Ann Veronica found herself walking back down the Avenue that had just been the scene of her first proposal beside her aunt, and speculating for the first time in her life about that lady’s mental attitudes.  Her prevailing effect was one of quiet and complete assurance, as though she knew all about everything, and was only restrained by her instinctive delicacy from telling what she knew.  But the restraint exercised by her instinctive delicacy was very great; over and above coarse or sexual matters it covered religion and politics and any mention of money matters or crime, and Ann Veronica found herself wondering whether these exclusions represented, after all, anything more than suppressions.  Was there anything at all in those locked rooms of her aunt’s mind?  Were they fully furnished and only a little dusty and cobwebby and in need of an airing, or were they stark vacancy except, perhaps, for a cockroach or so or the gnawing of a rat?  What was the mental equivalent of a rat’s gnawing?  The image was going astray.  But what would her aunt think of Teddy’s recent off-hand suggestion of marriage?  What would she think of the Widgett conversation?  Suppose she was to tell her aunt quietly but firmly about the parasitic males of degraded crustacea.  The girl suppressed a chuckle that would have been inexplicable.

There came a wild rush of anthropological lore into her brain, a flare of indecorous humor.  It was one of the secret troubles of her mind, this grotesque twist her ideas would sometimes take, as though they rebelled and rioted.  After all, she found herself reflecting, behind her aunt’s complacent visage there was a past as lurid as any one’s—­not, of course, her aunt’s own personal past, which was apparently just that curate and almost incredibly jejune, but an ancestral past with all sorts of scandalous things in it:  fire and slaughterings, exogamy, marriage by capture, corroborees, cannibalism!  Ancestresses with perhaps dim anticipatory likenesses to her aunt, their hair less neatly done, no doubt, their manners and gestures as yet undisciplined, but still ancestresses in the direct line, must have danced through a brief and stirring life in the woady buff.  Was there no echo anywhere in Miss Stanley’s pacified brain?  Those empty rooms, if they were empty, were the equivalents of astoundingly decorated predecessors.  Perhaps it was just as well there was no inherited memory.

Ann Veronica was by this time quite shocked at her own thoughts, and yet they would go on with their freaks.  Great vistas of history opened, and she and her aunt were near reverting to the primitive and passionate and entirely indecorous arboreal—­were swinging from branches by the arms, and really going on quite dread-fully—­when their arrival at the Palsworthys’ happily checked this play of fancy, and brought Ann Veronica back to the exigencies of the wrappered life again.