Page:Ann Veronica, a modern love story.djvu/63

 the Michaelmas daisies, and faced toward the house with an air of a duty completed.

"Just come to that seat now you are here, Miss Stanley, and look down the other path; there's a vista of just the common sort. Better even than these."

Ann Veronica walked as he indicated.

"You know I'm old-fashioned, Miss Stanley. I don't think women need to trouble about political questions."

"I want a vote," said Ann Veronica.

"Really!" said Mr. Manning, in an earnest voice, and waved his hand to the alley of mauve and purple. "I wish you didn't."

"Why not?" She turned on him.

"It jars. It jars with all my ideas.  Women to me are something so serene, so fine, so feminine, and politics are so dusty, so sordid, so wearisome and quarrelsome. It seems to me a woman's duty to be beautiful, to BE beautiful and to behave beautifully, and politics are by their very nature ugly.  You see, I--I am a woman worshipper.  I worshipped women long before I found any woman I might ever hope to worship.  Long ago. And--the idea of committees, of hustings, of agenda-papers!"

"I don't see why the responsibility of beauty should all be shifted on to the women," said Ann Veronica, suddenly remembering a part of Miss Miniver's discourse.

"It rests with them by the nature of things. Why should you who are queens come down from your thrones? If you can afford it, WE can't.  We can't afford to turn our women, our Madonnas, our Saint Catherines, our Mona Lisas, our goddesses and angels and fairy princesses, into a sort of man.  Womanhood is sacred to me.