And as she sat on her bed that night, musing and half-undressed, she began to run one hand down her arm and scrutinize the soft flow of muscle under her skin. She thought of the marvellous beauty of skin, and all the delightfulness of living texture. Oh the back of her arm she found the faintest down of hair in the world. “Etherialized monkey,” she said. She held out her arm straight before her, and turned her hand this way and that.
“Why should one pretend?” she whispered. “Why should one pretend?
“Think of all the beauty in the world that is covered up and overlaid.”
She glanced shyly at the mirror above her dressing-table, and then about her at the furniture, as though it might penetrate to the thoughts that peeped in her mind.
“I wonder,” said Ann Veronica at last, “if I am beautiful? I wonder if I shall ever shine like a light, like a translucent goddess?—
“I wonder—
“I suppose girls and women have prayed for this, have come to this—In Babylon, in Nineveh.
“Why shouldn’t one face the facts of one’s self?”
She stood up. She posed herself before her mirror and surveyed herself with gravely thoughtful, gravely critical, and yet admiring eyes. “And, after all, I am just one common person!”
She watched the throb of the arteries in the stem of her neck, and put her hand at last gently and almost timidly to where her heart beat beneath her breast.
The realization that she was in love flooded Ann Veronica’s mind, and altered the quality of all its topics.
She began to think persistently of Capes, and it seemed to her now that for some weeks at least she must have been thinking persistently of him unawares. She was surprised to find how stored her mind was with impressions and memories of him, how vividly she remembered his gestures and little things that he had said. It occurred to her that it was absurd and wrong to be so continuously thinking of one engrossing topic, and she made a strenuous effort to force her mind to other questions.
But it was extraordinary what seemingly irrelevant things could restore her to the thought of Capes again. And when she went to sleep, then always Capes became the novel and wonderful guest of her dreams.
For a time it really seemed all-sufficient to her that she should love. That Capes should love her seemed beyond the compass of her imagination. Indeed, she did not want to think of him as loving her. She wanted to think of him as her beloved person, to be near him and watch him, to have him going about, doing this and that, saying this and that, unconscious of her, while she too remained unconscious of herself. To think of him as loving her would make all that different. Then he would turn his face to her, and she would have to think of herself in his eyes. She would become defensive—what she did would be the thing that mattered. He would require things of her, and she would be passionately concerned to meet his requirements. Loving was better than that. Loving was self-forgetfulness, pure delighting in another human being. She felt that with Capes near to her she would be content always to go on loving.
She went next day to the schools, and her world seemed all made of happiness just worked up roughly into shapes and occasions and duties. She found she could do her microscope work all the better for being in love. She winced when first she heard the preparation-room door open and Capes came down the laboratory; but when at last he reached her she was self-possessed. She put a stool for him at a little distance from her own, and after he had seen the day’s work he hesitated, and then plunged into a resumption of their discussion about beauty.
“I think,” he said, “I was a little too mystical about beauty the other day.”
“I like the mystical way,” she said.
“Our business here is the right way. I’ve been thinking, you know—I’m not sure that primarily the perception of beauty isn’t just intensity of feeling free from pain; intensity of perception without any tissue destruction.”
“I like the mystical way better,” said Ann Veronica, and thought.
“A number of beautiful things are not intense.”
“But delicacy, for example, may be intensely perceived.”
“But why is one face beautiful and another not?” objected Ann Veronica; “on your theory any two faces side by side in the sunlight ought to be equally beautiful. One must get them with exactly the same intensity.”
He did not agree with that. “I don’t mean simply intensity of sensation. I said intensity of perception. You may perceive harmony, proportion, rhythm, intensely. They are things faint and slight in themselves, as physical facts, but they are like the detonator of a bomb: they let loose the explosive. There’s the internal factor as well as the external.... I don’t know if I express myself clearly. I mean that the point is that vividness of perception is the essential factor of beauty; but, of course, vividness may be created by a whisper.”
“That brings us back,” said Ann Veronica, “to the mystery. Why should some things and not others open the deeps?”
“Well, that might, after all, be an outcome of selection—like the preference for blue flowers, which are not nearly so bright as yellow, of some insects.”
“That doesn’t explain sunsets.”
“Not quite so easily as it explains an insect alighting on colored paper. But perhaps if people didn’t like clear, bright, healthy eyes—which is biologically understandable—they couldn’t like precious stones. One thing may be a necessary collateral of the others. And, after all, a fine clear sky of bright colors is the signal to come out of hiding and rejoice and go on with life.”
“H’m!” said Ann Veronica, and shook her head.
Capes smiled cheerfully with his eyes meeting hers. “I throw it out in passing,” he said. “What I am after is that beauty isn’t a special inserted sort of thing; that’s my idea. It’s just life, pure life, life nascent, running clear and strong.”
He stood up to go on to the next student.
“There’s morbid beauty,” said Ann Veronica.
“I wonder if there is!” said Capes, and paused, and then bent down over the boy who wore his hair like Russell.
Ann Veronica surveyed his sloping back for a moment, and then drew her microscope toward her. Then for a time she sat very still. She felt that she had passed a difficult corner, and that now she could go on talking with him again, just as she had been used to do before she understood what was the matter with her....
She had one idea, she found, very clear in her mind—that she would get a Research Scholarship, and so contrive another year in the laboratory.
“Now I see what everything means,” said Ann Veronica to herself; and it really felt for some days as though the secret of the universe, that had been wrapped and hidden from her so obstinately, was at last altogether displayed.
One afternoon, soon after Ann Veronica’s great discovery, a telegram came into the laboratory for her. It ran:
—————————————————————————-| Bored | and | nothing | to | do ||—————|—————-|—————|————|————|| will | you | dine | with | me ||—————|—————-|—————|————|————|| to-night | somewhere | and | talk | I ||—————|—————-|—————|————|————|| shall | be | grateful | Ramage | |—————————————————————————-
Ann Veronica was rather pleased by this. She had not seen Ramage for ten or eleven days, and she was quite ready for a gossip with him. And now her mind was so full of the thought that she was in love—in love!—that marvellous state! that I really believe she had some dim idea of talking to him about it. At any rate, it would be good to hear him saying the sort of things he did—perhaps now she would grasp them better—with this world-shaking secret brandishing itself about inside her head within a yard of him.
She was sorry to find Ramage a little disposed to be melancholy.
“I have made over seven hundred pounds in the last week,” he said.
“That’s exhilarating,” said Ann Veronica.
“Not a bit of it,” he said; “it’s only a score in a game.”
“It’s a score you can buy all sorts of things with.”
“Nothing that one wants.”
He turned to the waiter, who held a wine-card. “Nothing can cheer me,” he said, “except champagne.” He meditated. “This,” he said, and then: “No! Is this sweeter? Very well.”
“Everything goes well with me,” he said, folding his arms under him and regarding Ann Veronica with the slightly projecting eyes wide open. “And I’m not happy. I believe I’m in love.”
He leaned back for his soup.
Presently he resumed: “I believe I must be in love.”
“You can’t be that,” said Ann Veronica, wisely.
“How do you know?”
“Well, it isn’t exactly a depressing state, is it?”
“YOU don’t know.”
“One has theories,” said Ann Veronica, radiantly.
“Oh, theories! Being in love is a fact.”
“It ought to make one happy.”
“It’s an unrest—a longing—What’s that?” The waiter had intervened. “Parmesan—take it away!”
He glanced at Ann Veronica’s face, and it seemed to him that she really was exceptionally radiant. He wondered why she thought love made people happy, and began to talk of the smilax and pinks that adorned the table. He filled her glass with champagne. “You MUST,” he said, “because of my depression.”
They were eating quails when they returned to the topic of love. “What made you think” he said, abruptly, with the gleam of avidity in his face, “that love makes people happy?”
“I know it must.”
“But how?”
He was, she thought, a little too insistent. “Women know these things by instinct,” she answered.
“I wonder,” he said, “if women do know things by instinct? I have my doubts about feminine instinct. It’s one of our conventional superstitions. A woman is supposed to know when a man is in love with her. Do you think she does?”
Ann Veronica picked among her salad with a judicial expression of face. “I think she would,” she decided.
“Ah!” said Ramage, impressively.
Ann Veronica looked up at him and found him regarding her with eyes that were almost woebegone, and into which, indeed, he was trying to throw much more expression than they could carry. There was a little pause between them, full for Ann Veronica of rapid elusive suspicions and intimations.
“Perhaps one talks nonsense about a woman’s instinct,” she said. “It’s a way of avoiding explanations. And girls and women, perhaps, are different. I don’t know. I don’t suppose a girl can tell if a man is in love with her or not in love with her.” Her mind went off to Capes. Her thoughts took words for themselves. “She can’t. I suppose it depends on her own state of mind. If one wants a thing very much, perhaps one is inclined to think one can’t have it. I suppose if one were to love some one, one would feel doubtful. And if one were to love some one very much, it’s just so that one would be blindest, just when one wanted most to see.”
She stopped abruptly, afraid that Ramage might be able to infer Capes from the things she had said, and indeed his face was very eager.
“Yes?” he said.
Ann Veronica blushed. “That’s all,” she said “I’m afraid I’m a little confused about these things.”
Ramage looked at her, and then fell into deep reflection as the waiter came to paragraph their talk again.
“Have you ever been to the opera, Ann Veronica?” said Ramage.
“Once or twice.”
“Shall we go now?”
“I think I would like to listen to music. What is there?”
“Tristan.”
“I’ve never heard Tristan and Isolde.”
“That settles it. We’ll go. There’s sure to be a place somewhere.”
“It’s rather jolly of you,” said Ann Veronica.
“It’s jolly of you to come,” said Ramage.
So presently they got into a hansom together, and Ann Veronica sat back feeling very luxurious and pleasant, and looked at the light and stir and misty glitter of the street traffic from under slightly drooping eyelids, while Ramage sat closer to her than he need have done, and glanced ever and again at her face, and made to speak and said nothing. And when they got to Covent Garden Ramage secured one of the little upper boxes, and they came into it as the overture began.
Ann Veronica took off her jacket and sat down in the corner chair, and leaned forward to look into the great hazy warm brown cavity of the house, and Ramage placed his chair to sit beside her and near her, facing the stage. The music took hold of her slowly as her eyes wandered from the indistinct still ranks of the audience to the little busy orchestra with its quivering violins, its methodical movements of brown and silver instruments, its brightly lit scores and shaded lights. She had never been to the opera before except as one of a congested mass of people in the cheaper seats, and with backs and heads and women’s hats for the frame of the spectacle; there was by contrast a fine large sense of space and ease in her present position. The curtain rose out of the concluding bars of the overture and revealed Isolde on the prow of the barbaric ship. The voice of the young seaman came floating down from the masthead, and the story of the immortal lovers had begun. She knew the story only imperfectly, and followed it now with a passionate and deepening interest. The splendid voices sang on from phase to phase of love’s unfolding, the ship drove across the sea to the beating rhythm of the rowers. The lovers broke into passionate knowledge of themselves and each other, and then, a jarring intervention, came King Mark amidst the shouts of the sailormen, and stood beside them.
The curtain came festooning slowly down, the music ceased, the lights in the auditorium glowed out, and Ann Veronica woke out of her confused dream of involuntary and commanding love in a glory of sound and colors to discover that Ramage was sitting close beside her with one hand resting lightly on her waist. She made a quick movement, and the hand fell away.
“By God! Ann Veronica,” he said, sighing deeply. “This stirs one.”
She sat quite still looking at him.
“I wish you and I had drunk that love potion,” he said.
She found no ready reply to that, and he went on: “This music is the food of love. It makes me desire life beyond measure. Life! Life and love! It makes me want to be always young, always strong, always devoting my life—and dying splendidly.”
“It is very beautiful,” said Ann Veronica in a low tone.
They said no more for a moment, and each was now acutely aware of the other. Ann Veronica was excited and puzzled, with a sense of a strange and disconcerting new light breaking over her relations with Ramage. She had never thought of him at all in that way before. It did not shock her; it amazed her, interested her beyond measure. But also this must not go on. She felt he was going to say something more—something still more personal and intimate. She was curious, and at the same time clearly resolved she must not hear it. She felt she must get him talking upon some impersonal theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind. “What is the exact force of a motif?” she asked at random. “Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic descriptions of it from a mistress I didn’t like at school. She gave me an impression of a sort of patched quilt; little bits of patterned stuff coming up again and again.”
She stopped with an air of interrogation.
Ramage looked at her for a long and discriminating interval without speaking. He seemed to be hesitating between two courses of action. “I don’t know much about the technique of music,” he said at last, with his eyes upon her. “It’s a matter of feeling with me.”
He contradicted himself by plunging into an exposition of motifs.
By a tacit agreement they ignored the significant thing between them, ignored the slipping away of the ground on which they had stood together hitherto....
All through the love music of the second act, until the hunting horns of Mark break in upon the dream, Ann Veronica’s consciousness was flooded with the perception of a man close beside her, preparing some new thing to say to her, preparing, perhaps, to touch her, stretching hungry invisible tentacles about her. She tried to think what she should do in this eventuality or that. Her mind had been and was full of the thought of Capes, a huge generalized Capes-lover. And in some incomprehensible way, Ramage was confused with Capes; she had a grotesque disposition to persuade herself that this was really Capes who surrounded her, as it were, with wings of desire. The fact that it was her trusted friend making illicit love to her remained, in spite of all her effort, an insignificant thing in her mind. The music confused and distracted her, and made her struggle against a feeling of intoxication. Her head swam. That was the inconvenience of it; her head was swimming. The music throbbed into the warnings that preceded the king’s irruption.
Abruptly he gripped her wrist. “I love you, Ann Veronica. I love you—with all my heart and soul.”
She put her face closer to his. She felt the warm nearness of his. “DON’T!” she said, and wrenched her wrist from his retaining hand.
“My God! Ann Veronica,” he said, struggling to keep his hold upon her; “my God! Tell me—tell me now—tell me you love me!”
His expression was as it were rapaciously furtive. She answered in whispers, for there was the white arm of a woman in the next box peeping beyond the partition within a yard of him.
“My hand! This isn’t the place.”
He released her hand and talked in eager undertones against an auditory background of urgency and distress.
“Ann Veronica,” he said, “I tell you this is love. I love the soles of your feet. I love your very breath. I have tried not to tell you—tried to be simply your friend. It is no good. I want you. I worship you. I would do anything—I would give anything to make you mine.... Do you hear me? Do you hear what I am saying?... Love!”
He held her arm and abandoned it again at her quick defensive movement. For a long time neither spoke again.
She sat drawn together in her chair in the corner of the box, at a loss what to say or do—afraid, curious, perplexed. It seemed to her that it was her duty to get up and clamor to go home to her room, to protest against his advances as an insult. But she did not in the least want to do that. These sweeping dignities were not within the compass of her will; she remembered she liked Ramage, and owed things to him, and she was interested—she was profoundly interested. He was in love with her! She tried to grasp all the welter of values in the situation simultaneously, and draw some conclusion from their disorder.
He began to talk again in quick undertones that she could not clearly hear.
“I have loved you,” he was saying, “ever since you sat on that gate and talked. I have always loved you. I don’t care what divides us. I don’t care what else there is in the world. I want you beyond measure or reckoning....”
His voice rose and fell amidst the music and the singing of Tristan and King Mark, like a voice heard in a badly connected telephone. She stared at his pleading face.
She turned to the stage, and Tristan was wounded in Kurvenal’s arms, with Isolde at his feet, and King Mark, the incarnation of masculine force and obligation, the masculine creditor of love and beauty, stood over him, and the second climax was ending in wreaths and reek of melodies; and then the curtain was coming down in a series of short rushes, the music had ended, and the people were stirring and breaking out into applause, and the lights of the auditorium were resuming. The lighting-up pierced the obscurity of the box, and Ramage stopped his urgent flow of words abruptly and sat back. This helped to restore Ann Veronica’s self-command.
She turned her eyes to him again, and saw her late friend and pleasant and trusted companion, who had seen fit suddenly to change into a lover, babbling interesting inacceptable things. He looked eager and flushed and troubled. His eyes caught at hers with passionate inquiries. “Tell me,” he said; “speak to me.” She realized it was possible to be sorry for him—acutely sorry for the situation. Of course this thing was absolutely impossible. But she was disturbed, mysteriously disturbed. She remembered abruptly that she was really living upon his money. She leaned forward and addressed him.
“Mr. Ramage,” she said, “please don’t talk like this.”
He made to speak and did not.
“I don’t want you to do it, to go on talking to me. I don’t want to hear you. If I had known that you had meant to talk like this I wouldn’t have come here.”
“But how can I help it? How can I keep silence?”
“Please!” she insisted. “Please not now.”
“I MUST talk with you. I must say what I have to say!”
“But not now—not here.”
“It came,” he said. “I never planned it—And now I have begun—”
She felt acutely that he was entitled to explanations, and as acutely that explanations were impossible that night. She wanted to think.
“Mr. Ramage,” she said, “I can’t—Not now. Will you please—Not now, or I must go.”
He stared at her, trying to guess at the mystery of her thoughts.
“You don’t want to go?”
“No. But I must—I ought—”
“I MUST talk about this. Indeed I must.”
“Not now.”
“But I love you. I love you—unendurably.”
“Then don’t talk to me now. I don’t want you to talk to me now. There is a place—This isn’t the place. You have misunderstood. I can’t explain—”
They regarded one another, each blinded to the other. “Forgive me,” he decided to say at last, and his voice had a little quiver of emotion, and he laid his hand on hers upon her knee. “I am the most foolish of men. I was stupid—stupid and impulsive beyond measure to burst upon you in this way. I—I am a love-sick idiot, and not accountable for my actions. Will you forgive me—if I say no more?”
She looked at him with perplexed, earnest eyes.
“Pretend,” he said, “that all I have said hasn’t been said. And let us go on with our evening. Why not? Imagine I’ve had a fit of hysteria—and that I’ve come round.”
“Yes,” she said, and abruptly she liked him enormously. She felt this was the sensible way out of this oddly sinister situation.
He still watched her and questioned her.
“And let us have a talk about this—some other time. Somewhere, where we can talk without interruption. Will you?”
She thought, and it seemed to him she had never looked so self-disciplined and deliberate and beautiful. “Yes,” she said, “that is what we ought to do.” But now she doubted again of the quality of the armistice they had just made.
He had a wild impulse to shout. “Agreed,” he said with queer exaltation, and his grip tightened on her hand. “And to-night we are friends?”
“We are friends,” said Ann Veronica, and drew her hand quickly away from him.
“To-night we are as we have always been. Except that this music we have been swimming in is divine. While I have been pestering you, have you heard it? At least, you heard the first act. And all the third act is love-sick music. Tristan dying and Isolde coming to crown his death. Wagner had just been in love when he wrote it all. It begins with that queer piccolo solo. Now I shall never hear it but what this evening will come pouring back over me.”
The lights sank, the prelude to the third act was beginning, the music rose and fell in crowded intimations of lovers separated—lovers separated with scars and memories between them, and the curtain went reefing up to display Tristan lying wounded on his couch and the shepherd crouching with his pipe.
They had their explanations the next evening, but they were explanations in quite other terms than Ann Veronica had anticipated, quite other and much more startling and illuminating terms. Ramage came for her at her lodgings, and she met him graciously and kindly as a queen who knows she must needs give sorrow to a faithful liege. She was unusually soft and gentle in her manner to him. He was wearing a new silk hat, with a slightly more generous brim than its predecessor, and it suited his type of face, robbed his dark eyes a little of their aggressiveness and gave him a solid and dignified and benevolent air. A faint anticipation of triumph showed in his manner and a subdued excitement.
“We’ll go to a place where we can have a private room,” he said. “Then—then we can talk things out.”
So they went this time to the Rococo, in Germain Street, and up-stairs to a landing upon which stood a bald-headed waiter with whiskers like a French admiral and discretion beyond all limits in his manner. He seemed to have expected them. He ushered them with an amiable flat hand into a minute apartment with a little gas-stove, a silk crimson-covered sofa, and a bright little table, gay with napery and hot-house flowers.
“Odd little room,” said Ann Veronica, dimly apprehending that obtrusive sofa.
“One can talk without undertones, so to speak,” said Ramage. “It’s—private.” He stood looking at the preparations before them with an unusual preoccupation of manner, then roused himself to take her jacket, a little awkwardly, and hand it to the waiter who hung it in the corner of the room. It appeared he had already ordered dinner and wine, and the whiskered waiter waved in his subordinate with the soup forthwith.
“I’m going to talk of indifferent themes,” said Ramage, a little fussily, “until these interruptions of the service are over. Then—then we shall be together.... How did you like Tristan?”
Ann Veronica paused the fraction of a second before her reply came.
“I thought much of it amazingly beautiful.”
“Isn’t it. And to think that man got it all out of the poorest little love-story for a respectable titled lady! Have you read of it?”
“Never.”
“It gives in a nutshell the miracle of art and the imagination. You get this queer irascible musician quite impossibly and unfortunately in love with a wealthy patroness, and then out of his brain comes THIS, a tapestry of glorious music, setting out love to lovers, lovers who love in spite of all that is wise and respectable and right.”
Ann Veronica thought. She did not want to seem to shrink from conversation, but all sorts of odd questions were running through her mind. “I wonder why people in love are so defiant, so careless of other considerations?”
“The very hares grow brave. I suppose because it IS the chief thing in life.” He stopped and said earnestly: “It is the chief thing in life, and everything else goes down before it. Everything, my dear, everything!... But we have got to talk upon indifferent themes until we have done with this blond young gentleman from Bavaria....”
The dinner came to an end at last, and the whiskered waiter presented his bill and evacuated the apartment and closed the door behind him with an almost ostentatious discretion. Ramage stood up, and suddenly turned the key in the door in an off-hand manner. “Now,” he said, “no one can blunder in upon us. We are alone and we can say and do what we please. We two.” He stood still, looking at her.
Ann Veronica tried to seem absolutely unconcerned. The turning of the key startled her, but she did not see how she could make an objection. She felt she had stepped into a world of unknown usages.
“I have waited for this,” he said, and stood quite still, looking at her until the silence became oppressive.
“Won’t you sit down,” she said, “and tell me what you want to say?” Her voice was flat and faint. Suddenly she had become afraid. She struggled not to be afraid. After all, what could happen?
He was looking at her very hard and earnestly. “Ann Veronica,” he said.
Then before she could say a word to arrest him he was at her side. “Don’t!” she said, weakly, as he had bent down and put one arm about her and seized her hands with his disengaged hand and kissed her—kissed her almost upon her lips. He seemed to do ten things before she could think to do one, to leap upon her and take possession.
Ann Veronica’s universe, which had never been altogether so respectful to her as she could have wished, gave a shout and whirled head over heels. Everything in the world had changed for her. If hate could kill, Ramage would have been killed by a flash of hate. “Mr. Ramage!” she cried, and struggled to her feet.
“My darling!” he said, clasping her resolutely in his arms, “my dearest!”
“Mr. Ramage!” she began, and his mouth sealed hers and his breath was mixed with her breath. Her eye met his four inches away, and his was glaring, immense, and full of resolution, a stupendous monster of an eye.
She shut her lips hard, her jaw hardened, and she set herself to struggle with him. She wrenched her head away from his grip and got her arm between his chest and hers. They began to wrestle fiercely. Each became frightfully aware of the other as a plastic energetic body, of the strong muscles of neck against cheek, of hands gripping shoulder-blade and waist. “How dare you!” she panted, with her world screaming and grimacing insult at her. “How dare you!”
They were both astonished at the other’s strength. Perhaps Ramage was the more astonished. Ann Veronica had been an ardent hockey player and had had a course of jiu-jitsu in the High School. Her defence ceased rapidly to be in any sense ladylike, and became vigorous and effective; a strand of black hair that had escaped its hairpins came athwart Ramage’s eyes, and then the knuckles of a small but very hardly clinched fist had thrust itself with extreme effectiveness and painfulness under his jawbone and ear.
“Let go!” said Ann Veronica, through her teeth, strenuously inflicting agony, and he cried out sharply and let go and receded a pace.
“NOW!” said Ann Veronica. “Why did you dare to do that?”
Each of them stared at the other, set in a universe that had changed its system of values with kaleidoscopic completeness. She was flushed, and her eyes were bright and angry; her breath came sobbing, and her hair was all abroad in wandering strands of black. He too was flushed and ruffled; one side of his collar had slipped from its stud and he held a hand to the corner of his jaw.
“You vixen!” said Mr. Ramage, speaking the simplest first thought of his heart.
“You had no right—” panted Ann Veronica.
“Why on earth,” he asked, “did you hurt me like that?”
Ann Veronica did her best to think she had not deliberately attempted to cause him pain. She ignored his question.
“I never dreamt!” she said.
“What on earth did you expect me to do, then?” he asked.
Interpretation came pouring down upon her almost blindingly; she understood now the room, the waiter, the whole situation. She understood. She leaped to a world of shabby knowledge, of furtive base realizations. She wanted to cry out upon herself for the uttermost fool in existence.
“I thought you wanted to have a talk to me,” she said.
“I wanted to make love to you.
“You knew it,” he added, in her momentary silence.
“You said you were in love with me,” said Ann Veronica; “I wanted to explain—”
“I said I loved and wanted you.” The brutality of his first astonishment was evaporating. “I am in love with you. You know I am in love with you. And then you go—and half throttle me.... I believe you’ve crushed a gland or something. It feels like it.”
“I am sorry,” said Ann Veronica. “What else was I to do?”
For some seconds she stood watching him and both were thinking very quickly. Her state of mind would have seemed altogether discreditable to her grandmother. She ought to have been disposed to faint and scream at all these happenings; she ought to have maintained a front of outraged dignity to veil the sinking of her heart. I would like to have to tell it so. But indeed that is not at all a good description of her attitude. She was an indignant queen, no doubt she was alarmed and disgusted within limits; but she was highly excited, and there was something, some low adventurous strain in her being, some element, subtle at least if base, going about the rioting ways and crowded insurgent meeting-places of her mind declaring that the whole affair was after all—they are the only words that express it—a very great lark indeed. At the bottom of her heart she was not a bit afraid of Ramage. She had unaccountable gleams of sympathy with and liking for him. And the grotesquest fact was that she did not so much loathe, as experience with a quite critical condemnation this strange sensation of being kissed. Never before had any human being kissed her lips....
It was only some hours after that these ambiguous elements evaporated and vanished and loathing came, and she really began to be thoroughly sick and ashamed of the whole disgraceful quarrel and scuffle.
He, for his part, was trying to grasp the series of unexpected reactions that had so wrecked their tete-a-tete. He had meant to be master of his fate that evening and it had escaped him altogether. It had, as it were, blown up at the concussion of his first step. It dawned upon him that he had been abominably used by Ann Veronica.
“Look here,” he said, “I brought you here to make love to you.”
“I didn’t understand—your idea of making love. You had better let me go again.”
“Not yet,” he said. “I do love you. I love you all the more for the streak of sheer devil in you.... You are the most beautiful, the most desirable thing I have ever met in this world. It was good to kiss you, even at the price. But, by Jove! you are fierce! You are like those Roman women who carry stilettos in their hair.”
“I came here to talk reasonably, Mr. Ramage. It is abominable—”
“What is the use of keeping up this note of indignation, Ann Veronica? Here I am! I am your lover, burning for you. I mean to have you! Don’t frown me off now. Don’t go back into Victorian respectability and pretend you don’t know and you can’t think and all the rest of it. One comes at last to the step from dreams to reality. This is your moment. No one will ever love you as I love you now. I have been dreaming of your body and you night after night. I have been imaging—”
“Mr. Ramage, I came here—I didn’t suppose for one moment you would dare—”
“Nonsense! That is your mistake! You are too intellectual. You want to do everything with your mind. You are afraid of kisses. You are afraid of the warmth in your blood. It’s just because all that side of your life hasn’t fairly begun.”
He made a step toward her.
“Mr. Ramage,” she said, sharply, “I have to make it plain to you. I don’t think you understand. I don’t love you. I don’t. I can’t love you. I love some one else. It is repulsive. It disgusts me that you should touch me.”
He stared in amazement at this new aspect of the situation. “You love some one else?” he repeated.
“I love some one else. I could not dream of loving you.”
And then he flashed his whole conception of the relations of men and women upon her in one astonishing question. His hand went with an almost instinctive inquiry to his jawbone again. “Then why the devil,” he demanded, “do you let me stand you dinners and the opera—and why do you come to a cabinet particuliar with me?”
He became radiant with anger. “You mean to tell me” he said, “that you have a lover? While I have been keeping you! Yes—keeping you!”
This view of life he hurled at her as if it were an offensive missile. It stunned her. She felt she must fly before it and could no longer do so. She did not think for one moment what interpretation he might put upon the word “lover.”
“Mr. Ramage,” she said, clinging to her one point, “I want to get out of this horrible little room. It has all been a mistake. I have been stupid and foolish. Will you unlock that door?”
“Never!” he said. “Confound your lover! Look here! Do you really think I am going to run you while he makes love to you? No fear! I never heard of anything so cool. If he wants you, let him get you. You’re mine. I’ve paid for you and helped you, and I’m going to conquer you somehow—if I have to break you to do it. Hitherto you’ve seen only my easy, kindly side. But now confound it! how can you prevent it? I will kiss you.”
“You won’t!” said Ann Veronica; with the clearest note of determination.
He seemed to be about to move toward her. She stepped back quickly, and her hand knocked a wine-glass from the table to smash noisily on the floor. She caught at the idea. “If you come a step nearer to me,” she said, “I will smash every glass on this table.”
“Then, by God!” he said, “you’ll be locked up!”
Ann Veronica was disconcerted for a moment. She had a vision of policemen, reproving magistrates, a crowded court, public disgrace. She saw her aunt in tears, her father white-faced and hard hit. “Don’t come nearer!” she said.
There was a discreet knocking at the door, and Ramage’s face changed.
“No,” she said, under her breath, “you can’t face it.” And she knew that she was safe.
He went to the door. “It’s all right,” he said, reassuringly to the inquirer without.
Ann Veronica glanced at the mirror to discover a flushed and dishevelled disorder. She began at once a hasty readjustment of her hair, while Ramage parleyed with inaudible interrogations. “A glass slipped from the table,” he explained.... “Non. Fas du tout. Non.... Niente.... Bitte!... Oui, dans la note.... Presently. Presently.” That conversation ended and he turned to her again.
“I am going,” she said grimly, with three hairpins in her mouth.
She took her hat from the peg in the corner and began to put it on. He regarded that perennial miracle of pinning with wrathful eyes.
“Look here, Ann Veronica,” he began. “I want a plain word with you about all this. Do you mean to tell me you didn’t understand why I wanted you to come here?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Ann Veronica stoutly.
“You didn’t expect that I should kiss you?”
“How was I to know that a man would—would think it was possible—when there was nothing—no love?”
“How did I know there wasn’t love?”
That silenced her for a moment. “And what on earth,” he said, “do you think the world is made of? Why do you think I have been doing things for you? The abstract pleasure of goodness? Are you one of the members of that great white sisterhood that takes and does not give? The good accepting woman! Do you really suppose a girl is entitled to live at free quarters on any man she meets without giving any return?”
“I thought,” said Ann Veronica, “you were my friend.”
“Friend! What have a man and a girl in common to make them friends? Ask that lover of yours! And even with friends, would you have it all Give on one side and all Take on the other?... Does HE know I keep you?... You won’t have a man’s lips near you, but you’ll eat out of his hand fast enough.”
Ann Veronica was stung to helpless anger.
“Mr. Ramage,” she cried, “you are outrageous! You understand nothing. You are—horrible. Will you let me go out of this room?”
“No,” cried Ramage; “hear me out! I’ll have that satisfaction, anyhow. You women, with your tricks of evasion, you’re a sex of swindlers. You have all the instinctive dexterity of parasites. You make yourself charming for help. You climb by disappointing men. This lover of yours—”
“He doesn’t know!” cried Ann Veronica.
“Well, you know.”
Ann Veronica could have wept with vexation. Indeed, a note of weeping broke her voice for a moment as she burst out, “You know as well as I do that money was a loan!”
“Loan!”
“You yourself called it a loan!”
“Euphuism. We both understood that.”
“You shall have every penny of it back.”
“I’ll frame it—when I get it.”
“I’ll pay you if I have to work at shirt-making at threepence an hour.”
“You’ll never pay me. You think you will. It’s your way of glossing over the ethical position. It’s the sort of way a woman always does gloss over her ethical positions. You’re all dependents—all of you. By instinct. Only you good ones—shirk. You shirk a straightforward and decent return for what you get from us—taking refuge in purity and delicacy and such-like when it comes to payment.”
“Mr. Ramage,” said Ann Veronica, “I want to go—NOW!”