Page:Ann Veronica, a modern love story.djvu/203

 and sat down with his elbow four inches from hers and made a sketch. Then he got up and left her.

She had a feeling at his departure as of an immense cavity, of something enormously gone; she could not tell whether it was infinite regret or infinite relief....

But now Ann Veronica knew what was the matter with her.

Part 8
And as she sat on her bed that night, musing and half-undressed, she began to run one hand down her arm and scrutinize the soft flow of muscle under her skin. She thought of the marvellous beauty of skin, and all the delightfulness of living texture. Oh the back of her arm she found the faintest down of hair in the world. "Etherialized monkey," she said. She held out her arm straight before her, and turned her hand this way and that.

"Why should one pretend?" she whispered. "Why should one pretend?

"Think of all the beauty in the world that is covered up and overlaid."

She glanced shyly at the mirror above her dressing-table, and then about her at the furniture, as though it might penetrate to the thoughts that peeped in her mind.

"I wonder," said Ann Veronica at last, "if I am beautiful? I wonder if I shall ever shine like a light, like a translucent goddess?—

"I wonder—

"I suppose girls and women have prayed for this, have come to this—In Babylon, in Nineveh.