leave it in the summer. The blinds
were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what
colors these gray swathings hid. She wanted to know. And there was no
intimation whatever that the blinds would ever go up or the windows or
doors be opened, or the chandeliers, that seemed to promise such a blaze
of fire, unveiled and furnished and lit. Dim souls flitted about her,
not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in undertones....

During her school days, especially her earlier school days, the world
had been very explicit with her, telling her what to do, what not to do,
giving her lessons to learn and games to play and interests of the most
suitable and various kinds. Presently she woke up to the fact that there
was a considerable group of interests called being in love and getting
married, with certain attractive and amusing subsidiary developments,
such as flirtation and "being interested" in people of the opposite sex.
She approached this field with her usual liveliness of apprehension. But
here she met with a check. These interests her world promptly, through
the agency of schoolmistresses, older school-mates, her aunt, and a
number of other responsible and authoritative people, assured her she
must on no account think about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moral
instruction mistress, was particularly explicit upon this score, and
they all agreed in indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds
ran on such matters, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dress
or bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike any
other group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly ashamed of.
Nevertheless, Ann Veronica found it a difficult matter not to think of
these things. However having a considerable amount of pride, she decided
she would disavow these undesirable topics and keep her mind away from
them just as far as she could, but it left her at the end of her school
days with that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at loose
ends.

The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no particular
place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a functionless
existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels, walks, and dusting
in her father's house. She thought study would be better. She was a
clever girl, the best of her year in the High School, and she made
a valiant fight for Somerville or Newnham but her father had met and
argued with a Somerville girl at