Ann Veronica: A Modern Love StoryWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Feminism -- Fiction; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- Fiction; Love stories; Sex role -- Fiction
She was sorry to find Ramage a little disposed to be melancholy.
“I have made over seven hundred pounds in the last week,” he said.
“That’s exhilarating,” said Ann Veronica.
“Not a bit of it,” he said; “it’s only a score in a game.”
“It’s a score you can buy all sorts of things with.”
“Nothing that one wants.”
He turned to the waiter, who held a wine-card. “Nothing can cheer me,”
he said, “except champagne.” He meditated. “This,” he said, and then:
“No! Is this sweeter? Very well.”
“Everything goes well with me,” he said, folding his arms under him and
regarding Ann Veronica with the slightly projecting eyes wide open. “And
I’m not happy. I believe I’m in love.”
He leaned back for his soup.
Presently he resumed: “I believe I must be in love.”
“You can’t be that,” said Ann Veronica, wisely.
“How do you know?”
“Well, it isn’t exactly a depressing state, is it?”
“YOU don’t know.”
“One has theories,” said Ann Veronica, radiantly.
“Oh, theories! Being in love is a fact.”
“It ought to make one happy.”
“It’s an unrest--a longing--What’s that?” The waiter had intervened.
“Parmesan--take it away!”
He glanced at Ann Veronica’s face, and it seemed to him that she really
was exceptionally radiant. He wondered why she thought love made people
happy, and began to talk of the smilax and pinks that adorned the table.
He filled her glass with champagne. “You MUST,” he said, “because of my
depression.”
They were eating quails when they returned to the topic of love. “What
made you think” he said, abruptly, with the gleam of avidity in his
face, “that love makes people happy?”
“I know it must.”
“But how?”
He was, she thought, a little too insistent. “Women know these things by
instinct,” she answered.
“I wonder,” he said, “if women do know things by instinct? I have
my doubts about feminine instinct. It’s one of our conventional
superstitions. A woman is supposed to know when a man is in love with
her. Do you think she does?”
Ann Veronica picked among her salad with a judicial expression of face.
“I think she would,” she decided.
“Ah!” said Ramage, impressively.
Ann Veronica looked up at him and found him regarding her with eyes that
were almost woebegone, and into which, indeed, he was trying to throw
much more expression than they could carry. There was a little pause
between them, full for Ann Veronica of rapid elusive suspicions and
intimations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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