e an atmosphere this implication, not only
that the world was in some stupid and even obvious way WRONG, with which
indeed she was quite prepared to agree, but that it needed only a
few pioneers to behave as such and be thoroughly and indiscriminately
"advanced," for the new order to achieve itself.

When ninety per cent. out of the ten or twelve people one meets in a
month not only say but feel and assume a thing, it is very hard not
to fall into the belief that the thing is so. Imperceptibly almost Ann
Veronica began to acquire the new attitude, even while her mind still
resisted the felted ideas that went with it. And Miss Miniver began to
sway her.

The very facts that Miss Miniver never stated an argument clearly, that
she was never embarrassed by a sense of self-contradiction, and had
little more respect for consistency of statement than a washerwoman
has for wisps of vapor, which made Ann Veronica critical and hostile at
their first encounter in Morningside Park, became at last with constant
association the secret of Miss Miniver's growing influence. The brain
tires of resistance, and when it meets again and again, incoherently
active, the same phrases, the same ideas that it has already slain,
exposed and dissected and buried, it becomes less and less energetic to
repeat the operation. There must be something, one feels, in ideas that
achieve persistently a successful resurrection. What Miss Miniver would
have called the Higher Truth supervenes.

Yet through these talks, these meetings and conferences, these movements
and efforts, Ann Veronica, for all that she went with her friend, and
at times applauded with her enthusiastically, yet went nevertheless with
eyes that grew more and more puzzled, and fine eyebrows more and more
disposed to knit. She was with these movements--akin to them, she felt
it at times intensely--and yet something eluded her. Morningside Park
had been passive and defective; all this rushed about and was active,
but it was still defective. It still failed in something. It did seem
germane to the matter that so many of the people "in the van" were plain
people, or faded people, or tired-looking people. It did affect the
business that they all argued badly and were egotistical in their
manners and inconsistent in their phrases. There were moments when she
doubted whether the whole mass of movements and societies and gatherings
and talks was not simply one coherent spectacle of failure prote