a second mother
to you. Think if your own mother was alive!"

He paused, deeply moved.

"If my own mother was alive," sobbed Ann Veronica, "she would
understand."

The talk became more and more inconclusive and exhausting. Ann Veronica
found herself incompetent, undignified, and detestable, holding on
desperately to a hardening antagonism to her father, quarrelling with
him, wrangling with him, thinking of repartees--almost as if he was a
brother. It was horrible, but what could she do? She meant to live
her own life, and he meant, with contempt and insults, to prevent her.
Anything else that was said she now regarded only as an aspect of or
diversion from that.

In the retrospect she was amazed to think how things had gone to pieces,
for at the outset she had been quite prepared to go home again upon
terms. While waiting for his coming she had stated her present
and future relations with him with what had seemed to her the most
satisfactory lucidity and completeness. She had looked forward to an
explanation. Instead had come this storm, this shouting, this weeping,
this confusion of threats and irrelevant appeals. It was not only that
her father had said all sorts of inconsistent and unreasonable things,
but that by some incomprehensible infection she herself had replied in
the same vein. He had assumed that her leaving home was the point at
issue, that everything turned on that, and that the sole alternative was
obedience, and she had fallen in with that assumption until rebellion
seemed a sacred principle. Moreover, atrociously and inexorably, he
allowed it to appear ever and again in horrible gleams that he suspected
there was some man in the case.... Some man!

And to conclude it all was the figure of her father in the doorway,
giving her a last chance, his hat in one hand, his umbrella in the
other, shaken at her to emphasize his point.

"You understand, then," he was saying, "you understand?"

"I understand," said Ann Veronica, tear-wet and flushed with a
reciprocal passion, but standing up to him with an equality that amazed
even herself, "I understand." She controlled a sob. "Not a penny--not
one penny--and never darken your doors again!"

Part 4

The next day her aunt came again and expostulated, and was just saying
it was "an unheard-of thing" for a girl to leave her home as Ann
Veronica had done, when her father arrived, and was shown in by the
pleasant-faced landlady.

Her father had de