His grip twisted her wrist. She cried out with the pain of it.

A wild passion of shame and self-disgust swept over her. Her spirit
awoke in dismay to an affection in ruins, to the immense undignified
disaster that had come to them.

Abruptly she desisted, recoiled, and turned and fled up-stairs.

She made noises between weeping and laughter as she went. She gained her
room, and slammed her door and locked it as though she feared violence
and pursuit.

"Oh God!" she cried, "Oh God!" and flung aside her opera-cloak, and for
a time walked about the room--a Corsair's bride at a crisis of emotion.
"Why can't he reason with me," she said, again and again, "instead of
doing this?"

Part 3

There presently came a phase in which she said: "I WON'T stand it even
now. I will go to-night."

She went as far as her door, then turned to the window. She opened
this and scrambled out--a thing she had not done for five long years of
adolescence--upon the leaded space above the built-out bath-room on the
first floor. Once upon a time she and Roddy had descended thence by the
drain-pipe.

But things that a girl of sixteen may do in short skirts are not
things to be done by a young lady of twenty-one in fancy dress and
an opera-cloak, and just as she was coming unaided to an adequate
realization of this, she discovered Mr. Pragmar, the wholesale druggist,
who lived three gardens away, and who had been mowing his lawn to get
an appetite for dinner, standing in a fascinated attitude beside the
forgotten lawn-mower and watching her intently.

She found it extremely difficult to infuse an air of quiet correctitude
into her return through the window, and when she was safely inside she
waved clinched fists and executed a noiseless dance of rage.

When she reflected that Mr. Pragmar probably knew Mr. Ramage, and might
describe the affair to him, she cried "Oh!" with renewed vexation, and
repeated some steps of her dance in a new and more ecstatic measure.

Part 4

At eight that evening Miss Stanley tapped at Ann Veronica's bedroom
door.

"I've brought you up some dinner, Vee," she said.

Ann Veronica was lying on her bed in a darkling room staring at the
ceiling. She reflected before answering. She was frightfully hungry.
She had eaten little or no tea, and her mid-day meal had been worse than
nothing.

She got up and unlocked the door.

Her aunt did not object to capital punishment or war, or the industrial
syst