“I want a vote for myself,” she said.  “I don’t see why I should take it second-hand.  Though it’s very kind of you.  And rather unscrupulous.  Have you ever voted, Mr. Manning?  I suppose there’s a sort of place like a ticket-office.  And a ballot-box—­” Her face assumed an expression of intellectual conflict.  “What is a ballot-box like, exactly?” she asked, as though it was very important to her.

Mr. Manning regarded her thoughtfully for a moment and stroked his mustache.  “A ballot-box, you know,” he said, “is very largely just a box.”  He made quite a long pause, and went on, with a sigh:  “You have a voting paper given you—­”

They emerged into the publicity of the lawn.

“Yes,” said Ann Veronica, “yes,” to his explanation, and saw across the lawn Lady Palsworthy talking to her aunt, and both of them staring frankly across at her and Mr. Manning as they talked.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS

Part 1

Two days after came the day of the Crisis, the day of the Fadden Dance.  It would have been a crisis anyhow, but it was complicated in Ann Veronica’s mind by the fact that a letter lay on the breakfast-table from Mr. Manning, and that her aunt focussed a brightly tactful disregard upon this throughout the meal.  Ann Veronica had come down thinking of nothing in the world but her inflexible resolution to go to the dance in the teeth of all opposition.  She did not know Mr. Manning’s handwriting, and opened his letter and read some lines before its import appeared.  Then for a time she forgot the Fadden affair altogether.  With a well-simulated unconcern and a heightened color she finished her breakfast.

She was not obliged to go to the Tredgold College, because as yet the College had not settled down for the session.  She was supposed to be reading at home, and after breakfast she strolled into the vegetable garden, and having taken up a position upon the staging of a disused greenhouse that had the double advantage of being hidden from the windows of the house and secure from the sudden appearance of any one, she resumed the reading of Mr. Manning’s letter.

Mr. Manning’s handwriting had an air of being clear without being easily legible; it was large and rather roundish, with a lack of definition about the letters and a disposition to treat the large ones as liberal-minded people nowadays treat opinions, as all amounting to the same thing really—­a years-smoothed boyish rather than an adult hand.  And it filled seven sheets of notepaper, each written only on one side.