Part 6
In the afternoon she resumed her search for apartments. The
intoxicating sense of novelty had given place to a more
business-like mood. She drifted northward from the Strand, and
came on some queer and dingy quarters.
She had never imagined life was half so sinister as it looked to
her in the beginning of these investigations. She found herself
again in the presence of some element in life about which she had
been trained not to think, about which she was perhaps
instinctively indisposed to think; something which jarred, in
spite of all her mental resistance, with all her preconceptions
of a clean and courageous girl walking out from Morningside Park
as one walks out of a cell into a free and spacious world. One or
two landladies refused her with an air of conscious virtue that
she found hard to explain. "We don't let to ladies," they said.
She drifted, via Theobald's Road, obliquely toward the region
about Titchfield Street. Such apartments as she saw were either
scandalously dirty or unaccountably dear, or both. And some were
adorned with engravings that struck her as being more vulgar and
undesirable than anything she had ever seen in her life. Ann
Veronica loved beautiful things, and the beauty of undraped
loveliness not least among them; but these were pictures that did
but insist coarsely upon the roundness of women's bodies. The
windows of these rooms were obscured with draperies, their floors
a carpet patchwork; the china ornaments on their mantels were of
a class apart. After the first onset several of the women who
had apartments to let said she would not do for them, and in
effect dismissed her. This also struck her as odd.
About many of these houses hung a mysterious taint as of
something weakly and commonly and dustily evil; the women who
negotiated the rooms looked out through a friendly manner as
though it was a mask, with hard, defiant eyes. Then one old
crone, short-sighted and shaky-handed, called Ann Veronica
"dearie," and made some remark, obscure and slangy, of which the
spirit rather than the words penetrated to her understanding.
For a time she looked at no more apartments, and walked through
gaunt and ill-cleaned streets, through the sordid under side of
life, perplexed and troubled, ashamed of her previous obtuseness.
She had something of the feeling a Hindoo must experience who has
been into surroundings or touched something that offends his
caste. She passed people in the streets and regarded them with a
quickening apprehension, once or twice came girls dressed in
slatternly finery, going toward Regent Street from out these
places. It did not occur to her that they at least had found a
way of earning a living, and had that much economic superiority
to herself. It did not occur to her that save for some accidents
of education and character they had souls like her own.
For a time Ann Veronica went on her way gauging the quality of
sordid streets. At last, a little way to the northward of Euston
Road, the moral cloud seemed to lift, the moral atmosphere to
change; clean blinds appeared in the windows, clean doorsteps
before the doors, a different appeal in the neatly placed cards
bearing the word
--------------------------
| APARTMENTS |
--------------------------
in the clear bright windows. At last in a street near the
Hampstead Road she hit upon a room that had an exceptional
quality of space and order, and a tall woman with a kindly face
to show it. "You're a student, perhaps?" said the tall woman.
"At the Tredgold Women's College," said Ann Veronica. She felt
it would save explanations if she did not state she had left her
home and was looking for employment. The room was papered with
green, large-patterned paper that was at worst a trifle dingy,
and the arm-chair and the seats of the other chairs were covered
with the unusual brightness of a large-patterned chintz, which
also supplied the window-curtain. There was a round table
covered, not with the usual "tapestry" cover, but with a plain
green cloth that went passably with the wall-paper. In the
recess beside the fireplace were some open bookshelves. The
carpet was a quiet drugget and not excessively worn, and the bed
in the corner was covered by a white quilt. There were neither
texts nor rubbish on the walls, but only a stirring version of
Belshazzar's feast, a steel engraving in the early Victorian
manner that had some satisfactory blacks. And the woman who
showed this room was tall, with an understanding eye and the
quiet manner of the well-trained servant.
Ann Veronica brought her luggage in a cab from the hotel; she
tipped the hotel porter sixpence and overpaid the cabman
eighteenpence, unpacked some of her books and possessions, and so
made the room a little homelike, and then sat down in a by no
means uncomfortable arm-chair before the fire. She had arranged
for a supper of tea, a boiled egg, and some tinned peaches. She
had discussed the general question of supplies with the helpful
landlady. "And now," said Ann Veronica surveying her apartment
with an unprecedented sense of proprietorship, "what is the next
step?"
She spent the evening in writing--it was a little difficult--to
her father and--which was easier--to the Widgetts. She was
greatly heartened by doing this. The necessity of defending
herself and assuming a confident and secure tone did much to
dispell the sense of being exposed and indefensible in a huge
dingy world that abounded in sinister possibilities. She
addressed her letters, meditated on them for a time, and then
took them out and posted them. Afterward she wanted to get her
letter to her father back in order to read it over again, and, if
it tallied with her general impression of it, re-write it.
He would know her address to-morrow. She reflected upon that
with a thrill of terror that was also, somehow, in some faint
remote way, gleeful.
"Dear old Daddy," she said, "he'll make a fearful fuss. Well, it
had to happen somewhen. . . . Somehow. I wonder what he'll say?"
