In the beginning of December Ann Veronica began to speculate privately upon the procedure of pawning. She had decided that she would begin with her pearl necklace. She spent a very disagreeable afternoon and evening--it was raining fast outside, and she had very unwisely left her soundest pair of boots in the boothole of her father's house in Morningside Park--thinking over the economic situation and planning a course of action. Her aunt had secretly sent on to Ann Veronica some new warm underclothing, a dozen pairs of stockings, and her last winter's jacket, but the dear lady had overlooked those boots.
These things illuminated her situation extremely. Finally she decided upon a step that had always seemed reasonable to her, but that hitherto she had, from motives too faint for her to formulate, refrained from taking. She resolved to go into the City to Ramage and ask for his advice. And next morning she attired herself with especial care and neatness, found his address in the Directory at a post-office, and went to him.
She had to wait some minutes in an outer office, wherein three young men of spirited costume and appearance regarded her with ill-concealed curiosity and admiration. Then Ramage appeared with effusion, and ushered her into his inner apartment. The three young men exchanged expressive glances.
The inner apartment was rather gracefully furnished with a thick, fine Turkish carpet, a good brass fender, a fine old bureau, and on the walls were engravings of two young girls' heads by Greuze, and of some modern picture of boys bathing in a sunlit pool.
"But this is a surprise!" said Ramage. "This is wonderful! I've been feeling that you had vanished from my world. Have you been away from Morningside Park?"
"I'm not interrupting you?"
"You are. Splendidly. Business exists for such interruptions. There you are, the best client's chair."
Ann Veronica sat down, and Ramage's eager eyes feasted on her.
"I've been looking out for you," he said. "I confess it."
She had not, she reflected, remembered how prominent his eyes were.
"I want some advice," said Ann Veronica.
"Yes?"
"You remember once, how we talked--at a gate on the Downs? We talked about how a girl might get an independent living."
"Yes, yes."
"Well, you see, something has happened at home."
She paused.
"Nothing has happened to Mr. Stanley?"
"I've fallen out with my father. It was about--a question of what I might do or might not do. He--In fact, he--he locked me in my room. Practically."
Her breath left her for a moment.
"I SAY!" said Mr. Ramage.
"I wanted to go to an art-student ball of which he disapproved."
"And why shouldn't you?"
"I felt that sort of thing couldn't go on. So I packed up and came to London next day."
"To a friend?"
"To lodgings--alone."
"I say, you know, you have some pluck. You did it on your own?"
Ann Veronica smiled. "Quite on my own," she said.
"It's magnificent!" He leaned back and regarded her with his head a little on one side. "By Jove!" he said, "there is something direct about you. I wonder if I should have locked you up if I'd been your father. Luckily I'm not. And you started out forthwith to fight the world and be a citizen on your own basis?" He came forward again and folded his hands under him on his desk.
"How has the world taken it?" he asked. "If I was the world I think I should have put down a crimson carpet, and asked you to say what you wanted, and generally walk over me. But the world didn't do that."
"Not exactly."
"It presented a large impenetrable back, and went on thinking about something else."
"It offered from fifteen to two-and-twenty shillings a week--for drudgery."
"The world has no sense of what is due to youth and courage. It never has had."
"Yes," said Ann Veronica. "But the thing is, I want a job."
"Exactly! And so you came along to me. And you see, I don't turn my back, and I am looking at you and thinking about you from top to toe."
"And what do you think I ought to do?"
"Exactly!" He lifted a paper-weight and dabbed it gently down again. "What ought you to do?"
"I've hunted up all sorts of things."
"The point to note is that fundamentally you don't want particularly to do it."
"I don't understand."
"You want to be free and so forth, yes. But you don't particularly want to do the job that sets you free--for its own sake. I mean that it doesn't interest you in itself."
"I suppose not."
"That's one of our differences. We men are like children. We can get absorbed in play, in games, in the business we do. That's really why we do them sometimes rather well and get on. But women--women as a rule don't throw themselves into things like that. As a matter of fact it isn't their affair. And as a natural consequence, they don't do so well, and they don't get on--and so the world doesn't pay them. They don't catch on to discursive interests, you see, because they are more serious, they are concentrated on the central reality of life, and a little impatient of its--its outer aspects. At least that, I think, is what makes a clever woman's independent career so much more difficult than a clever man's."
"She doesn't develop a specialty." Ann Veronica was doing her best to follow him.
"She has one, that's why. Her specialty is the central thing in life, it is life itself, the warmth of life, sex--and love."
He pronounced this with an air of profound conviction and with his eyes on Ann Veronica's face. He had an air of having told her a deep, personal secret. She winced as he thrust the fact at her, was about to answer, and checked herself. She colored faintly.
"That doesn't touch the question I asked you," she said. "It may be true, but it isn't quite what I have in mind."
"Of course not," said Ramage, as one who rouses himself from deep preoccupations And he began to question her in a business-like way upon the steps she had taken and the inquiries she had made. He displayed none of the airy optimism of their previous talk over the downland gate. He was helpful, but gravely dubious. "You see," he said, "from my point of view you're grown up--you're as old as all the goddesses and the contemporary of any man alive. But from the--the economic point of view you're a very young and altogether inexperienced person."
He returned to and developed that idea. "You're still," he said, "in the educational years. From the point of view of most things in the world of employment which a woman can do reasonably well and earn a living by, you're unripe and half-educated. If you had taken your degree, for example."
He spoke of secretarial work, but even there she would need to be able to do typing and shorthand. He made it more and more evident to her that her proper course was not to earn a salary but to accumulate equipment. "You see," he said, "you are like an inaccessible gold-mine in all this sort of matter. You're splendid stuff, you know, but you've got nothing ready to sell. That's the flat business situation."
He thought. Then he slapped his hand on his desk and looked up with the air of a man struck by a brilliant idea. "Look here," he said, protruding his eyes; "why get anything to do at all just yet? Why, if you must be free, why not do the sensible thing? Make yourself worth a decent freedom. Go on with your studies at the Imperial College, for example, get a degree, and make yourself good value. Or become a thorough-going typist and stenographer and secretarial expert."
"But I can't do that."
"Why not?"
"You see, if I do go home my father objects to the College, and as for typing--"
"Don't go home."
"Yes, but you forget; how am I to live?"
"Easily. Easily. . . . Borrow. . . . From me."
"I couldn't do that," said Ann Veronica, sharply.
"I see no reason why you shouldn't."
"It's impossible."
"As one friend to another. Men are always doing it, and if you set up to be a man--"
"No, it's absolutely out of the question, Mr. Ramage." And Ann Veronica's face was hot.
Ramage pursed his rather loose lips and shrugged his shoulders, with his eyes fixed steadily upon her. "Well anyhow-- I don't see the force of your objection, you know. That's my advice to you. Here I am. Consider you've got resources deposited with me. Perhaps at the first blush--it strikes you as odd. People are brought up to be so shy about money. As though it was indelicate--it's just a sort of shyness. But here I am to draw upon. Here I am as an alternative either to nasty work--or going home."
"It's very kind of you--" began Ann Veronica.
"Not a bit. Just a friendly polite suggestion. I don't suggest any philanthropy. I shall charge you five per cent., you know, fair and square."
Ann Veronica opened her lips quickly and did not speak. But the five per cent. certainly did seem to improve the aspect of Ramage's suggestion.
"Well, anyhow, consider it open." He dabbed with his paper-weight again, and spoke in an entirely indifferent tone. "And now tell me, please, how you eloped from Morningside Park. How did you get your luggage out of the house? Wasn't it--wasn't it rather in some respects--rather a lark? It's one of my regrets for my lost youth. I never ran away from anywhere with anybody anywhen. And now--I suppose I should be considered too old. I don't feel it. . . . Didn't you feel rather EVENTFUL--in the train--coming up to Waterloo?"