bbah with a richly
embroidered yoke. He was a small, dark, reserved man, with a large
inflexible-looking convex forehead, and his wife was very pink and
high-spirited, with one of those chins that pass insensibly into a full,
strong neck. Once a week, every Saturday, they had a little gathering
from nine till the small hours, just talk and perhaps reading aloud and
fruitarian refreshments--chestnut sandwiches buttered with nut tose,
and so forth--and lemonade and unfermented wine; and to one of these
symposia Miss Miniver after a good deal of preliminary solicitude,
conducted Ann Veronica.

She was introduced, perhaps a little too obviously for her taste, as
a girl who was standing out against her people, to a gathering that
consisted of a very old lady with an extremely wrinkled skin and a deep
voice who was wearing what appeared to Ann Veronica's inexperienced
eye to be an antimacassar upon her head, a shy, blond young man with a
narrow forehead and glasses, two undistinguished women in plain skirts
and blouses, and a middle-aged couple, very fat and alike in black, Mr.
and Mrs. Alderman Dunstable, of the Borough Council of Marylebone.
These were seated in an imperfect semicircle about a very copper-adorned
fireplace, surmounted by a carved wood inscription:

"DO IT NOW."

And to them were presently added a roguish-looking young man, with
reddish hair, an orange tie, and a fluffy tweed suit, and others who,
in Ann Veronica's memory, in spite of her efforts to recall details,
remained obstinately just "others."

The talk was animated, and remained always brilliant in form even when
it ceased to be brilliant in substance. There were moments when Ann
Veronica rather more than suspected the chief speakers to be, as
school-boys say, showing off at her.

They talked of a new substitute for dripping in vegetarian cookery that
Mrs. Goopes was convinced exercised an exceptionally purifying influence
on the mind. And then they talked of Anarchism and Socialism, and
whether the former was the exact opposite of the latter or only a higher
form. The reddish-haired young man contributed allusions to the Hegelian
philosophy that momentarily confused the discussion. Then Alderman
Dunstable, who had hitherto been silent, broke out into speech and went
off at a tangent, and gave his personal impressions of quite a number
of his fellow-councillors. He continued to do this for the rest of the
evening intermittently, in and out, amo