reams, it wrote up broken and enigmatical sentences upon the
passage walls of her mind. She was aware of it now as if it were a
voice shouting outside a house, shouting passionate verities in a hot
sunlight, a voice that cries while people talk insincerely in a darkened
room and pretend not to hear. Its shouting now did in some occult manner
convey a protest that Mr. Manning would on no account do, though he
was tall and dark and handsome and kind, and thirty-five and adequately
prosperous, and all that a husband should be. But there was, it
insisted, no mobility in his face, no movement, nothing about him that
warmed. If Ann Veronica could have put words to that song they
would have been, "Hot-blooded marriage or none!" but she was far too
indistinct in this matter to frame any words at all.

"I don't love him," said Ann Veronica, getting a gleam. "I don't see
that his being a good sort matters. That really settles about that....
But it means no end of a row."

For a time she sat on a rail before leaving the road for the downland
turf. "But I wish," she said, "I had some idea what I was really up to."

Her thoughts went into solution for a time, while she listened to a lark
singing.

"Marriage and mothering," said Ann Veronica, with her mind crystallizing
out again as the lark dropped to the nest in the turf. "And all the rest
of it perhaps is a song."

Part 3

Her mind got back to the Fadden Ball.

She meant to go, she meant to go, she meant to go. Nothing would stop
her, and she was prepared to face the consequences. Suppose her father
turned her out of doors! She did not care, she meant to go. She would
just walk out of the house and go....

She thought of her costume in some detail and with considerable
satisfaction, and particularly of a very jolly property dagger with
large glass jewels in the handle, that reposed in a drawer in her room.
She was to be a Corsair's Bride. "Fancy stabbing a man for jealousy!"
she thought. "You'd have to think how to get in between his bones."

She thought of her father, and with an effort dismissed him from her
mind.

She tried to imagine the collective effect of the Fadden Ball; she had
never seen a fancy-dress gathering in her life. Mr. Manning came into
her thoughts again, an unexpected, tall, dark, self-contained presence
at the Fadden. One might suppose him turning up; he knew a lot of clever
people, and some of them might belong to the class. What would he c