b pipes in the Avenue on Sunday
morning, travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly
despised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the station.
He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three daughters with
peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found adorable. Two of these
had been her particular intimates at the High School, and had done much
to send her mind exploring beyond the limits of the available literature
at home. It was a cheerful, irresponsible, shamelessly hard-up family in
the key of faded green and flattened purple, and the girls went on from
the High School to the Fadden Art School and a bright, eventful life of
art student dances, Socialist meetings, theatre galleries, talking about
work, and even, at intervals, work; and ever and again they drew Ann
Veronica from her sound persistent industry into the circle of these
experiences. They had asked her to come to the first of the two great
annual Fadden Dances, the October one, and Ann Veronica had accepted
with enthusiasm. And now her father said she must not go.

He had "put his foot down," and said she must not go.

Going involved two things that all Ann Veronica's tact had been
ineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father. Her usual dignified
reserve had availed her nothing. One point was that she was to wear
fancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair's bride, and the other was that
she was to spend whatever vestiges of the night remained after the dance
was over in London with the Widgett girls and a select party in "quite a
decent little hotel" near Fitzroy Square.

"But, my dear!" said Ann Veronica's aunt.

"You see," said Ann Veronica, with the air of one who shares a
difficulty, "I've promised to go. I didn't realize--I don't see how I
can get out of it now."

Then it was her father issued his ultimatum. He had conveyed it to her,
not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to her a singularly
ignoble method of prohibition. "He couldn't look me in the face and say
it," said Ann Veronica.

"But of course it's aunt's doing really."

And thus it was that as Ann Veronica neared the gates of home, she said
to herself: "I'll have it out with him somehow. I'll have it out with
him. And if he won't--"

But she did not give even unspoken words to the alternative at that
time.

Part 3

Ann Veronica's father was a solicitor with a good deal of company
business: a lean, trustworthy, worried-