Page:Ann Veronica, a modern love story.djvu/233



Part 6
When Ann Veronica reached her little bed-sitting-room again, every nerve in her body was quivering with shame and self-disgust.

She threw hat and coat on the bed and sat down before the fire.

"And now," she said, splintering the surviving piece of coal into indignant flame-spurting fragments with one dexterous blow, "what am I to do?

"I'm in a hole!—mess is a better word, expresses it better. I'm in a mess—a nasty mess! a filthy mess! Oh, no end of a mess!

"Do you hear, Ann Veronica?—you're in a nasty, filthy, unforgivable mess!

"Haven't I just made a silly mess of things?

"Forty pounds! I haven't got twenty!"

She got up, stamped with her foot, and then, suddenly remembering the lodger below, sat down and wrenched off her boots.

"This is what comes of being a young woman up to date. By Jove! I'm beginning to have my doubts about freedom!

"You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly young woman! The smeariness of the thing!

"The smeariness of this sort of thing!... Mauled about!"

She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the back of her hand. "Ugh!" she said.

"The young women of Jane Austen's time didn't get into this sort of scrape! At least—one thinks so.... I wonder if some of them did—and it didn't get reported. Aunt Jane had her quiet moments. Most of them didn't,