“The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every
well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can
even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.”
CONTENTS
ANN VERONICA
CHAPTER THE FIRST
CHAPTER THE SECOND
CHAPTER THE THIRD
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
CHAPTER THE NINTH
CHAPTER THE TENTH
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH
CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH
CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH
One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to have things out with her father that very evening. She had trembled on the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had been reached. She made up her mind in the train home that it should be a decisive crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins with her there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of this crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.
She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to Morningside Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in an attitude that would certainly have distressed her mother to see, and horrified her grandmother beyond measure; she sat with her knees up to her chin and her hands clasped before them, and she was so lost in thought that she discovered with a start, from a lettered lamp, that she was at Morningside Park, and thought she was moving out of the station, whereas she was only moving in. “Lord!” she said. She jumped up at once, caught up a leather clutch containing notebooks, a fat text-book, and a chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the carriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and that she had to tr