ated. "I knew you would begin
to see how it all falls into place together."

It did begin to fall into place together. She became more and more
alive, not so much to a system of ideas as to a big diffused
impulse toward change, to a great discontent with and criticism of
life as it is lived, to a clamorous confusion of ideas for
reconstruction--reconstruction of the methods of business, of economic
development, of the rules of property, of the status of children, of the
clothing and feeding and teaching of every one; she developed a quite
exaggerated consciousness of a multitude of people going about the
swarming spaces of London with their minds full, their talk and gestures
full, their very clothing charged with the suggestion of the urgency of
this pervasive project of alteration. Some indeed carried themselves,
dressed themselves even, rather as foreign visitors from the land
of "Looking Backward" and "News from Nowhere" than as the indigenous
Londoners they were. For the most part these were detached people: men
practising the plastic arts, young writers, young men in employment, a
very large proportion of girls and women--self-supporting women or girls
of the student class. They made a stratum into which Ann Veronica was
now plunged up to her neck; it had become her stratum.

None of the things they said and did were altogether new to Ann
Veronica, but now she got them massed and alive, instead of by glimpses
or in books--alive and articulate and insistent. The London backgrounds,
in Bloomsbury and Marylebone, against which these people went to
and fro, took on, by reason of their gray facades, their implacably
respectable windows and window-blinds, their reiterated unmeaning iron
railings, a stronger and stronger suggestion of the flavor of her father
at his most obdurate phase, and of all that she felt herself fighting
against.

She was already a little prepared by her discursive reading and
discussion under the Widgett influence for ideas and "movements," though
temperamentally perhaps she was rather disposed to resist and criticise
than embrace them. But the people among whom she was now thrown through
the social exertions of Miss Miniver and the Widgetts--for Teddy and
Hetty came up from Morningside Park and took her to an eighteen-penny
dinner in Soho and introduced her to some art students, who were also
Socialists, and so opened the way to an evening of meandering talk in a
studio--carried with them lik