with registry offices and all sorts of accommodation round the corner. Nothing to check their proceedings but a declining habit of telling the truth and the limitations of their imaginations. And in that respect they stir up one another. Not my affair, of course, but I think we ought to teach them more or restrain them more. One or the other. They’re too free for their innocence or too innocent for their freedom. That’s my point. Are you going to have any apple-tart, Stanley? The apple-tart’s been very good lately—very good!”
Part 7
At the end of dinner that evening Ann Veronica began: “Father!”
Her father looked at her over his glasses and spoke with grave deliberation; “If there is anything you want to say to me,” he said, “you must say it in the study. I am going to smoke a little here, and then I shall go to the study. I don’t see what you can have to say. I should have thought my note cleared up everything. There are some papers I have to look through to-night—important papers.”
“I won’t keep you very long, daddy,” said Ann Veronica.
“I don’t see, Mollie,” he remarked, taking a cigar from the box on the table as his sister and daughter rose, “why you and Vee shouldn’t discuss this little affair—whatever it is—without bothering me.”
It was the first time this controversy had become triangular, for all three of them were shy by habit.
He stopped in mid-sentence, and Ann Veronica opened the door for her aunt. The air was thick with feelings. Her aunt went out of the room with dignity and a rustle, and up-stairs to the fastness of her own room. She agreed entirely with her brother. It distressed and confused her that the girl should not come to her.
It seemed to show a want of affection, to be a deliberate and unmerited disregard, to justify the reprisal of being hurt.
When Ann Veronica came into the study she found every evidence of a carefully foreseen grouping about the gas fire. Both arm-chairs had been moved a little so as to face each other on either side of the fender, and in the circular glow of the green-shaded lamp there lay, conspicuously waiting, a thick bundle of blue and white papers tied with pink tape. Her father held some printed document in his hand, and appeared not to observe her entry. “Sit down,” he said, and perused—“perused” is the word for it—for some moments. Then he put the paper by. “And what is it all about, Veronica?” he asked, with a deliberate note of irony, looking at her a little quizzically over his glasses.
Ann Veronica looked bright and a little elated, and she disregarded her father’s invitation to be seated. She stood on the mat instead, and looked down on him. “Look here, daddy,” she said, in a tone of great reasonableness, “I MUST go to that dance, you know.”
Her father’s irony deepened. “Why?” he asked, suavely.
Her answer was not quite ready. “Well, because I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t.”
“You see I do.”
“Why shouldn’t I go?”
“It isn’t a suitable place; it isn’t a suitable gathering.”
“But, daddy, what do you know of the place and the gathering?”
“And it’s entirely out of order; it isn’t right, it isn’t correct; it’s impossible for you to stay in an hotel in London—the idea is preposterous. I can’t imagine what possessed you, Veronica.”
He put his head on one side, pulled down the corners of his mouth, and looked at her over his glasses.
“But why is it preposterous?” asked Ann Veronica, and fiddled with a pipe on the mantel.
“Surely!” he remarked, with an expression of worried appeal.
“You see, daddy, I don’t think it IS preposterous. That’s really what I want to discuss. It comes to this—am I to be trusted to take care of myself, or am I not?”
“To judge from this proposal of yours, I should say not.”
“I think I am.”
“As long as you remain under my roof—” he began, and paused.
“You are going to treat me as though I wasn’t. Well, I don’t think that’s fair.”
“Your ideas of fairness—” he remarked, and discontinued that sentence. “My dear girl,” he said, in a tone of patient reasonableness, “you are a mere child. You know nothing of life, nothing of its dangers, nothing of its possibilities. You think everything is harmless and simple, and so forth. It isn’t. It isn’t. That’s where you go wrong. In some things, in many things, you must trust to your elders, to those who know more of life than you do. Your aunt and I have discussed all this matter. There it is. You can’t go.”
The conversation hung for a moment. Ann Veronica tried to keep hold of a complicated situation and not lose her head. She had turned round sideways, so as to look down into the fire.
“You see, father,” she said, “it isn’t only this affair of the dance. I want to go to that because it’s a new experience, because I think it will be interesting and give me a view of things. You say I know nothing. That’s probably true. But how am I to know of things?”
“Some things I hope you may never know,” he said.
“I’m not so sure. I want to know—just as much as I can.”
“Tut!” he said, fuming, and put out his hand to the papers in the pink tape.
“Well, I do. It’s just that I want to say. I want to be a human being; I want to learn about things and know about things, and not to be protected as something too precious for life, cooped up in one narrow little corner.”
“Cooped up!” he cried. “Did I stand in the way of your going to college? Have I ever prevented you going about at any reasonable hour? You’ve got a bicycle!”
“H’m!” said Ann Veronica, and then went on “I want to be taken seriously. A girl—at my age—is grown-up. I want to go on with my University work under proper conditions, now that I’ve done the Intermediate. It isn’t as though I haven’t done well. I’ve never muffed an exam yet. Roddy muffed two. …”
Her father interrupted. “Now look here, Veronica, let us be plain with each other. You are not going to that infidel Russell’s classes. You are not going anywhere but to the Tredgold College. I’ve thought that out, and you must make up your mind to it. All sorts of considerations come in. While you live in my house you must follow my ideas. You are wrong even about that man’s scientific position and his standard of work. There are men in the Lowndean who laugh at him—simply laugh at him. And I have seen work by his pupils myself that struck me as being—well, next door to shameful. There’s stories, too, about his demonstrator, Capes Something or other. The kind of man who isn’t content with his science, and writes articles in the monthly reviews. Anyhow, there it is: YOU ARE NOT GOING THERE.”
The
