Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells Read Free Book Online

the meanings of life on
its surfaces. They seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica's
wrappered world. The Widgett mental furniture was perhaps worn and
shabby, but there it was before you, undisguised, fading visibly in an
almost pitiless sunlight. Lady Palsworthy was the widow of a knight
who had won his spurs in the wholesale coal trade, she was of good
seventeenth-century attorney blood, a county family, and distantly
related to Aunt Mollie's deceased curate. She was the social leader of
Morningside Park, and in her superficial and euphuistic way an extremely
kind and pleasant woman. With her lived a Mrs. Pramlay, a sister of
the Morningside Park doctor, and a very active and useful member of the
Committee of the Impoverished Gentlewomen's Aid Society. Both ladies
were on easy and friendly terms with all that was best in Morningside
Park society; they had an afternoon once a month that was quite well
attended, they sometimes gave musical evenings, they dined out and gave
a finish to people's dinners, they had a full-sized croquet lawn and
tennis beyond, and understood the art of bringing people together.
And they never talked of anything at all, never discussed, never even
encouraged gossip. They were just nice.
    Ann Veronica found herself walking back down the Avenue that had just
been the scene of her first proposal beside her aunt, and speculating
for the first time in her life about that lady's mental attitudes. Her
prevailing effect was one of quiet and complete assurance, as though she
knew all about everything, and was only restrained by her instinctive
delicacy from telling what she knew. But the restraint exercised by her
instinctive delicacy was very great; over and above coarse or sexual
matters it covered religion and politics and any mention of money
matters or crime, and Ann Veronica found herself wondering whether these
exclusions represented, after all, anything more than suppressions. Was
there anything at all in those locked rooms of her aunt's mind? Were
they fully furnished and only a little dusty and cobwebby and in need of
an airing, or were they stark vacancy except, perhaps, for a cockroach
or so or the gnawing of a rat? What was the mental equivalent of a rat's
gnawing? The image was going astray. But what would her aunt think of
Teddy's recent off-hand suggestion of marriage? What would she think of
the Widgett conversation? Suppose she was to tell her aunt quietly
but firmly about the parasitic males of degraded crustacea. The girl
suppressed a chuckle that would have been inexplicable.
    There came a wild rush of anthropological lore into her brain, a flare
of indecorous humor. It was one of the secret troubles of her mind, this
grotesque twist her ideas would sometimes take, as though they rebelled
and rioted. After all, she found herself reflecting, behind her aunt's
complacent visage there was a past as lurid as any one's—not, of
course, her aunt's own personal past, which was apparently just that
curate and almost incredibly jejune, but an ancestral past with all
sorts of scandalous things in it: fire and slaughterings, exogamy,
marriage by capture, corroborees, cannibalism! Ancestresses 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