Ann Veronica listened with her eyes on the fire. “Everybody is taking it up,” said Miss Miniver. “YOU had to come in. You couldn’t help it. Something drew you. Something draws everybody. From suburbs, from country towns--everywhere. I see all the Movements. As far as I can, I belong to them all. I keep my finger on the pulse of things.” Ann Veronica said nothing. “The dawn!” said Miss Miniver, with her glasses reflecting the fire like pools of blood-red flame. “I came to London,” said Ann Veronica, “rather because of my own difficulty. I don’t know that I understand altogether.” “Of course you don’t,” said Miss Miniver, gesticulating triumphantly with her thin hand and thinner wrist, and patting Ann Veronica’s knee. “Of course you don’t. That’s the wonder of it. But you will, you will. You must let me take you to things--to meetings and things, to conferences and talks. Then you will begin to see. You will begin to see it all opening out. I am up to the ears in it all--every moment I can spare. I throw up work--everything! I just teach in one school, one good school, three days a week. All the rest--Movements! I can live now on fourpence a day. Think how free that leaves me to follow things up! I must take you everywhere. I must take you to the Suffrage people, and the Tolstoyans, and the Fabians.” “I have heard of the Fabians,” said Ann Veronica. “It’s THE Society!” said Miss Miniver. “It’s the centre of the intellectuals. Some of the meetings are wonderful! Such earnest, beautiful women! Such deep-browed men!... And to think that there they are making history! There they are putting together the plans of a new world. Almost light-heartedly. There is Shaw, and Webb, and Wilkins the author, and Toomer, and Doctor Tumpany--the most wonderful people! There you see them discussing, deciding, planning! Just think--THEY ARE MAKING A NEW WORLD!” “But ARE these people going to alter everything?” said Ann Veronica. “What else can happen?” asked Miss Miniver, with a little weak gesture at the glow. “What else can possibly happen--as things are going now?” Part 3 Miss Miniver let Ann Veronica into her peculiar levels of the world with so enthusiastic a generosity that it seemed ingratitude to remain critical. Indeed, almost insensibly Ann Veronica became habituated to the peculiar appearance and the peculiar manners of the people “in the van.” The shock of their intellectual attitude was over, usage robbed it of the first quaint effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct relation to that rightness, absurd.