Ann Veronica | Page 6

the night remained after the
dance was over in London with the Widgett girls and a select party in
"quite a decent little hotel" near Fitzroy Square.
"But, my dear!" said Ann Veronica's aunt.
"You see," said Ann Veronica, with the air of one who shares a
difficulty, "I've promised to go. I didn't realize-- I don't see how I can
get out of it now."
Then it was her father issued his ultimatum. He had conveyed it to her,
not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to her a singularly
ignoble method of prohibition. "He couldn't look me in the face and say
it," said Ann Veronica.
"But of course it's aunt's doing really."
And thus it was that as Ann Veronica neared the gates of home, she
said to herself: "I'll have it out with him somehow. I'll have it out with
him. And if he won't--"
But she did not give even unspoken words to the alternative at that
time.

Part 3
Ann Veronica's father was a solicitor with a good deal of company
business: a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic, clean-shaven
man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose, iron-gray hair, gray
eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small, circular baldness at the crown
of his head. His name was Peter. He had had five children at irregular
intervals, of whom Ann Veronica was the youngest, so that as a parent
he came to her perhaps a little practised and jaded and inattentive; and
he called her his "little Vee," and patted her unexpectedly and

disconcertingly, and treated her promiscuously as of any age between
eleven and eight-and-twenty. The City worried him a good deal, and
what energy he had left over he spent partly in golf, a game he treated
very seriously, and partly in the practices of microscopic petrography.
He "went in" for microscopy in the unphilosophical Victorian manner
as his "hobby." A birthday present of a microscope had turned his mind
to technical microscopy when he was eighteen, and a chance friendship
with a Holborn microscope dealer had confirmed that bent. He had
remarkably skilful fingers and a love of detailed processes, and he had
become one of the most dexterous amateur makers of rock sections in
the world. He spent a good deal more money and time than he could
afford upon the little room at the top of the house, in producing new
lapidary apparatus and new microscopic accessories and in rubbing
down slices of rock to a transparent thinness and mounting them in a
beautiful and dignified manner. He did it, he said, "to distract his
mind." His chief successes he exhibited to the Lowndean Microscopical
Society, where their high technical merit never failed to excite
admiration. Their scientific value was less considerable, since he chose
rocks entirely with a view to their difficulty of handling or their
attractiveness at conversaziones when done. He had a great contempt
for the sections the "theorizers" produced. They proved all sorts of
things perhaps, but they were thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work. Yet
an indiscriminating, wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts of
distinctions....
He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fiction with chromatic
titles, The Red Sword, The Black Helmet, The Purple Robe, also in
order "to distract his mind." He read it in winter in the evening after
dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with a tendency to monopolize
the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair of dappled fawn-skin slippers
across the fender. She wondered occasionally why his mind needed so
much distraction. His favorite newspaper was the Times, which he
began at breakfast in the morning often with manifest irritation, and
carried off to finish in the train, leaving no other paper at home.
It occurred to Ann Veronica once that she had known him when he was

younger, but day had followed day, and each had largely obliterated the
impression of its predecessor. But she certainly remembered that when
she was a little girl he sometimes wore tennis flannels, and also rode a
bicycle very dexterously in through the gates to the front door. And in
those days, too, he used to help her mother with her gardening, and
hover about her while she stood on the ladder and hammered creepers
to the scullery wall.
It had been Ann Veronica's lot as the youngest child to live in a home
that became less animated and various as she grew up. Her mother had
died when she was thirteen, her two much older sisters had married
off--one submissively, one insubordinately; her two brothers had gone
out into the world well ahead of her, and so she had made what she
could of her father. But he was not a father one could make