"You've got my view," he said, after a pensive second. "I always get off here and lean over that rail for a bit. May I do so to-day?""It's your gate," she said, amiably; "you got it first. It's for you to say if I may sit on it."He slipped off the horse. "Let me introduce you to Caesar," he said; and she patted Caesar's neck, and remarked how soft his nose was, and secretly deplored the ugliness of equine teeth.
Ramage tethered the horse to the farther gate-post, and Caesar blew heavily and began to investigate the hedge.
Ramage leaned over the gate at Ann Veronica's side, and for a moment there was silence.
He made some obvious comments on the wide view warming toward its autumnal blaze that spread itself in hill and valley, wood and village, below.
"It's as broad as life," said Mr. Ramage, regarding it and putting a well-booted foot up on the bottom rail.
Part 7
"And what are you doing here, young lady," he said, looking up at her face, "wandering alone so far from home?""I like long walks," said Ann Veronica, looking down on him.
"Solitary walks?"
"That's the point of them. I think over all sorts of things.""Problems?"
"Sometimes quite difficult problems."
"You're lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother, for instance, couldn't. She had to do her thinking at home--under inspection."She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of her free young poise show in his face.
"I suppose things have changed?" she said.
"Never was such an age of transition."
She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know. "Sufficient unto me is the change thereof," he said, with all the effect of an epigram.
"I must confess," he said, "the New Woman and the New Girl intrigue me profoundly. I am one of those people who are interested in women, more interested than I am in anything else.
I don't conceal it. And the change, the change of attitude! The way all the old clingingness has been thrown aside is amazing.
And all the old--the old trick of shrinking up like a snail at a touch. If you had lived twenty years ago you would have been called a Young Person, and it would have been your chief duty in life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to understand.""There's quite enough still," said Ann Veronica, smiling, "that one doesn't understand.""Quite. But your role would have been to go about saying, 'I beg your pardon' in a reproving tone to things you understood quite well in your heart and saw no harm in. That terrible Young Person! she's vanished. Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young Person! . . . I hope we may never find her again."He rejoiced over this emancipation. "While that lamb was about every man of any spirit was regarded as a dangerous wolf. We wore invisible chains and invisible blinkers. Now, you and I can gossip at a gate, and {}Honi soit qui mal y pense. The change has given man one good thing he never had before," he said. "Girl friends. And I am coming to believe the best as well as the most beautiful friends a man can have are girl friends."He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:
"I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than to any man alive.""I suppose we ARE more free than we were?" said Ann Veronica, keeping the question general.
"Oh, there's no doubt of it! Since the girls of the eighties broke bounds and sailed away on bicycles--my young days go back to the very beginnings of that--it's been one triumphant relaxation.""Relaxation, perhaps. But are we any more free?""Well?"
"I mean we've long strings to tether us, but we are bound all the same. A woman isn't much freer--in reality."Mr. Ramage demurred.
"One runs about," said Ann Veronica.
"Yes."
"But it's on condition one doesn't do anything.""Do what?"
"Oh!--anything."
He looked interrogation with a faint smile.
"It seems to me it comes to earning one's living in the long run," said Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. "Until a girl can go away as a son does and earn her independent income, she's still on a string. It may be a long string, long enough if you like to tangle up all sorts of people; but there it is! If the paymaster pulls, home she must go. That's what I mean."Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that. He was a little impressed by Ann Veronica's metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed to Hetty Widgett. "YOU wouldn't like to be independent?" he asked, abruptly. "I mean REALLY independent. On your own. It isn't such fun as it seems.""Every one wants to be independent," said Ann Veronica. "Every one. Man or woman.""And you?"
"Rather!"
"I wonder why?"
"There's no why. It's just to feel--one owns one's self.""Nobody does that," said Ramage, and kept silence for a moment.
"But a boy--a boy goes out into the world and presently stands on his own feet. He buys his own clothes, chooses his own company, makes his own way of living.""You'd like to do that?"
"Exactly."
"Would you like to be a boy?"
"I wonder! It's out of the question, any way."Ramage reflected. "Why don't you?"
"Well, it might mean rather a row."
"I know--" said Ramage, with sympathy.
"And besides," said Ann Veronica, sweeping that aspect aside, "what could I do? A boy sails out into a trade or profession.
But--it's one of the things I've just been thinking over.
Suppose--suppose a girl did want to start in life, start in life for herself--" She looked him frankly in the eyes. "What ought she to do?""Suppose you--"
"Yes, suppose I--"
He felt that his advice was being asked. He became a little more personal and intimate. "I wonder what you could do?" he said.
"I should think YOU could do all sorts of things. . . .
