A wild passion of shame and self-disgust swept over her.  Her spirit awoke in dismay to an affection in ruins, to the immense undignified disaster that had come to them.

Abruptly she desisted, recoiled, and turned and fled up-stairs.

She made noises between weeping and laughter as she went.  She gained her room, and slammed her door and locked it as though she feared violence and pursuit.

“Oh God!” she cried, “Oh God!” and flung aside her opera-cloak, and for a time walked about the room—­a Corsair’s bride at a crisis of emotion.  “Why can’t he reason with me,” she said, again and again, “instead of doing this?”

Part 3

There presently came a phase in which she said:  “I won’t stand it even now.  I will go to-night.”

She went as far as her door, then turned to the window.  She opened this and scrambled out—­a thing she had not done for five long years of adolescence—­upon the leaded space above the built-out bath-room on the first floor.  Once upon a time she and Roddy had descended thence by the drain-pipe.

But things that a girl of sixteen may do in short skirts are not things to be done by a young lady of twenty-one in fancy dress and an opera-cloak, and just as she was coming unaided to an adequate realization of this, she discovered Mr. Pragmar, the wholesale druggist, who lived three gardens away, and who had been mowing his lawn to get an appetite for dinner, standing in a fascinated attitude beside the forgotten lawn-mower and watching her intently.

She found it extremely difficult to infuse an air of quiet correctitude into her return through the window, and when she was safely inside she waved clinched fists and executed a noiseless dance of rage.

When she reflected that Mr. Pragmar probably knew Mr. Ramage, and might describe the affair to him, she cried “Oh!” with renewed vexation, and repeated some steps of her dance in a new and more ecstatic measure.

Part 4

At eight that evening Miss Stanley tapped at Ann Veronica’s bedroom door.

“I’ve brought you up some dinner, Vee,” she said.

Ann Veronica was lying on her bed in a darkling room staring at the ceiling.  She reflected before answering.  She was frightfully hungry.  She had eaten little or no tea, and her mid-day meal had been worse than nothing.

She got up and unlocked the door.

Her aunt did not object to capital punishment or war, or the industrial system or casual wards, or flogging of criminals or the Congo Free State, because none of these things really got hold of her imagination; but she did object, she did not like, she could not bear to think of people not having and enjoying their meals.  It was her distinctive test of an emotional state, its interference with a kindly normal digestion.  Any one very badly moved choked down a few mouthfuls;