Ann Veronica, page 179 by H.G. Wells
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gesture flung them into the fire. Instantly she seized the poker and made a desperate effort to get them out again. But she was only able to save a corner of the letter. The twenty pounds burned with avidity.
She remained for some seconds crouching at the fender, poker in hand.
"By Jove!" she said, standing up at last, "that about finishes it, Ann Veronica!"
CHAPTER THE
TENTH
THE SUFFRAGETTES
Part 1
"There is only one way out of all this," said Ann Veronica, sitting up in her little bed in the darkness and biting at her nails.
"I thought I was just up against Morningside Park and father, but it's the whole order of things--the whole blessed order of things. . . ."
She shivered. She frowned and gripped her hands about her knees very tightly. Her mind developed into savage wrath at the present conditions of a woman's life.
"I suppose all life is an affair of chances. But a woman's life is all chance. It's artificially chance. Find your man, that's the rule. All the rest is humbug and delicacy. He's the handle of life for you. He will let you live if it pleases him. . . .
"Can't it be altered?
"I suppose an actress is free? . . ."
She tried to think of some altered state of affairs in which these monstrous limitations would be alleviated, in which women would stand on their own feet in equal citizenship with men. For a time she brooded on the ideals and suggestions of the Socialists, on the vague intimations of an Endowment of Motherhood, of a complete relaxation of that intense individual dependence for women which is woven into the existing social order. At the back of her mind there seemed always one irrelevant qualifying spectator whose presence she sought to disregard. She would not look at him, would not think of him; when her mind wavered, then she muttered to herself in the darkness so as to keep hold of her generalization