The very facts that Miss Miniver never stated an argument clearly, that she was never embarrassed by a sense of self-contradiction, and had little more respect for consistency of statement than a washerwoman has for wisps of vapor, which made Ann Veronica critical and hostile at their first encounter in Morningside Park, became at last with constant association the secret of Miss Miniver’s growing influence.  The brain tires of resistance, and when it meets again and again, incoherently active, the same phrases, the same ideas that it has already slain, exposed and dissected and buried, it becomes less and less energetic to repeat the operation.  There must be something, one feels, in ideas that achieve persistently a successful resurrection.  What Miss Miniver would have called the Higher Truth supervenes.

Yet through these talks, these meetings and conferences, these movements and efforts, Ann Veronica, for all that she went with her friend, and at times applauded with her enthusiastically, yet went nevertheless with eyes that grew more and more puzzled, and fine eyebrows more and more disposed to knit.  She was with these movements—­akin to them, she felt it at times intensely—­and yet something eluded her.  Morningside Park had been passive and defective; all this rushed about and was active, but it was still defective.  It still failed in something.  It did seem germane to the matter that so many of the people “in the van” were plain people, or faded people, or tired-looking people.  It did affect the business that they all argued badly and were egotistical in their manners and inconsistent in their phrases.  There were moments when she doubted whether the whole mass of movements and societies and gatherings and talks was not simply one coherent spectacle of failure protecting itself from abjection by the glamour of its own assertions.  It happened that at the extremest point of Ann Veronica’s social circle from the Widgetts was the family of the Morningside Park horse-dealer, a company of extremely dressy and hilarious young women, with one equestrian brother addicted to fancy waistcoats, cigars, and facial spots.  These girls wore hats at remarkable angles and bows to startle and kill; they liked to be right on the spot every time and up to everything that was it from the very beginning and they rendered their conception of Socialists and all reformers by the words “positively frightening” and “weird.”  Well, it was beyond dispute that these words did convey a certain quality of the Movements in general amid which Miss Miniver disported herself.  They were weird.  And yet for all that—­