es with perhaps
dim anticipatory likenesses to her aunt, their hair less neatly done,
no doubt, their manners and gestures as yet undisciplined, but still
ancestresses in the direct line, must have danced through a brief and
stirring life in the woady buff. Was there no echo anywhere in Miss
Stanley's pacified brain? Those empty rooms, if they were empty, were
the equivalents of astoundingly decorated predecessors. Perhaps it was
just as well there was no inherited memory.

Ann Veronica was by this time quite shocked at her own thoughts, and yet
they would go on with their freaks. Great vistas of history opened, and
she and her aunt were near reverting to the primitive and passionate and
entirely indecorous arboreal--were swinging from branches by the
arms, and really going on quite dread-fully--when their arrival at
the Palsworthys' happily checked this play of fancy, and brought Ann
Veronica back to the exigencies of the wrappered life again.

Lady Palsworthy liked Ann Veronica because she was never awkward,
had steady eyes, and an almost invariable neatness and dignity in her
clothes. She seemed just as stiff and shy as a girl ought to be, Lady
Palsworthy thought, neither garrulous nor unready, and free from nearly
all the heavy aggressiveness, the overgrown, overblown quality, the
egotism and want of consideration of the typical modern girl. But then
Lady Palsworthy had never seen Ann Veronica running like the wind
at hockey. She had never seen her sitting on tables nor heard her
discussing theology, and had failed to observe that the graceful figure
was a natural one and not due to ably chosen stays. She took it for
granted Ann Veronica wore stays--mild stays, perhaps, but stays, and
thought no more of the matter. She had seen her really only at teas,
with the Stanley strain in her uppermost. There are so many girls
nowadays who are quite unpresentable at tea, with their untrimmed
laughs, their awful dispositions of their legs when they sit down, their
slangy disrespect; they no longer smoke, it is true, like the girls of
the eighties and nineties, nevertheless to a fine intelligence they have
the flavor of tobacco. They have no amenities, they scratch the
mellow surface of things almost as if they did it on purpose; and
Lady Palsworthy and Mrs. Pramlay lived for amenities and the mellowed
surfaces of things. Ann Veronica was one of the few young people--and
one must have young people just as one must have flowers