of Parliament, and the other under a Harley Street
doctor, and both men declined her proffered services with the utmost
civility and admiration and terror. There was also a curious interview
at a big hotel with a middle-aged, white-powdered woman, all covered
with jewels and reeking of scent, who wanted a Companion. She did not
think Ann Veronica would do as her companion.

And nearly all these things were fearfully ill-paid. They carried no
more than bare subsistence wages; and they demanded all her time and
energy. She had heard of women journalists, women writers, and so
forth; but she was not even admitted to the presence of the editors she
demanded to see, and by no means sure that if she had been she could
have done any work they might have given her. One day she desisted from
her search and went unexpectedly to the Tredgold College. Her place
was not filled; she had been simply noted as absent, and she did a
comforting day of admirable dissection upon the tortoise. She was so
interested, and this was such a relief from the trudging anxiety of her
search for work, that she went on for a whole week as if she was still
living at home. Then a third secretarial opening occurred and renewed
her hopes again: a position as amanuensis--with which some of the
lighter duties of a nurse were combined--to an infirm gentleman of means
living at Twickenham, and engaged upon a great literary research to
prove that the "Faery Queen" was really a treatise upon molecular
chemistry written in a peculiar and picturesquely handled cipher.

Part 2

Now, while Ann Veronica was taking these soundings in the industrial
sea, and measuring herself against the world as it is, she was also
making extensive explorations among the ideas and attitudes of a number
of human beings who seemed to be largely concerned with the world as it
ought to be. She was drawn first by Miss Miniver, and then by her own
natural interest, into a curious stratum of people who are busied with
dreams of world progress, of great and fundamental changes, of a New Age
that is to replace all the stresses and disorders of contemporary life.

Miss Miniver learned of her flight and got her address from the
Widgetts. She arrived about nine o'clock the next evening in a state of
tremulous enthusiasm. She followed the landlady half way up-stairs, and
called up to Ann Veronica, "May I come up? It's me! You know--Nettie
Miniver!" She appeared before Ann Veronica could