“Well, rather,” said Ann Veronica. “It seems – It’s interesting.”
“Do you think so? I find my interest in that sort of thing decline and decline.”
“I’m curious. Perhaps because I don’t know. I suppose an intelligent person OUGHT to be interested in political affairs. They concern us all.”
“I wonder,” said Mr. Manning, with a baffling smile.
“I think they do. After all, they’re history in the making.”
“A sort of history,” said Mr. Manning; and repeated, “a sort of history. But look at these glorious daisies!”
“But don’t you think political questions ARE important?”
“I don’t think they are this afternoon, and I don’t think they are to you.”
Ann Veronica turned her back on the Michaelmas daisies, and faced toward the house with an air of a duty completed.
“Just come to that seat now you are here, Miss Stanley, and look down the other path; there’s a vista of just the common sort. Better even than these.”
Ann Veronica walked as he indicated.
“You know I’m old-fashioned, Miss Stanley. I don’t think women need to trouble about political questions.”
“I want a vote,” said Ann Veronica.
“Really!” said Mr. Manning, in an earnest voice, and waved his hand to the alley of mauve and purple. “I wish you didn’t.”
“Why not?” She turned on him.
“It jars. It jars with all my ideas. Women to me are something so serene, so fine, so feminine, and politics are so dusty, so sordid, so wearisome and quarrelsome. It seems to me a woman’s duty to be beautiful, to BE beautiful and to behave beautifully, and politics are by their very nature ugly. You see, I – I am a woman worshipper. I worshipped women long before I found any woman I might ever hope to worship. Long ago. And – the idea of committees, of hustings, of agenda-papers!”
“I don’t see why the responsibility of beauty should all be shifted on to the women,” said Ann Veronica, suddenly remembering a part of Miss Miniver’s discourse.
“It rests with them by the nature of things. Why should you who are queens come down from your thrones? If you can afford it, WE can’t. We can’t afford to turn our women, our Madonnas, our Saint Catherines, our Mona Lisas, our goddesses and angels and fairy princesses, into a sort of man. Womanhood is sacred to me. My politics in that matter wouldn’t be to give women votes. I’m a Socialist, Miss Stanley.”
“WHAT?” said Ann Veronica, startled.
“A Socialist of the order of John Ruskin. Indeed I am! I would make this country a collective monarchy, and all the girls and women in it should be the Queen. They should never come into contact with politics or economics – or any of those things. And we men would work for them and serve them in loyal fealty.”
“That’s rather the theory now,” said Ann Veronica. “Only so many men neglect their duties.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Manning, with an air of emerging from an elaborate demonstration, “and so each of us must, under existing conditions, being chivalrous indeed to all women, choose for himself his own particular and worshipful queen.”
“So far as one can judge from the system in practice,” said Ann Veronica, speaking in a loud, common-sense, detached tone, and beginning to walk slowly but resolutely toward the lawn, “it doesn’t work.”
“Every one must be experimental,” said Mr. Manning, and glanced round hastily for further horticultural points of interest in secluded corners. None presented themselves to save him from that return.
“That’s all very well when one isn’t the material experimented upon,” Ann Veronica had remarked.
“Women would – they DO have far more power than they think, as influences, as inspirations.”
Ann Veronica said nothing in answer to that.
“You say you want a vote,” said Mr. Manning, abruptly.
“I think I ought to have one.”
“Well, I have two,” said Mr. Manning – “one in Oxford University and one in Kensington.” He caught up and went on with a sort of clumsiness: “Let me present you with them and be your voter.”
There followed an instant’s pause, and then Ann Veronica had decided to misunderstand.
“I want a vote for myself,” she said. “I don’t see why I should take it second-hand. Though it’s very kind of you. And rather unscrupulous. Have you ever voted, Mr. Manning? I suppose there’s a sort of place like a ticket-office. And a ballot-box – ” Her face assumed an expression of intellectual conflict. “What is a ballot-box like, exactly?” she asked, as though it was very important to her.
Mr. Manning regarded her thoughtfully for a moment and stroked his mustache. “A ballot-box, you know,” he said, “is very largely just a box.” He made quite a long pause, and went on, with a sigh: “You have a voting paper given you – ”
They emerged into the publicity of the lawn.
“Yes,” said Ann Veronica, “yes,” to his explanation, and saw across the lawn Lady Palsworthy talking to her aunt, and both of them staring frankly across at her and Mr. Manning as they talked.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
Part 1
Two days after came the day of the Crisis, the day of the Fadden Dance. It would have been a crisis anyhow, but it was complicated in Ann Veronica’s mind by the fact that a letter lay on the breakfast-table from Mr. Manning, and that her aunt focussed a brightly tactful disregard upon this throughout the meal. Ann Veronica had come down thinking of nothing in the world but her inflexible resolution to go to the dance in the teeth of all opposition. She did not know Mr. Manning’s handwriting, and opened his letter and read some lines before its import appeared. Then for a time she forgot the Fadden affair altogether. With a well-simulated unconcern and a heightened color she finished her breakfast.
She was not obliged to go to the Tredgold College, because as yet the College had not settled down for the session. She was supposed to be reading at home, and after breakfast she strolled into the vegetable garden, and having taken up a position upon the staging of a disused greenhouse that had the double advantage of being hidden from the windows of the house and secure from the sudden appearance of any one, she resumed the reading of Mr. Manning’s letter.
Mr. Manning’s handwriting had an air of being clear without being easily legible; it was large and rather roundish, with a lack of definition about the letters and a disposition to treat the large ones as liberal-minded people nowadays treat opinions, as all amounting to the same thing really – a years-smoothed boyish rather than an adult hand. And it filled seven sheets of notepaper, each written only on one side.
“MY DEAR MISS STANLEY,” it began, – “I hope you will forgive my bothering you with a letter, but I have been thinking very much over our conversation at Lady Palsworthy’s, and I feel there are things I want to say to you so much that I cannot wait until we meet again. It is the worst of talk under such social circumstances that it is always getting cut off so soon as it is beginning; and I went home that afternoon feeling I had said nothing – literally nothing – of the things I had meant to say to you and that were coursing through my head. They were things I had meant very much to talk to you about, so that I went home vexed and disappointed, and only relieved myself a little by writing a few verses. I wonder if you will mind very much when I tell you they were suggested by you. You must forgive the poet’s license I take. Here is one verse. The metrical irregularity is intentional, because I want, as it were, to put you apart: to change the lilt and the mood altogether when I speak of you.