tamped with her foot, and then, suddenly remembering the
lodger below, sat down and wrenched off her boots.

"This is what comes of being a young woman up to date. By Jove! I'm
beginning to have my doubts about freedom!

"You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly young woman! The
smeariness of the thing!

"The smeariness of this sort of thing!... Mauled about!"

She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the back of her
hand. "Ugh!" she said.

"The young women of Jane Austen's time didn't get into this sort of
scrape! At least--one thinks so.... I wonder if some of them did--and
it didn't get reported. Aunt Jane had her quiet moments. Most of
them didn't, anyhow. They were properly brought up, and sat still and
straight, and took the luck fate brought them as gentlewomen should.
And they had an idea of what men were like behind all their nicety. They
knew they were all Bogey in disguise. I didn't! I didn't! After all--"

For a time her mind ran on daintiness and its defensive restraints
as though it was the one desirable thing. That world of fine printed
cambrics and escorted maidens, of delicate secondary meanings and
refined allusiveness, presented itself to her imagination with the
brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed for many women it is a lost
paradise.

"I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners," she said. "I
wonder if I've been properly brought up. If I had been quite quiet and
white and dignified, wouldn't it have been different? Would he have
dared?..."

For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica was utterly
disgusted with herself; she was wrung with a passionate and belated
desire to move gently, to speak softly and ambiguously--to be, in
effect, prim.

Horrible details recurred to her.

"Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in his
neck--deliberately to hurt him?"

She tried to sound the humorous note.

"Are you aware, Ann Veronica, you nearly throttled that gentleman?"

Then she reviled her own foolish way of putting it.

"You ass and imbecile, Ann Veronica! You female cad! Cad! Cad!... Why
aren't you folded up clean in lavender--as every young woman ought to
be? What have you been doing with yourself?..."

She raked into the fire with the poker.

"All of which doesn't help me in the slightest degree to pay back that
money."

That night was the most intolerable one that Ann Veronica had ever
spent. She washed her face with unwonted elabor