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…
“What ought you to do?” He began to produce his knowledge of the world for her benefit, jerkily and allusively, and with a strong, rank flavor of “savoir faire.” He took an optimist view of her chances. Ann Veronica listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on the turf, and now and then she asked a question or looked up to discuss a point. In the meanwhile, as he talked, he scrutinized her face, ran his eyes over her careless, gracious poise, wondered hard about her. He described her privately to himself as a splendid girl. It was clear she wanted to get away from home, that she was impatient to get away from home. Why? While the front of his mind was busy warning her not to fall into the hopeless miseries of underpaid teaching, and explaining his idea that for women of initiative, quite as much as for men, the world of business had by far the best chances, the back chambers of his brain were busy with the problem of that “Why?”
His first idea as a man of the world was to explain her unrest by a lover, some secret or forbidden or impossible lover. But he dismissed that because then she would ask her lover and not him all these things. Restlessness, then, was the trouble, simple restlessness: home bored her. He could quite understand the daughter of Mr. Stanley being bored and feeling limited. But was that enough? Dim, formless suspicions of something more vital wandered about his mind. Was the young lady impatient for experience? Was she adventurous? As a man of the world he did not think it becoming to accept maidenly calm as anything more than a mask. Warm life was behind that always, even if it slept. If it was not an actual personal lover, it still might be the lover not yet incarnate, not yet perhaps suspected…
He had diverged only a little from the truth when he said that his chief interest in life was women. It wasn’t so much women as Woman that engaged his mind. His was the Latin turn of thinking; he had fallen in love at thirteen, and he was still capable – he prided himself – of falling in love. His invalid wife and her money had been only the thin thread that held his life together; beaded on that permanent relation had been an inter-weaving series of other feminine experiences, disturbing, absorbing, interesting, memorable affairs. Each one had been different from the others, each had had a quality all its own, a distinctive freshness, a distinctive beauty. He could not understand how men could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing, these complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and mounted to the supremest, most passionate intimacy. All the rest of his existence was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for it, worked for it, kept himself in training for it.
So while