The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no particular place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a functionless existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels, walks, and dusting in her father’s house.  She thought study would be better.  She was a clever girl, the best of her year in the High School, and she made a valiant fight for Somerville or Newnham but her father had met and argued with a Somerville girl at a friend’s dinner-table and he thought that sort of thing unsexed a woman.  He said simply that he wanted her to live at home.  There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhile she went on at school.  They compromised at length on the science course at the Tredgold Women’s College—­she had already matriculated into London University from school—­she came of age, and she bickered with her aunt for latch-key privileges on the strength of that and her season ticket.  Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind, thinly disguised as literature and art.  She read voraciously, and presently, because of her aunt’s censorship, she took to smuggling any books she thought might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, and she went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable friend to accompany her.  She passed her general science examination with double honors and specialized in science.  She happened to have an acute sense of form and unusual mental lucidity, and she found in biology, and particularly in comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest, albeit the illumination it cast upon her personal life was not altogether direct.  She dissected well, and in a year she found herself chafing at the limitations of the lady B. Sc. who retailed a store of faded learning in the Tredgold laboratory.  She had already realized that this instructress was hopelessly wrong and foggy—­it is the test of the good comparative anatomist—­upon the skull.  She discovered a desire to enter as a student in the Imperial College at Westminster, where Russell taught, and go on with her work at the fountain-head.

She had asked about that already, and her father had replied, evasively:  “We’ll have to see about that, little Vee; we’ll have to see about that.”  In that posture of being seen about the matter hung until she seemed committed to another session at the Tredgold College, and in the mean time a small conflict arose and brought the latch-key question, and in fact the question of Ann Veronica’s position generally, to an acute issue.

In addition to the various business men, solicitors, civil servants, and widow ladies who lived in the Morningside Park Avenue, there was a certain family of alien sympathies and artistic quality, the Widgetts, with which Ann Veronica had become very friendly.  Mr. Widgett was a journalist and art critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suit and “art” brown ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday morning, travelled third class to London by