter."
But after that neither ideas nor phrases had come and she had
fallen thinking of the events of the day. She had decided that
she would spend the next morning answering advertisements in the
papers that abounded in the writing-room; and so, after half an
hour's perusal of back numbers of the Sketch in the drawing-room,
she had gone to bed.
She found next morning, when she came to this advertisement
answering, that it was more difficult than she had supposed. In
the first place there were not so many suitable advertisements as
she had expected. She sat down by the paper-rack with a general
feeling of resemblance to Vivie Warren, and looked through the
Morning Post and Standard and Telegraph, and afterward the
half-penny sheets. The Morning Post was hungry for governesses
and nursery governesses, but held out no other hopes; the Daily
Telegraph that morning seemed eager only for skirt hands. She
went to a writing-desk and made some memoranda on a sheet of
note-paper, and then remembered that she had no address as yet to
which letters could be sent.
She decided to leave this matter until the morrow and devote the
morning to settling up with Mr. Manning. At the cost of quite a
number of torn drafts she succeeded in evolving this:
"DEAR MR. MANNING,--I find it very difficult to answer your
letter. I hope you won't mind if I say first that I think it
does me an extraordinary honor that you should think of any one
like myself so highly and seriously, and, secondly, that I wish
it had not been written."
She surveyed this sentence for some time before going on. "I
wonder," she said, "why one writes him sentences like that?
It'll have to go," she decided, "I've written too many already."
She went on, with a desperate attempt to be easy and colloquial:
"You see, we were rather good friends, I thought, and now perhaps
it will be difficult for us to get back to the old friendly
footing. But if that can possibly be done I want it to be done.
You see, the plain fact of the case is that I think I am too
young and ignorant for marriage. I have been thinking these
things over lately, and it seems to me that marriage for a girl
is just the supremest thing in life. It isn't just one among a
number of important things; for her it is the important thing,
and until she knows far more than I know of the facts of life,
how is she to undertake it? So please; if you will, forget that
you wrote that letter, and forgive this answer. I want you to
think of me just as if I was a man, and quite outside marriage
altogether.
"I do hope you will be able to do this, because I value men
friends. I shall be very sorry if I cannot have you for a
friend. I think that there is no better friend for a girl than a
man rather older than herself.
"Perhaps by this time you will have heard of the step I have
taken in leaving my home. Very likely you will disapprove highly
of what I have done--l wonder? You may, perhaps, think I have
done it just in a fit of childish petulance because my father
locked me in when I wanted to go to a ball of which he did not
approve. But really it is much more than that. At Morningside
Park I feel as though all my growing up was presently to stop, as
though I was being shut in from the light of life, and, as they
say in botany, etiolated. I was just like a sort of dummy that
does things as it is told--that is to say, as the strings are
pulled. I want to be a person by myself, and to pull my own
strings. I had rather have trouble and hardship like that than
be taken care of by others. I want to be myself. l wonder if a
man can quite understand that passionate feeling? It is quite a
passionate feeling. So I am already no longer the girl you knew
at Morningside Park. I am a young person seeking employment and
freedom and self-development, just as in quite our first talk of
all I said I wanted to be.
"I do hope you will see how things are, and not be offended with
me or frightfully shocked and distressed by what I have done.
"Very sincerely yours,
"ANN VERONICA STANLEY."
