reat me fairly, Miss Stanley. My
garden-close would be a better thing than that."

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

IDEALS AND A REALITY

Part 1

And now for some weeks Ann Veronica was to test her market value in the
world. She went about in a negligent November London that had become
very dark and foggy and greasy and forbidding indeed, and tried to find
that modest but independent employment she had so rashly assumed. She
went about, intent-looking and self-possessed, trim and fine, concealing
her emotions whatever they were, as the realities of her position opened
out before her. Her little bed-sitting-room was like a lair, and she
went out from it into this vast, dun world, with its smoke-gray houses,
its glaring streets of shops, its dark streets of homes, its orange-lit
windows, under skies of dull copper or muddy gray or black, much as an
animal goes out to seek food. She would come back and write letters,
carefully planned and written letters, or read some book she had fetched
from Mudie's--she had invested a half-guinea with Mudie's--or sit over
her fire and think.

Slowly and reluctantly she came to realize that Vivie Warren was what
is called an "ideal." There were no such girls and no such positions. No
work that offered was at all of the quality she had vaguely postulated
for herself. With such qualifications as she possessed, two chief
channels of employment lay open, and neither attracted her, neither
seemed really to offer a conclusive escape from that subjection to
mankind against which, in the person of her father, she was rebelling.
One main avenue was for her to become a sort of salaried accessory wife
or mother, to be a governess or an assistant schoolmistress, or a very
high type of governess-nurse. The other was to go into business--into a
photographer's reception-room, for example, or a costumer's or hat-shop.
The first set of occupations seemed to her to be altogether too domestic
and restricted; for the latter she was dreadfully handicapped by her
want of experience. And also she didn't like them. She didn't like the
shops, she didn't like the other women's faces; she thought the
smirking men in frock-coats who dominated these establishments the
most intolerable persons she had ever had to face. One called her very
distinctly "My dear!"

Two secretarial posts did indeed seem to offer themselves in which, at
least, there was no specific exclusion of womanhood; one was under
a Radical Member