phant eye, and a note of approval in
her father's manner, and a novel disposition in him to praise Manning
in a just, impartial voice had soon placed very definite qualifications
upon that covenanted secrecy.

Part 5

At first the quality of her relationship to Manning seemed moving and
beautiful to Ann Veronica. She admired and rather pitied him, and she
was unfeignedly grateful to him. She even thought that perhaps she might
come to love him, in spite of that faint indefinable flavor of absurdity
that pervaded his courtly bearing. She would never love him as she
loved Capes, of course, but there are grades and qualities of love.
For Manning it would be a more temperate love altogether. Much more
temperate; the discreet and joyless love of a virtuous, reluctant,
condescending wife. She had been quite convinced that an engagement with
him and at last a marriage had exactly that quality of compromise which
distinguishes the ways of the wise. It would be the wrappered world
almost at its best. She saw herself building up a life upon that--a
life restrained, kindly, beautiful, a little pathetic and altogether
dignified; a life of great disciplines and suppressions and extensive
reserves...

But the Ramage affair needed clearing up, of course; it was a flaw upon
that project. She had to explain about and pay off that forty pounds....

Then, quite insensibly, her queenliness had declined. She was never able
to trace the changes her attitude had undergone, from the time when she
believed herself to be the pampered Queen of Fortune, the crown of a
good man's love (and secretly, but nobly, worshipping some one else),
to the time when she realized she was in fact just a mannequin for her
lover's imagination, and that he cared no more for the realities of her
being, for the things she felt and desired, for the passions and dreams
that might move her, than a child cares for the sawdust in its doll. She
was the actress his whim had chosen to play a passive part....

It was one of the most educational disillusionments in Ann Veronica's
career.

But did many women get anything better?

This afternoon, when she was urgent to explain her hampering and
tainting complication with Ramage, the realization of this alien quality
in her relationship with Manning became acute. Hitherto it had been
qualified by her conception of all life as a compromise, by her new
effort to be unexacting of life. But she perceived that to tell Ma