第74章

Everything was very neat; it had evidently been straightened up and kept for her. She put down the sketch-books and apparatus she had brought with her, pulled out her stool, and sat down. As she did so the preparation-room door opened behind her. She heard it open, but as she felt unable to look round in a careless manner she pretended not to hear it. Then Capes' footsteps approached. She turned with an effort.

"I expected you this morning," he said. "I saw--they knocked off your fetters yesterday.""I think it is very good of me to come this afternoon.""I began to be afraid you might not come at all.""Afraid!"

"Yes. I'm glad you're back for all sorts of reasons." He spoke a little nervously. "Among other things, you know, I didn't understand quite--I didn't understand that you were so keenly interested in this suffrage question. I have it on my conscience that I offended you--""Offended me when?"

"I've been haunted by the memory of you. I was rude and stupid.

We were talking about the suffrage--and I rather scoffed.""You weren't rude," she said.

"I didn't know you were so keen on this suffrage business.""Nor I. You haven't had it on your mind all this time?""I have rather. I felt somehow I'd hurt you.""You didn't. I--I hurt myself."

"I mean--"

"I behaved like an idiot, that's all. My nerves were in rags. Iwas worried. We're the hysterical animal, Mr. Capes. I got myself locked up to cool off. By a sort of instinct. As a dog eats grass. I'm right again now.""Because your nerves were exposed, that was no excuse for my touching them. I ought to have seen--""It doesn't matter a rap--if you're not disposed to resent the--the way I behaved.""_I_ resent!"

"I was only sorry I'd been so stupid."

"Well, I take it we're straight again," said Capes with a note of relief, and assumed an easier position on the edge of her table.

"But if you weren't keen on the suffrage business, why on earth did you go to prison?"Ann Veronica reflected. "It was a phase," she said.

He smiled. "It's a new phase in the life history," he remarked.

"Everybody seems to have it now. Everybody who's going to develop into a woman.""There's Miss Garvice."

"She's coming on," said Capes. "And, you know, you're altering us all. I'M shaken. The campaign's a success." He met her questioning eye, and repeated, "Oh! it IS a success. A man is so apt to--to take women a little too lightly. Unless they remind him now and then not to. . . . YOU did.""Then I didn't waste my time in prison altogether?""It wasn't the prison impressed me. But I liked the things you said here. I felt suddenly I understood you--as an intelligent person. If you'll forgive my saying that, and implying what goes with it. There's something--puppyish in a man's usual attitude to women. That is what I've had on my conscience. . . . I don't think we're altogether to blame if we don't take some of your lot seriously. Some of your sex, I mean. But we smirk a little, I'm afraid, habitually when we talk to you. We smirk, and we're a bit--furtive."He paused, with his eyes studying her gravely. "You, anyhow, don't deserve it," he said.

Their colloquy was ended abruptly by the apparition of Miss Klegg at the further door. When she saw Ann Veronica she stood for a moment as if entranced, and then advanced with outstretched hands. "Veronique!" she cried with a rising intonation, though never before had she called Ann Veronica anything but Miss Stanley, and seized her and squeezed her and kissed her with profound emotion. "To think that you were going to do it--and never said a word! You are a little thin, but except for that you look--you look better than ever. Was it VERY horrible? Itried to get into the police-court, but the crowd was ever so much too big, push as I would. . . .

"I mean to go to prison directly the session is over," said Miss Klegg. "Wild horses--not if they have all the mounted police in London--shan't keep me out."Part 6

Capes lit things wonderfully for Ann Veronica all that afternoon, he was so friendly, so palpably interested in her, and glad to have her back with him. Tea in the laboratory was a sort of suffragette reception. Miss Garvice assumed a quality of neutrality, professed herself almost won over by Ann Veronica's example, and the Scotchman decided that if women had a distinctive sphere it was, at any rate, an enlarging sphere, and no one who believed in the doctrine of evolution could logically deny the vote to women "ultimately," however much they might be disposed to doubt the advisability of its immediate concession.

It was a refusal of expediency, he said, and not an absolute refusal. The youth with his hair like Russell cleared his throat and said rather irrelevantly that he knew a man who knew Thomas Bayard Simmons, who had rioted in the Strangers' Gallery, and then Capes, finding them all distinctly pro-Ann Veronica, if not pro-feminist, ventured to be perverse, and started a vein of speculation upon the Scotchman's idea--that there were still hopes of women evolving into something higher.

He was unusually absurd and ready, and all the time it seemed to Ann Veronica as a delightful possibility, as a thing not indeed to be entertained seriously, but to be half furtively felt, that he was being so agreeable because she had come back again. She returned home through a world that was as roseate as it had been gray overnight.