“Yes.”
“Why?”
Mr. Fortescue raised his eyebrows and assumed a light-comedy expression. “I suppose I fell in love with her, Ann Veronica.”
“Rum,” said Ann Veronica. “Have you got to keep her now?”
“To the best of my ability,” said Mr. Fortescue, with a bow.
“Have you much ability?” asked Ann Veronica.
Mr. Fortescue tried to act embarrassment in order to conceal its reality, and Ann Veronica went on to ask a string of questions about acting, and whether her sister would act, and was she beautiful enough for it, and who would make her dresses, and so on.
As a matter of fact Mr. Fortescue had not much ability to keep her sister, and a little while after her mother’s death Ann Veronica met Gwen suddenly on the staircase coming from her father’s study, shockingly dingy in dusty mourning and tearful and resentful, and after that Gwen receded from the Morningside Park world, and not even the begging letters and distressful communications that her father and aunt received, but only a vague intimation of dreadfulness, a leakage of incidental comment, flashes of paternal anger at “that blackguard,” came to Ann Veronica’s ears.
Part 6
These were Ann Veronica’s leading cases in the question of marriage. They were the only real marriages she had seen clearly. For the rest, she derived her ideas of the married state from the observed behavior of married women, which impressed her in Morningside Park as being tied and dull and inelastic in comparison with the life of the young, and from a remarkably various reading among books. As a net result she had come to think of all married people much as one thinks of insects that have lost their wings, and of her sisters as new hatched creatures who had scarcely for a moment had wings. She evolved a dim image of herself cooped up in a house under the benevolent shadow of Mr. Manning. Who knows?—on the analogy of “Squiggles” she might come to call him “Mangles!”