passage walls of her mind. She was aware of it now as if it were a
voice shouting outside a house, shouting passionate verities in a hot
sunlight, a voice that cries while people talk insincerely in a darkened
room and pretend not to hear. Its shouting now did in some occult manner
convey a protest that Mr. Manning would on no account do, though he
was tall and dark and handsome and kind, and thirty-five and adequately
prosperous, and all that a husband should be. But there was, it
insisted, no mobility in his face, no movement, nothing about him that
warmed. If Ann Veronica could have put words to that song they
would have been, "Hot-blooded marriage or none!" but she was far too
indistinct in this matter to frame any words at all.

"I don't love him," said Ann Veronica, getting a gleam. "I don't see
that his being a good sort matters. That really settles about that....
But it means no end of a row."

For a time she sat on a rail before leaving the road for the downland
turf. "But I wish," she said, "I had some idea what I was really up to."

Her thoughts went into solution for a time, while she listened to a lark
singing.

"Marriage and mothering," said Ann Veronica, with her mind crystallizing
out again as the lark dropped to the nest in the turf. "And all the rest
of it perhaps is a song."



Part 3