ne school, one good
school, three days a week. All the rest--Movements! I can live now on
fourpence a day. Think how free that leaves me to follow things up! I
must take you everywhere. I must take you to the Suffrage people, and
the Tolstoyans, and the Fabians."

"I have heard of the Fabians," said Ann Veronica.

"It's THE Society!" said Miss Miniver. "It's the centre of the
intellectuals. Some of the meetings are wonderful! Such earnest,
beautiful women! Such deep-browed men!... And to think that there
they are making history! There they are putting together the plans of a
new world. Almos light-heartedly. There is Shaw, and Webb, and Wilkins
the author, and Toomer, and Doctor Tumpany--the most wonderful people!
There you see them discussing, deciding, planning! Just think--THEY ARE
MAKING A NEW WORLD!"

"But ARE these people going to alter everything?" said Ann Veronica.

"What else can happen?" asked Miss Miniver, with a little weak gesture
at the glow. "What else can possibly happen--as things are going now?"

Part 3

Miss Miniver let Ann Veronica into her peculiar levels of the world
with so enthusiastic a generosity that it seemed ingratitude to remain
critical. Indeed, almost insensibly Ann Veronica became habituated to
the peculiar appearance and the peculiar manners of the people "in the
van." The shock of their intellectual attitude was over, usage robbed
it of the first quaint effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many
respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the
paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct
relation to that rightness, absurd.

Very central in Miss Miniver's universe were the Goopes. The Goopes were
the oddest little couple conceivable, following a fruitarian career upon
an upper floor in Theobald's Road. They were childless and servantless,
and they had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts. Mr.
Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited
schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian
cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis,
and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management of
a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very furniture had
mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home dressed
simply in a pajama-shaped suit of canvas sacking tied with brown
ribbons, while his wife wore a purple dji