“I have heard of the Fabians,” said Ann Veronica.

“It’s the Society!” said Miss Miniver.  “It’s the centre of the intellectuals.  Some of the meetings are wonderful!  Such earnest, beautiful women!  Such deep-browed men!...  And to think that there they are making history!  There they are putting together the plans of a new world.  Almos light-heartedly.  There is Shaw, and Webb, and Wilkins the author, and Toomer, and Doctor Tumpany—­the most wonderful people!  There you see them discussing, deciding, planning!  Just think—­they are making A new world!”

“But are these people going to alter everything?” said Ann Veronica.

“What else can happen?” asked Miss Miniver, with a little weak gesture at the glow.  “What else can possibly happen—­as things are going now?”

Part 3

Miss Miniver let Ann Veronica into her peculiar levels of the world with so enthusiastic a generosity that it seemed ingratitude to remain critical.  Indeed, almost insensibly Ann Veronica became habituated to the peculiar appearance and the peculiar manners of the people “in the van.”  The shock of their intellectual attitude was over, usage robbed it of the first quaint effect of deliberate unreason.  They were in many respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct relation to that rightness, absurd.

Very central in Miss Miniver’s universe were the Goopes.  The Goopes were the oddest little couple conceivable, following a fruitarian career upon an upper floor in Theobald’s Road.  They were childless and servantless, and they had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts.  Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis, and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management of a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road.  Their very furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home dressed simply in a pajama-shaped suit of canvas sacking tied with brown ribbons, while his wife wore a purple djibbah with a richly embroidered yoke.  He was a small, dark, reserved man, with a large inflexible-looking convex forehead, and his wife was very pink and high-spirited, with one of those chins that pass insensibly into a full, strong neck.  Once a week, every Saturday, they had a little gathering from nine till the small hours, just talk and perhaps reading aloud and fruitarian refreshments—­chestnut sandwiches buttered with nut tose, and so forth—­and lemonade and unfermented wine; and to one of these symposia Miss Miniver after a good deal of preliminary solicitude, conducted Ann Veronica.