"Wells, H G - Ann Veronica" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley
came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite
resolved to have things out with her father that very evening.
She had trembled on the verge of such a resolution before, but
this time quite definitely she made it. A crisis had been
reached, and she was almost glad it had been reached. She made
up her mind in the train home that it should be a decisive
crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins with her
there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of
this crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.

She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to
Morningside Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in
an attitude that would certainly have distressed her mother to
see, and horrified her grandmother beyond measure; she sat with
her knees up to her chin and her hands clasped before them, and
she was so lost in thought that she discovered with a start, from
a lettered lamp, that she was at Morningside Park, and thought
she was moving out of the station, whereas she was only moving
in. "Lord!" she said. She jumped up at once, caught up a
leather clutch containing notebooks, a fat text-book, and a
chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the
carriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and
that she had to traverse the full length of the platform past it
again as the result of her precipitation. "Sold again," she
remarked. "Idiot!" She raged inwardly while she walked along
with that air of self-contained serenity that is proper to a
young lady of nearly two-and-twenty under the eye of the world.

She walked down the station approach, past the neat, obtrusive
offices of the coal merchant and the house agent, and so to the
wicket-gate by the butcher's shop that led to the field path to
her home. Outside the post-office stood a no-hatted, blond young
man in gray flannels, who was elaborately affixing a stamp to a
letter. At the sight of her he became rigid and a singularly
bright shade of pink. She made herself serenely unaware of his
existence, though it may be it was his presence that sent her by
the field detour instead of by the direct path up the Avenue.

"Umph!" he said, and regarded his letter doubtfully before
consigning it to the pillar-box. "Here goes," he said. Then he
hovered undecidedly for some seconds with his hands in his
pockets and his mouth puckered to a whistle before he turned to
go home by the Avenue.

Ann Veronica forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and
her face resumed its expression of stern preoccupation. "It's
either now or never," she said to herself. . . .