Ann Veronica | Page 5

it a difficult matter not to think of
these things. However having a considerable amount of pride, she
decided she would disavow these undesirable topics and keep her mind
away from them just as far as she could, but it left her at the end of her
school days with that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at
loose ends.
The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no particular
place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a functionless
existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels, walks, and dusting in
her father's house. She thought study would be better. She was a clever
girl, the best of her year in the High School, and she made a valiant
fight for Somerville or Newnham but her father had met and argued
with a Somerville girl at a friend's dinner-table and he thought that sort
of thing unsexed a woman. He said simply that he wanted her to live at
home. There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhile she
went on at school. They compromised at length on the science course at
the Tredgold Women's College--she had already matriculated into
London University from school--she came of age, and she bickered
with her aunt for latch-key privileges on the strength of that and her
season ticket. Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind,
thinly disguised as literature and art. She read voraciously, and
presently, because of her aunt's censorship, she took to smuggling any
books she thought might be prohibited instead of bringing them home
openly, and she went to the theatre whenever she could produce an
acceptable friend to accompany her. She passed her general science
examination with double honors and specialized in science. She
happened to have an acute sense of form and unusual mental lucidity,
and she found in biology, and particularly in comparative anatomy, a
very considerable interest, albeit the illumination it cast upon her
personal life was not altogether direct. She dissected well, and in a year
she found herself chafing at the limitations of the lady B. Sc. who
retailed a store of faded learning in the Tredgold laboratory. She had
already realized that this instructress was hopelessly wrong and
foggy--it is the test of the good comparative anatomist--upon the skull.

She discovered a desire to enter as a student in the Imperial College at
Westminster, where Russell taught, and go on with her work at the
fountain-head.
She had asked about that already, and her father had replied, evasively:
"We'll have to see about that, little Vee; we'll have to see about that." In
that posture of being seen about the matter hung until she seemed
committed to another session at the Tredgold College, and in the mean
time a small conflict arose and brought the latch-key question, and in
fact the question of Ann Veronica's position generally, to an acute
issue.
In addition to the various business men, solicitors, civil servants, and
widow ladies who lived in the Morningside Park Avenue, there was a
certain family of alien sympathies and artistic quality, the Widgetts,
with which Ann Veronica had become very friendly. Mr. Widgett was a
journalist and art critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suit and "art"
brown ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday
morning, travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly
despised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the station.
He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three daughters with
peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found adorable. Two of
these had been her particular intimates at the High School, and had
done much to send her mind exploring beyond the limits of the
available literature at home. It was a cheerful, irresponsible,
shamelessly hard-up family in the key of faded green and flattened
purple, and the girls went on from the High School to the Fadden Art
School and a bright, eventful life of art student dances, Socialist
meetings, theatre galleries, talking about work, and even, at intervals,
work; and ever and again they drew Ann Veronica from her sound
persistent industry into the circle of these experiences. They had asked
her to come to the first of the two great annual Fadden Dances, the
October one, and Ann Veronica had accepted with enthusiasm. And
now her father said she must not go.
He had "put his foot down," and said she must not go.
Going involved two things that all Ann Veronica's tact had been

ineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father. Her usual dignified
reserve had availed her nothing. One point was that she was to wear
fancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair's bride, and the other was that
she was to spend whatever vestiges of