But as she got out of the train at Morningside Park Station she had a shock.  She saw, twenty yards down the platform, the shiny hat and broad back and inimitable swagger of Ramage.  She dived at once behind the cover of the lamp-room and affected serious trouble with her shoe-lace until he was out of the station, and then she followed slowly and with extreme discretion until the bifurcation of the Avenue from the field way insured her escape.  Ramage went up the Avenue, and she hurried along the path with a beating heart and a disagreeable sense of unsolved problems in her mind.

“That thing’s going on,” she told herself.  “Everything goes on, confound it!  One doesn’t change anything one has set going by making good resolutions.”

And then ahead of her she saw the radiant and welcoming figure of Manning.  He came as an agreeable diversion from an insoluble perplexity.  She smiled at the sight of him, and thereat his radiation increased.

“I missed the hour of your release,” he said, “but I was at the Vindicator Restaurant.  You did not see me, I know.  I was among the common herd in the place below, but I took good care to see you.”

“Of course you’re converted?” she said.

“To the view that all those Splendid Women in the movement ought to have votes.  Rather!  Who could help it?”

He towered up over her and smiled down at her in his fatherly way.

“To the view that all women ought to have votes whether they like it or not.”

He shook his head, and his eyes and the mouth under the black mustache wrinkled with his smile.  And as he walked by her side they began a wrangle that was none the less pleasant to Ann Veronica because it served to banish a disagreeable preoccupation.  It seemed to her in her restored geniality that she liked Manning extremely.  The brightness Capes had diffused over the world glorified even his rival.

Part 7

The steps by which Ann Veronica determined to engage herself to marry Manning were never very clear to her.  A medley of motives warred in her, and it was certainly not one of the least of these that she knew herself to be passionately in love with Capes; at moments she had a giddy intimation that he was beginning to feel keenly interested in her.  She realized more and more the quality of the brink upon which she stood—­the dreadful readiness with which in certain moods she might plunge, the unmitigated wrongness and recklessness of such a self-abandonment.  “He must never know,” she would whisper to herself, “he must never know.  Or else—­Else it will be impossible that I can be his friend.”