Ann Veronica | Page 7

much of.
His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest
quality; they were creatures, he thought, either too bad for a modern
vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably desirable, or too pure
and good for life. He made this simple classification of a large and
various sex to the exclusion of all intermediate kinds; he held that the
two classes had to be kept apart even in thought and remote from one
another. Women are made like the potter's vessels--either for worship
or contumely, and are withal fragile vessels. He had never wanted
daughters. Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealed
his chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and had
sworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom. He
was a manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he had
loved his dark-eyed, dainty bright-colored, and active little wife with a
real vein of passion in his sentiment. But he had always felt (he had
never allowed himself to think of it) that the promptitude of their
family was a little indelicate of her, and in a sense an intrusion. He had,
however, planned brilliant careers for his two sons, and, with a certain
human amount of warping and delay, they were pursuing these. One
was in the Indian Civil Service and one in the rapidly developing motor
business. The daughters, he had hoped, would be their mother's care.
He had no ideas about daughters. They happen to a man.

Of course a little daughter is a delightful thing enough. It runs about
gayly, it romps, it is bright and pretty, it has enormous quantities of soft
hair and more power of expressing affection than its brothers. It is a
lovely little appendage to the mother who smiles over it, and it does
things quaintly like her, gestures with her very gestures. It makes
wonderful sentences that you can repeat in the City and are good
enough for Punch. You call it a lot of nicknames--"Babs" and "Bibs"
and "Viddles" and "Vee"; you whack at it playfully, and it whacks you
back. It loves to sit on your knee. All that is jolly and as it should be.
But a little daughter is one thing and a daughter quite another. There
one comes to a relationship that Mr. Stanley had never thought out.
When he found himself thinking about it, it upset him so that he at once
resorted to distraction. The chromatic fiction with which he relieved his
mind glanced but slightly at this aspect of life, and never with any
quality of guidance. Its heroes never had daughters, they borrowed
other people's. The one fault, indeed, of this school of fiction for him
was that it had rather a light way with parental rights. His instinct was
in the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property,
bound to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a comfort in
his declining years just as he thought fit. About this conception of
ownership he perceived and desired a certain sentimental glamour, he
liked everything properly dressed, but it remained ownership.
Ownership seemed only a reasonable return for the cares and expenses
of a daughter's upbringing. Daughters were not like sons. He perceived,
however, that both the novels he read and the world he lived in
discountenanced these assumptions. Nothing else was put in their place,
and they remained sotto voce, as it were, in his mind. The new and the
old cancelled out; his daughters became quasi-independent
dependents--which is absurd. One married as he wished and one against
his wishes, and now here was Ann Veronica, his little Vee,
discontented with her beautiful, safe, and sheltering home, going about
with hatless friends to Socialist meetings and art-class dances, and
displaying a disposition to carry her scientific ambitions to unwomanly
lengths. She seemed to think he was merely the paymaster, handing
over the means of her freedom. And now she insisted that she MUST
leave the chastened security of the Tredgold Women's College for

Russell's unbridled classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in
pirate costume and spend the residue of the night with Widgett's
ramshackle girls in some indescribable hotel in Soho!
He had done his best not to think about her at all, but the situation and
his sister had become altogether too urgent. He had finally put aside
The Lilac Sunbonnet, gone into his study, lit the gas fire, and written
the letter that had brought these unsatisfactory relations to a head.
Part 4
MY DEAR VEE, he wrote.
These daughters! He gnawed his pen and reflected, tore the sheet up,
and began again.
"MY DEAR VERONICA,--Your aunt tells me you have involved
yourself in some arrangement