He flung aside all his talk of help and disinterested friendship as though it had never been even a disguise between them, as though from the first it was no more than a fancy dress they had put quite understandingly upon their relationship. He had set out to win her, and she had let him start. And at the thought of that other lover--he was convinced that that beloved person was a lover, and she found herself unable to say a word to explain to him that this other person, the person she loved, did not even know of her love--Ramage grew angry and savage once more, and returned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men do services for the love of women, and the woman who takes must pay. Such was the simple code that displayed itself in all his thoughts. He left that arid rule clear of the least mist of refinement or delicacy.
That he should pay forty pounds to help this girl who preferred another man was no less in his eyes than a fraud and mockery that made her denial a maddening and outrageous disgrace to him. And this though he was evidently passionately in love with her.
For a while he threatened her. "You have put all your life in my hands," he declared. "Think of that check you endorsed. There it is--against you. I defy you to explain it away. What do you think people will make of that? What will this lover of yours make of that?"At intervals Ann Veronica demanded to go, declaring her undying resolve to repay him at any cost, and made short movements doorward.
But at last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened the door.
She emerged with a white face and wide-open eyes upon a little, red-lit landing. She went past three keenly observant and ostentatiously preoccupied waiters down the thick-carpeted staircase and out of the Hotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory of relationships, past a tall porter in blue and crimson, into a cool, clear night.
Part 6
When Ann Veronica reached her little bed-sitting-room again, every nerve in her body was quivering with shame and self-disgust.
She threw hat and coat on the bed and sat down before the fire.
"And now," she said, splintering the surviving piece of coal into indignant flame-spurting fragments with one dexterous blow, "what am I to do?
"I'm in a hole!--mess is a better word, expresses it better .
I'm in a mess--a nasty mess! a filthy mess! Oh, no end of a mess!
Do you hear, Ann Veronica?--you're in a nasty, filthy, unforgivable mess!
"Haven't I just made a silly mess of things?
"Forty pounds! I haven't got twenty!"
She got up, stamped with her foot, and then, suddenly remembering the lodger below, sat down and wrenched off her boots.
"This is what comes of being a young woman up to date. By Jove!
I'm beginning to have my doubts about freedom!
"You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly young woman!
The smeariness of the thing!
"The smeariness of this sort of thing! . . . Mauled about!"She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the back of her hand. "Ugh!" she said.
"The young women of Jane Austen's time didn't get into this sort of scrape! At least--one thinks so. . . . I wonder if some of them did--and it didn't get reported. Aunt Jane had her quiet moments. Most of them didn't, anyhow. They were properly brought up, and sat still and straight, and took the luck fate brought them as gentlewomen should. And they had an idea of what men were like behind all their nicety. They knew they were all Bogey in disguise. I didn't! I didn't! After all--"For a time her mind ran on daintiness and its defensive restraints as though it was the one desirable thing. That world of fine printed cambrics and escorted maidens, of delicate secondary meanings and refined allusiveness, presented itself to her imagination with the brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed for many women it is a lost paradise.
"I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners," she said.
"I wonder if I've been properly brought up. If I had been quite quiet and white and dignified, wouldn't it have been different?
Would he have dared? . . ."
For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica was utterly disgusted with herself; she was wrung with a passionate and belated desire to move gently, to speak softly and ambiguously--to be, in effect, prim.
Horrible details recurred to her.
"Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in his neck--deliberately to hurt him?"She tried to sound the humorous note.
"Are you aware, Ann Veronica, you nearly throttled that gentleman?"Then she reviled her own foolish way of putting it.
"You ass and imbecile, Ann Veronica! You female cad! Cad! Cad!
. . . Why aren't you folded up clean in lavender--as every young woman ought to be? What have you been doing with yourself? . .
."
She raked into the fire with the poker.
"All of which doesn't help me in the slightest degree to pay back that money."That night was the most intolerable one that Ann Veronica had ever spent. She washed her face with unwonted elaboration before she went to bed. This time, there was no doubt, she did not sleep. The more she disentangled the lines of her situation the deeper grew her self-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of lying in bed became unendurable, and she rolled out and marched about her room and whispered abuse of herself--usually until she hit against some article of furniture.
Then she would have quiet times, in which she would say to herself, "Now look here! Let me think it all out!"For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman's position in the world--the meagre realities of such freedom as it permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual man under which she must labor for even a foothold in the world. She had flung away from her father's support with the finest assumption of personal independence. And here she was--in a mess because it had been impossible for her to avoid leaning upon another man. She had thought--What had she thought? That this dependence of women was but an illusion which needed only to be denied to vanish. She had denied it with vigor, and here she was!
