She tried to imagine the collective effect of the Fadden Ball; she had never seen a fancy-dress gathering in her life.  Mr. Manning came into her thoughts again, an unexpected, tall, dark, self-contained presence at the Fadden.  One might suppose him turning up; he knew a lot of clever people, and some of them might belong to the class.  What would he come as?

Presently she roused herself with a guilty start from the task of dressing and re-dressing Mr. Manning in fancy costume, as though he was a doll.  She had tried him as a Crusader, in which guise he seemed plausible but heavy—­“There is something heavy about him; I wonder if it’s his mustache?”—­and as a Hussar, which made him preposterous, and as a Black Brunswicker, which was better, and as an Arab sheik.  Also she had tried him as a dragoman and as a gendarme, which seemed the most suitable of all to his severely handsome, immobile profile.  She felt he would tell people the way, control traffic, and refuse admission to public buildings with invincible correctness and the very finest explicit feelings possible.  For each costume she had devised a suitable form of matrimonial refusal.  “Oh, Lord!” she said, discovering what she was up to, and dropped lightly from the fence upon the turf and went on her way toward the crest.

“I shall never marry,” said Ann Veronica, resolutely; “I’m not the sort.  That’s why it’s so important I should take my own line now.”

Part 4

Ann Veronica’s ideas of marriage were limited and unsystematic.  Her teachers and mistresses had done their best to stamp her mind with an ineradicable persuasion that it was tremendously important, and on no account to be thought about.  Her first intimations of marriage as a fact of extreme significance in a woman’s life had come with the marriage of Alice and the elopement of her second sister, Gwen.

These convulsions occurred when Ann Veronica was about twelve.  There was a gulf of eight years between her and the youngest of her brace of sisters—­an impassable gulf inhabited chaotically by two noisy brothers.  These sisters moved in a grown-up world inaccessible to Ann Veronica’s sympathies, and to a large extent remote from her curiosity.  She got into rows through meddling with their shoes and tennis-rackets, and had moments of carefully concealed admiration when she was privileged to see them just before her bedtime, rather radiantly dressed in white or pink or amber and prepared to go out with her mother.  She thought Alice a bit of a sneak, an opinion her brothers shared, and Gwen rather a snatch at meals.  She saw nothing of their love-making, and came home from her boarding-school in a state of decently suppressed curiosity for Alice’s wedding.