Then it was the expostulations really began.

From first to last, on this occasion, her aunt expostulated for about two hours. “But, my dear,” she began, “it is Impossible! It is quite out of the Question. You simply can’t.” And to that, through vast rhetorical meanderings, she clung. It reached her only slowly that Ann Veronica was standing to her resolution. “How will you live?” she appealed. “Think of what people will say!” That became a refrain. “Think of what Lady Palsworthy will say! Think of what”—So-and-so—“will say! What are we to tell people?

“Besides, what am I to tell your father?”

At first it had not been at all clear to Ann Veronica that she would refuse to return home; she had had some dream of a capitulation that should leave her an enlarged and defined freedom, but as her aunt put this aspect and that of her flight to her, as she wandered illogically and inconsistently from one urgent consideration to another, as she mingled assurances and aspects and emotions, it became clearer and clearer to the girl that there could be little or no change in the position of things if she returned. “And what will Mr. Manning think?” said her aunt.

“I don’t care what any one thinks,” said Ann Veronica.

“I can’t imagine what has come over you,” said her aunt. “I can’t conceive what you want. You foolish girl!”

Ann Veronica took that in silence. At the back of her mind, dim and yet disconcerting, was the perception that she herself did not know what she wanted. And yet she knew it was not fair to call her a foolish girl.

“Don’t you care for Mr. Manning?” said her aunt.

“I don’t see what he has to do with my coming to London?”

“He—he worships the ground you tread on. You don’t deserve it, but he does. Or at least he did the day before yesterday. And here you are!”

Her aunt opened all the fingers of her gloved hand in a rhetorical gesture. “It seems to me all madness—madness! Just because your father—wouldn’t let you disobey him!”