He sat in the arm-chair and took tea, and consumed several of the extra cakes which she had sent out for and talked to her and expressed himself, looking very earnestly at her with his deep-set eyes, and carefully avoiding any crumbs on his mustache the while. Ann Veronica sat firelit by her tea-tray with, quite unconsciously, the air of an expert hostess.
“But how is it all going to end?” said Mr. Manning.
“Your father, of course,” he said, “must come to realize just how Splendid you are! He doesn’t understand. I’ve seen him, and he doesn’t a bit understand. I didn’t understand before that letter. It makes me want to be just everything I CAN be to you. You’re like some splendid Princess in Exile in these Dreadful Dingy apartments!”
“I’m afraid I’m anything but a Princess when it comes to earning a salary,” said Ann Veronica. “But frankly, I mean to fight this through if I possibly can.”
“My God!” said Manning, in a stage-aside. “Earning a salary!”
“You’re like a Princess in Exile!” he repeated, overruling her. “You come into these sordid surroundings — you mustn’t mind my calling them sordid — and it makes them seem as though they didn’t matter.... I don’t think they do matter. I don’t think any surroundings could throw a shadow on you.”
Ann Veronica felt a slight embarrassment. “Won’t you have some more tea, Mr. Manning?” she asked.
“You know —,” said Mr. Manning, relinquishing his cup without answering her question, “when I hear you talk of earning a living, it’s as if I heard of an archangel going on the Stock Exchange — or Christ selling doves.... Forgive my daring. I couldn’t help the thought.”
“It’s a very good image,” said Ann Veronica.
“I knew you wouldn’t mind.”
“But does it correspond with the facts of the case? You know, Mr. Manning, all this sort of thing is very well as sentiment, but does it correspond with the realities? Are women truly such angelic things and men so chivalrous? You men have, I know, meant to make us Queens and Goddesses, but in practice — well, look, for example, at the stream of girls one meets going to work of a morning, round-shouldered, cheap, and underfed! They aren’t queens, and no one is treating them as queens. And look, again, at the women one finds letting lodgings.... I was looking for rooms last week. It got on my nerves — the women I saw. Worse than any man. Everywhere I went and rapped at a door I found behind it another dreadful dingy woman — another fallen queen, I suppose — dingier than the last, dirty, you know, in grain. Their poor hands!”
“I know,” said Mr. Manning, with entirely suitable emotion.
“And think of the ordinary wives and mothers, with their anxiety, their limitations, their swarms of children!”
Mr. Manning displayed distress. He fended these things off from him with the rump of his fourth piece of cake. “I know that our social order is dreadful enough,” he said, “and sacrifices all that is best and most beautiful in life. I don’t defend it.”
“And besides, when it comes to the idea of queens,” Ann Veronica went on, “there’s twenty-one and a half million women to twenty million men. Suppose our proper place is a shrine. Still, that leaves over a million shrines short, not reckoning widows who re-marry. And more boys die than girls, so that the real disproportion among adults is even greater.”
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